Bless Me, Ultima Book

Actual rating: 2.5 stars.

This is a hard review to write. I read Bless Me, Ultima because it is frequently challenged, often banned, sometimes even burned. I read it because it has been banished from Tucson classrooms and school libraries. I read it because I live in a majority Mexican-American community in a part of Arizona that until relatively recently was still part of the state of Sonora, Mexico. And I read it because many readers have praised it.

Anaya wrote his novel in 1972. Copies were confiscated and burned at a New Mexico school less than a year later. Burning, it turned out, was not to be a one-time aberration: Bless Me, Ultima has fed the flames again and again: the most recent incident happened in Norwood, Colorado, in 2005.

My awareness of what is sometimes called Chicano pride literature began in January 2012, when Tucson Unified School District administrators cancelled Mexican-American Studies classes in mid-session, pulling novels and textbooks from students' and teachers' hands and packing them in boxes labeled "banned books," a story that resulted in international outrage and made Arizona a laughingstock. Bless Me, Ultima was one of TUSD's targets.

Why do non-hispanics hate this novel? The most-often cited reason is that it contains profanity, violence, and sexuality. It is true that the novel contains two instances of the word "fuck." More if you translate the word "chingada," which appears so many times that if you were to eliminate all the other words, you'd still have 20 pages of chingada. Also, the kids in the story call each other "cabrón" a lot. And there is violence. But if there's any sex I must have missed it.

Other challenges spell out what I consider to be more likely objections: the story is irreverent toward Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, full of pagan mysticism, and frankly pro-magic (in that Ultima is a practicing medicine woman who uses her arts to stymie and even kill witches). Which is all true, but neither here nor there in a society that respects the separation of church and state (don't we all wish).

Arizona State Schools Superintendent Tom Horne dared speak what I believe to be the real reasons behind white antipathy toward Bless Me, Ultima. In interviews leading up to the infamous TUSD book bannings he characterized Mexican-American studies and the books used in those classes as "civilizational war" and stated that in his view the histories of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans are not based on "Greco-Roman" knowledge and thus not part of Western civilization. Oh, yes, he really did say that.

So there you have the reasons Anaya's novel generates so much hate. Now I come to the hard part, explaining why I didn't get much out of reading it. I'll refer back to the 20 pages of "chingadas" and "cabróns," and a host of other Spanish and Indian words sprinkled throughout the narrative: yes, it's worth it to note that Mexican-Americans living near the US/Mexico border use many Spanish and Indian words in everyday speech, but after a while I began to feel somewhat put upon by all this multiculturalism.

Antonio keeps telling us Ultima is not a witch, but she has an owl as a familiar and she casts counter-spells against three known brujas (witches), killing two of them before she herself is killed ... not directly, but by the father of the witches, who kills the owl and thus Ultima. So she's a witch. C'mon.

Apart from Antonio and Ultima, the other characters are paper cutouts, acting and speaking in predictable ways. It was interesting to see Antonio begin to question the teachings of the church and to embrace the paganism of Ultima and the mysterious golden carp, but that was all the excitement the novel offered, and Antonio's doubts grew tiresome after much repetition.

It's an okay story. I question how relevant it is to today's readers, but as a cornerstone of Mexican-American literature it is undoubtedly important. I'm glad I read it, but having read it, I remain far more interested in the reasons white people hate it than I am in the novel itself.