In many communities, it is an often observed maxim that children are better off with shallow truths than definitive, stark ones. Often, adults believe the naïve livelihood of children to necessitate the invocation of white lies, or even myths, to explain the complexity—or soften the harshness—of our world. There are enumerable examples of this in daily life, whether be it Santa Claus, or God, appeals to the fantastical or supernatural, embellish reality so that a child may be reared prescriptively. In life, however, the stories we tell have a way of telling us a great deal about ourselves. So, for Rodulfo Anayas, it is not only a genre conceit to add folklore and mythological elements into his storytelling, but rather, particularly in “Bless Me, Ultima,” perhaps the coming of age story of an immigrant boy would be incomplete without them. “One of the most typical features of Anaya’s fiction,” begins Dr. Hasine Şen of Istanbul University, “[is] his extensive use of myth” (Şen 166). In this employment of ‘magicalism’ and realism, Anaya does not seek to simply pit to worlds at odds, but rather to reconcile both as essential to each other in the setting of the narrative. “To put it another way, the modernity of the magical realist novel manifests itself in the implicit acknowledgment that there is such a thing as a coherent, interdependent, and recognizable modern world that is inescapable, that such a world is the only one with a historical future, the only real one that can any longer be represented” (Moses 106). In authoring an account of Antonio as a young boy of both Mexican and Spanish descent, there is at once an internal conflict of ethnicity at play, as well as the exterior conflict of reconciling the mythical folklore of his mother’s heritage with the pragmatic modernity of his father’s ambition.
Chicano scholar Gloria Anzaldua has called the borderland between the United States of America and Mexico, where many, like her, make their displaced home, “a 1,950 mile-long open wound” of barbed wire and desert boundary. Anzaldua explains that the border serves not only to physically divide people but to metaphorically afflict them with prejudice toward each other. “Many Chicano writers,” writes Şen, “have based their works on the multifaceted problems of the borderland – the central issue of migration, the life in the barrio, the conflict with Anglo culture, the search for a genuine Chicano identity – to describe the difficulties of coping with life in this indeterminate space” (Şen 167). Anaya writes “Bless Me, Ultima” during a time of Mexican-American turmoil guaranteed by the fallout of both country’s forefathers. The term “Chicano” rose to a partisan prominence as the political nomenclature of Mexican-Americans. These Mexican-Americans were often second generation individuals, the children of immigrant parents yet lamenting their native culture. “By integrating myths and legends into his narrative,” writes Şen, “[Anaya] aims to revive the collective unconscious of the Chicano people” (Şen 167). The Chicano identity specifically takes up arms with the sheer invocation of magical realism, because it is a call to reclaim the Mexican identity as inextricably bound to that of Aztlan.
There is much mysticism still pervading the telltales of Aztec civilization. Even among Mexican-Americans, there remains a lot of mystification of the Aztecs as significantly less cunning than their Spanish conquerors. Historical accounts dispute the Aztecs as caricaturized as peaceful, non-warring natives. The significance of the myth is not erect idols, but rather, in “Bless Me, Ultima,” for Anaya, it is to represent a metaphorical and spiritual kinship with Antonio’s, the protagonist, cultural origins. The character of Ultima an old curandera, “a woman who knew the herbs and remedies of the ancients, a miracle-worker who could heal the sick” acts as both a stand-in for a mythological and mythical culture of a land Antonio may never truly know (Anaya 5). Antonio may never know his father or mother’s homeland like they have, but in keeping with certain traditions and understanding the role of Ultima in his life and the community at large, Antonio too preserves his native culture in practice and observation of Ultima’s folk-healing. In keeping with the cuentos, Antonio is keeping with what Anaya cultivates as a new mestizo identity in the New World, one distinctly Chicano.
Şen, Hasine. “Mythic Visions of the Borderland: Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.” Journal of Arts and Sciences Sayı. 12 Apr. 2009. Web.
Moses, Michael. “Magical Realism at World’s End.” Oxford Journals. 2001. Web. http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/1/105.full.pdf