Dreams and Identity in Bless Me, Ultima by Anaya

Overview of the Novel and Its Themes

Bless Me, Ultima is the first in a trilogy of novels by Rudolfo Anaya that also includes Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga. Set in New Mexico in the 1940s, it follows the story of Antonio Marez, a boy who meets a curandera named Ultima. The main plotline involves Ultima's struggle to stop the witchcraft of the three daughters of Tenorio Trementina, the novel's main villain. In the novel, Antonio mentally matures into an adult; it is, therefore, a coming-of-age story. As a witness to several deaths, Antonio is forced to confront religious and moral questions. He must choose between two opposing family heritages: the wild Marez, the cowboy people from whom Antonio's father descends, and the quiet Lunas, the religious farmers from whom his mother came.

Anaya uses dream sequences to emphasize the inner conflicts that push Antonio to understand the world around him. The dreams present Antonio's acute intuitive sense, his conflicting understandings of the world, and his own deep fears. They are windows into Antonio's unconscious world as he matures and deepens his understanding. The dreams foreshadow many of the major events in Antonio's life. In the beginning, Antonio is very naive and holds an innocent view of the world, but as the novel progresses he gains knowledge and self-understanding. Anaya uses the recurrent dream motif to show how Antonio's interpretations of his thoughts and experiences change as he develops as a character.

Dream Sequences as Windows into Antonio's Inner Life

In his early dreams, Antonio is largely preoccupied with the question of his destiny — whether he will become a vaquero or a priest. In his later dreams, however, he is preoccupied with much larger questions of family, morality, and duty. This gradual transformation, traced through dreams, reflects Antonio's growth from childhood to maturity. His dreams also offer him a rich and varied set of images and symbols with which to understand his own life.

Antonio's first dream concerns his own birth. As he drifts off to sleep, he floats over the hills of the llano to the village of Las Pasturas and toward the window of a lighted hut. There, a woman is in labor, and Antonio recognizes that he is witnessing his own birth. After the baby Antonio is born, his mother's brothers arrive and declare that he will be a Luna and perhaps become a priest. His father's brothers declare that he will continue their tradition of restless wandering on the llano. Each family wishes to dispose of the afterbirth according to their own traditions: the Lunas seek to bury it in the earth, while the vaqueros seek to burn it and scatter the ashes across the open plains. Ultima, however, claims that she will bury the afterbirth herself and declares that only she will know Antonio's destiny.

Ultima is a curandera, which means she practices folk medicine — a healing art heavily influenced by the knowledge and ancient religions of indigenous peoples. Curanderismo is associated with the treatment of both physical and supernatural illnesses. It was considered by some a practice associated with witchcraft, and it also revealed the fact that the Catholic Church could not explain certain kinds of power, especially Ultima's. Her declaration that she alone knows Antonio's future establishes her as a guide for him in the process of reconciling his heritages and building a life out of both. The relationship between them is built on harmony and trust. Antonio is developing an independent self-consciousness and learning to combine elements of both his parents' heritages. As a young boy, he has not yet begun to consider the consequences of such changes, remaining naive and vulnerable.

His mother associates growing up with learning how to sin, while Gabriel and Ultima view growing up as an inevitable process that is neither good nor bad in itself. Maria's worldview stems from a primarily religious outlook on life, while Gabriel and Ultima's reflects a more natural outlook. As a boy becomes a man, he uses his experiences and knowledge to make decisions. These competing pressures flare up whenever the subject of Antonio's future is raised. Maria's religiosity leads her to conclude that Antonio's only hope for salvation lies in becoming a priest, while Gabriel's love of independence causes him to insist that no one but Antonio should make that decision. As Antonio's mentor, Ultima does not tell him what to think; rather, she teaches him how people like his father and Narciso make moral decisions. Her approach gives Antonio the freedom to apply his understanding to his own choices. Ultima's style of teaching implies that she is more interested in helping Antonio develop into an independent person than in instilling any particular moral outlook. Maria protests that Antonio is still a baby and that it is a sin for boys to become men. She wants to protect her son, and the only way she envisions keeping him safe from a corrupt world is to make him a priest.

The Virgin of Guadalupe and Competing Religious Loyalties

Another important symbol in the novel is the Virgin of Guadalupe. Every night, Antonio's family prays before her statue. Antonio loves her and she is his favorite saint because the Virgin is the one who provides forgiveness and possesses a pure soul. One night, Antonio has a dream in which the Virgin speaks to Maria and promises that his older brothers will return home from the war safely. When Maria asks the Virgin to make Antonio a priest, Antonio sees the Virgin wearing mourning clothes while standing on the moon.

The dream carries several possible interpretations. The Virgin in mourning may represent Antonio's death. It may also suggest that becoming a priest would not save Antonio from sin, as his mother had hoped. Alternatively, it could mean that Antonio will disappoint his mother's wishes by not becoming a priest. The dream symbolizes many of the interior conflicts that torment Antonio as he grows out of his childhood innocence. He thinks about sin, punishment, and his own morality, and he is also preoccupied with the possible significance of disobeying his mother's wishes.

The Virgin embodies both the novel's main forces of conflict and their potential resolution. Antonio's devotion to the saint shows that he is concerned about forgiveness, knowing that he himself can sin. For Antonio, Ultima is like the Virgin — by the statement "Bless me, Ultima," he refers to her as a woman who has not sinned. One of Ultima's predictions is that Antonio might become a man of learning, though that does not necessarily mean he will fulfill Maria's hope that he will become a priest. He must face cultural differences, but he desires above all to obtain knowledge.