Development of an "American Mestizaje", Antonio's boon
After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the state officially constructed a Mexican national identity policy on the proposition that Mexicans are the product of a creative mixing of Indians and Europeans—that is, about a fusing together of cultures. This doctrine is expressed in official rhetoric, mythology and public ceremonial. In practice, however, the emphasis on culture gets conflated with the biological mixing of races, mestizaje in Spanish. The Revolution's goals included returning to Mexico's indigenous peoples their dignity as full-fledged citizens by relieving them from a history of exploitation, providing them with material progress and social justice. In return for this, Mexican Indians would give up their old customs, speak Spanish and join the mainstream of national life, defined as mestizo, the biological issue of mixed-race parentage. Thus, the Mexican "Mestizaje" has come to represent a policy of cultural assimilation.[33]
A number of Anaya critics and at least one Chicana novelist view his young protagonist's path to adolescence as a spiritual search for a personal identity. The result embodies the synergistic integration of both the cultural and biological aspects of his indigenous and European inheritances as the creation of something new.[3][12][16][18][19][34][35] Antonio's successful quest provides the world with a new model of cultural identity —a new American Mestizaje for the American Mestizo known as the Chicano. This model repudiates assimilation to the mainstream culture, but embraces acceptance of our historical selves through creative adaptation to the changing world around us.
Margarite Fernandez Olmos comments on the novel's pioneering position in the Chicano literary tradition: "Bless Me, Ultima blazed a path within the Chicano literary tradition in the [genre] 'novels of identity' in which the main characters must redefine themselves within the larger society from the vantage point of their own distinct ethnicity." (17)[18] Others, such as Denise Chavez (Face of an Angel, 1994) support Olmos' position. In an interview with Margot Kelly, Chavez concludes, "Anaya maintains that the kind of protagonist who will be able to become free is a person of synthesis, a person who is able to draw . . . on our Spanish roots and our native indigenous roots and become a new person, become that Mestizo with a unique perspective."[34] In general, Amy Barrias' analyses of representative coming-of-age Chicano and American Indian texts, including Bless Me, Ultima allows her to conclude that because American Indian and Chicano(a) writers find very little in dominant culture on which to build an identity, they have turned inward to create their own texts of rediscovery. (16)[12]
Michael Fink uses a wider lens to suggest that Anaya's seminal novel is a contribution to identity and memory politics that provides us with "a set of strategies of transcultural survival . . . [in which] former collective identities are eventually transformed into new hybrid identities of difference." (6–7)[16]
Anaya uses strategies that employ the need for a mentor, and the return to ancient spiritual roots encompassing belief in magic, mysticism, and the shaman's trance. Fernandez Olmos remarks on mentorship: "In Bless Me, Ultima the figure of Ultima . . . is crucial. As young Antonio's guide and mentor, her teachings not only bring him into contact with a mystical, primordial world but also with a culture—his own Hispanic/Indian culture—that he must learn to appreciate if he is ever to truly understand himself and his place within society." (17)[18] Amy Barrias cites the novel as a prime example of the use of magical intervention as the mediator, which enables Antonio to "emerge from his conflicts with a blended sense of identity. [He takes] the best each culture has to offer to form a new perspective."(iv)[12]
Cynthia Darche Park focuses on the shaman's initiation [d] as the spiritual experience that allows Antonio's transcendental integration of the conflicts with which he is struggling:
Through all that has transpired between them Antonio is ready near the end of his journey with Ultima to descend into the vast underworld, the great void of the unconscious where there are no divisions—neither of body and soul, nor time and space, nor matter and spirit. (194)[19]
Anaya as mythmaker: apocalypse as revelation, the hero's journey
The mythos of any community is the bearer of something which exceeds its own frontiers; it is the bearer of other possible worlds...It is in this horizon of the ‘possible’ that we discover the universal dimensions of symbolic and poetic language.
– Paul Ricoeur
Robert Cantú suggests that apocalypse as revelation is the ideological construct that best explains the novel's structure and purpose. His reconstructive analysis shows how Antonio, as narrator, solves and resolves his troubling metaphysical questions through a series of revelations mediated by Ultima and her otherworldly connections. As more and more is revealed to Tony, a transcendent reality is disclosed which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation; and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.[37]
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare worldview), as in several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (a "received consciousness" or product of socialization).
Myth and magic as healing
Because healing is Ultima's mission, Antonio's relationship with her includes accompanying her to gather the curative herbs she knows about through tradition and spiritual revelation. With her Antonio visits the sick and begins to grasp a connection between healing and nature even though he never receives an explicit scientific or grounded explanation for how she foretells future occurrences, heals the infirm, combats witches through casting spells, or when and why she decides not to intervene. Ultima's indigenous and experiential pedagogy allows Antonio to intuit that her approach to healing includes a sense of who the afflicted person is, what s/he believes, knowledge of the healing powers of her herbs, and the limits of her power.[38] He learns through assisting Ultima in the cure of his uncle that healing requires making himself vulnerable to sickness and to the spiritual as well as physical needs of the sick. With Antonio, Ultima's relationship as healer is also one of teacher. Cynthia Park considers the relationship between those two roles, and abstracts a set of life-giving principles that form the basis for Ultima's way of knowing.[19]
Connections to multicultural literature
Susan Landt proposes that multicultural literature will take a wide range of perspectives from individuals within historically marginalized groups.[39]
Heriberto Gordina, a teacher at the University of Iowa, and Rachelle McCoy, a teacher at West Branch High School in West Branch, Iowa, analyze the novel in two different perspectives of multicultural literature.[40] An emic perspective takes a view of a culture within its elements whereas an etic perspective takes an objective view of culture.[40] For the two teachers, the story takes an emic perspective as Antonio, living within a Chicano culture, must find his own identity as he analyzes and questions his own connections to the culture's various ideologies, cultures, and viewpoints throughout the narrative.[40]
Candace Morales, a graduate student pursuing a Masters of Science in Education while concentrating in Reading, proposes that in a curriculum that utilizes Bless Me Ultima as a piece of multicultural literature, it must be timed appropriately. Specifically, she suggests teaching it to middle schoolers so that they have a diverse lens (that of a Chicano/a culture) to view their own development; to Morales, Antonio's own pursuit of “knowledge, truth, and personal identity” will resonate with the students as well.[41]
