practice today. There is renewed interest in traditional medicine. Holistic healers are practicing in some of the areas the old curanderas treated. We all know people who seem to have special abilities to make, not only our bodies, but our spirits feel better. Ultima has such knowledge.
When I finished writing Bless Me, Ultima I sent it to many major publishers. I received many rejections, but writers are strong willed. (You have to be if you think there are people out there waiting to read your story.) Finally I sent it to Quinto Sol, a small press in Berkeley. The manuscript was accepted, and I was awarded the 1971 Premio Quinto Sol Literary Prize for the best Chicano novel of the year. The novel was published in 1972. In the 1960s and ’70s the Mexican American community was going through a civil rights struggle. In the arts there was a renaissance called the Chicano Movement. Poetry, fiction, theatre, murals, and music blossomed and became part of the social and economic struggle to better the lives of Mexican Americans. I became part of that literary movement and was invited to many university campuses and communities to speak about my novel.
In 1974 I began teaching at the University of New Mexico. I kept writing, completing my somewhat autobiographical New Mexico trilogy with Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga. Heart of Aztlan is set in the 1950s in Barelas, a barrio in Alburquerque. My parents had moved us to the city, following the pattern after World War II which drew many families from small New Mexican communities to seek work in bigger cities. Tortuga is a novel that verges on magical realism in which the hospital becomes the underworld that the boy, Tortuga, must struggle to leave.
But Bless Me, Ultima remains the favorite. I believe readers have sympathy for Antonio’s spiritual journey. Perhaps, like Antonio, we have questioned our faith or beliefs, and we understand his search for the truth. The novel also explores folklore, myth, and dream in a lyrical narrative. Readers tell me they feel the landscape come alive in the novel, the river palpitates with its presence, its soul, and the llano seems to form the character of the people who live there. The sun and moon, the river and the open plain, the themes of good and evil, the teaching of the Catholic church and the native spirituality, all these elements form archetypes that touch the reader.
The beliefs of my traditional New Mexican culture are grounded in the Catholic religion and Spanish folktales from the Iberian world. These beliefs are influenced by cultural borrowings from the Pueblo Indian way of life. This culture is the backdrop for the novel. It is the way of life of the Nuevos Mexicanos that inspires my creativity. But a novel is not written to explain a culture, it creates its own. I create stories, so the reader must separate realistic portrayals of the culture from fiction.
I am still writing. My recent novels include a quartet written around the seasons and set in Alburquerque, where I live. The quartet started with the spring novel, Alburquerque, then shifted to three murder mysteries: Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, and Shaman Winter. The novels are set in the city and deal with more contemporary themes, yet they echo the same spiritual themes I explored in Bless Me, Ultima. I have also written dozens of short stories and essays, many plays, and recently picture books and stories for young readers.
The success of Bless Me, Ultima is due to its readers. One reader tells another about it, or a teacher uses it with students. I’m especially pleased when young readers read and discuss my work. Antonio’s story has attracted readers from all over the world. It has been widely translated into many languages. I am still amazed, and thankful, the novel has this power to touch the lives of people, and perhaps like Ultima, help in the healing process that we all need in our daily lives.
Rudolfo Anaya
Alburquerque, New Mexico
Uno
Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. She took my hand, and the silent, magic powers she possessed made beauty from the raw, sun-baked llano, the green river valley,