Bless Me, Ultima Study Guide

Rudolfo Anaya was born in Pastura and raised in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Like Antonio Márez, Anaya had a vaquero (cowboy) father and a mother from a farming family, and he was also greatly influenced by the beauty of the New Mexican flatlands. Anaya's family later moved to Albuquerque, where he attended high school and the University of New Mexico. He got two masters degrees there, and he married Patricia Lawless in 1966. Bless Me, Ultima is his first novel. Many publishers rejected it for its blend of languages and its Chicano subject matter, but once it was published the book became extremely popular through word-of-mouth. It is now considered part of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature and American literature as a whole. Anaya's best known other books are Heart of Aztlan, Tortuga, and Albuquerque. He still lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The cultural setting for Bless Me, Ultima is New Mexico, where Spanish colonists mixed with Native Americans for many years, blending indigenous mythology with Catholic Christianity. The novel is set during World War II, and mentions the testing of the atomic bomb in the New Mexican Desert. The isolated rural towns like Guadalupe were also forever changed when their young men returned from the horrors of war.

Anaya struggled to find other works that spoke to his Chicano experience, so Bless Me, Ultima is one of the first of its kind. An earlier related work is Josephina Niggli's Mexican Village, which was published in 1945. Other major Chicano writers include Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, poet Luis Omar Salinas, and poet Lorna Dee Cervantes.