My first major stop on my road trip was Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before that I’d stayed a night in San Antonio, but only to make the twenty-six hour drive from Florida to New Mexico semi-bearable. With bloodshot eyes and aching limbs, I drove into Albuquerque around seven in the evening, checked into my hotel, and slept for eleven hours.
My days in the city were full of sight-seeing and adventure, but those are stories for another blog. Here at The Lit Wiz, we talk about books. Or try to, anyway.
Originally, I’d planned to read Albuquerque by Rudolfo Anaya. I’ll give you one guess as to why I thought that was the perfect novel for this destination. Unfortunately, after a few hours of listening I decided the novel wasn’t for me. There are too many good books to read for me to spend time on one I don’t enjoy. It may have been the style of writing or it could have been that I was listening to the audiobook version, which isn’t my favorite way to consume literature anyway. Either way, I scrapped it and listened to Sense and Sensibility instead. In two and a half weeks, I managed two audiobooks (the second novel I listened to was Rule of Wolves, it was excellent.). Neither of which were related to my travels, but both of which were tolerable in an audiobook format.
When I returned home I realized I would have to pick a different novel for my time in Albuquerque. I knew Anaya had another, more popular novel called Bless Me, Ultima, which also took place in New Mexico. That was good enough for me, so I borrowed it from the library and got to reading.
Bless Me, Ultima is a coming of age story that follows the main character, Tony, as he grows up in Guadalupe, New Mexico. Guadalupe is a small county about two hours east of Albuquerque, so I wasn’t too far off. While Albuquerque has some mountainous terrain thanks to the Sandias, Guadalupe is all desert. This means a lot of wind, a lot of rocks, and a lot of sand. Contrary to my (a Floridian, remember) idea of the desert, it’s not all smooth sand dunes. The ground is hard and rocky due to lack of moisture and there are lots of little shrubs and cacti around. Also, tumbleweeds are real. This is where Tony’s adventure takes place.
We follow our main character as he struggles with several changes occurring in his young life. I don’t remember if his age is explicitly said in the novel, but I think he’s around seven or eight. The story itself takes place during the “German and Japanese war” as Anaya refers to it, which is WWI for those of us who are terrible at history. Tony’s brothers are gone to (and then return home from) the war, he’s about to go to school for the first time, he’s preparing to take communion, and a curandera named Ultima comes to live with his family. Ultima coming to live with Tony is the first and arguably the most significant of these events to take place. In fact, much of the plot revolves around her and the fact that she’s a curandera.
Curanderas are traditional healers and medicine women of the village. They treat injuries with ingredients like herbs and vegetation found in the desert or mountains. Unfortunately, with the rise of Catholicism came a suspicion of the curanderas. Healing techniques once considered traditional turned blasphemous in the eyes of many Catholics, and they soon began labeling curanderas as brujas, or witches. We see Ultima face this accusation a few times, but her only response is that she’s united with the universe and wishes to see balance among all things.
A note here: The Albuquerque Botanical Gardens has an entire exhibit dedicated to curanderas which I thought was very cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of it because, you know, I’d seen Oregano before. Now, back to the stuff that matters.
Rather than be a foil for her Catholic counterparts, Ultima is a Catholic as well. She represents a tolerance and understanding for many faiths. Ultima is the moral compass for the novel, attempting to teach Antonio to think for himself rather than follow others blindly. While she attends mass regularly and believes in the Catholic faith, she continues to practice medicine in the traditional way because she understands spirituality is multi-faceted. This is the main lesson of the novel and the one Antonio appropriately struggles with the most.
I didn’t know when I took this picture that it would be relevant to my blog, but look at that. I am the knower of all things.
Tony struggles with his faith throughout the novel, especially after witnessing several events that seem to be in direct contrast with the Catholic teachings. I think Anaya did a great job depicting Tony’s tumultuous feelings surrounding his faith and the choices before him. We learn early on Tony will have to find a way to accept a world in which many different belief systems can coexist. After I realized this, it was nice to watch Anaya’s prose unfold as he shows Tony’s journey in learning how to draw his own conclusions about the world around him. I would argue that there could’ve been a more definite resolution to this point at the end of the book, but leaving it more open-ended does suit the narrative of Tony preparing to sort things out on his own. We’ll allow it.
Another thing I liked was the idea of Tony being pulled in several different directions and having to make his own decision. His mother wishes for him to become a priest, which is extremely stressful since he’s having a complete crisis of faith. Tony’s father wants him to learn to work the land and become a farmer, which is in direct contrast with his mother’s wishes. This is a unique struggle in the book as well because we often see the dynamic of parents having a dream for their children that differs from the child’s own dreams or wants, but in this case his parents both have separate dreams for him which adds to the already difficult situation.
Ultima, his teacher and guide throughout the novel, is aware of all of Tony’s struggles, but she does not encourage him in any direction. Instead, her role in the novel is to push Tony to look at the world around him and make his own choices.
Other themes in the novel include a love for nature, mortality and death, and the influence of culture or identity. Of these, Anaya’s depiction of the last theme was the most intriguing to me. Tony’s father is a Marez, and his mother is a Luna. These two names are representative of two entirely different cultures, both of which Tony is a part of. His father says the Marez blood is a wandering blood, and his family are ranchers who travel the desert. The Lunas are more stable, preferring to have a farm and cultivate an area of land rather than be wanderers.
Tony, who belongs to both lines, struggles for a time with trying to decide in whose footsteps he wants to follow. Eventually he realizes he can be a combination of both, existing somewhere in the middle. This is on brand with the message of the novel, which is learning how to make our own way in the world.
Overall, I thought Bless Me, Ultima was a pretty good book (not to be confused with a good book). It was a nice coming of age story, but I wouldn’t say there was anything exceptional about it. Will I read it again? Probably not. Am I glad I read it? Sure, especially because the scenic depictions of New Mexico allowed me to relive that part of my trip after I’d come down with the post-travel blues.
Coming in at 262 pages, it’s a short enough book that you can add it to your reading list if you’re short for new titles, or if you’re looking to explore Chicano literature. I would not say it’s an essential read, so don’t feel bad if you can’t make time for it.
The Lit Wiz