Texts for the Course

This semester, we will read a famous novel that American students sometimes study in high school, Bless Me Ultima, by the New Mexico writer Rudolfo Anaya.

The book is a bit difficult for this Level 3 class, but we will work on it together little by little, and the teacher will provide many shorter readings to help you follow the main text, and also learn more about American history and geography.

You will also find it helpful to use Internet resources as we study this book: Follow the links that are posted at this site, on the right.

The textbooks for the course are:

(1) Bless Me, Ultima: This novel will be sold in the Laney bookstore, but there are many, many inexpensive ways to buy it, online or at local bookstores. Below are links to help you:

Online bookstore Barnes and Noble 

Online bookstore Amazon: At this site, it is also possible to buy and download an audio recording of the book.

Walmart

Target

Be sure that you buy the complete, unabridged novel, and not just a summary or study notes. Also, be sure that you buy the book in English and not in Spanish! The Spanish title is Bendiceme, Ultima, and is not the one you want.

(2) You will also need to follow the CliffsNotes study guide for Bless Me Ultima. This is available for free online (see the link on the right). If you want to buy the study guide in paper form, if will be for sale in the college bookstore, or you can buy it online.

(3) You must have a copy of Longmans Dictionary of American English. You can buy it online or at the Laney College bookstore. You must have your own paper copy of this dictionary to use in class and during quizzes and tests. Dictionary skills are one of the most important things you will be learning in Reading 3; please do not try to take the course without this book.

(4) We will study three issues of Easy English Times during the fall semester. The instructor will provide the three issues that we study in class, but if you wish, you can order a full year's subscription of your own from their website; follow the link on the right and click on "Subscribe."

Rudolfo Anaya Talks about Bless Me, Ultima

"Hello, my name is Rudolfo Anaya, and I am here to discuss my novel, Bless Me, Ultima.

I fell in love with books when my mother taught me my catechism at home, and then later on I remember I would read The Hardy Boys, and I’d read a lot of westerns about cowboys, and Nancy Drew.

I grew up in the oral tradition, of family and friends telling stories in a Spanish-speaking family. You see, at home, we didn’t have books, and I didn’t know the magic of words until I went to school and picked up a book.

And then, in town there was a library on top of the old fire station. It was a small room, and one of the teachers in the school volunteered on Saturdays to open the library. You know, that was the opening of my world into books; because in this little, dusty room with Miss Pansy checking out books, I could finally take books home … oh, man, that was excitement because I had books, I finally had books, and I think books are salvation, you know. Books are the mirror in which we see ourselves.

I find myself every time I write something, because writing is an exploration, and the exploration is not only for me, it’s for the reader. That’s why the library is so important. The writers of the world are there, and the readers can share in that journey.

I loved my university experience. What happened is when I was studying literature at the University, I fell in love with literature. But when I start to write, somehow those models don’t fit me. I have to find my own way of writing, and in order to find that, I need to ask guidance from my ancestors. I comes from our culture. It’s a belief that they can help me, and they’re the ones who are going to guide me, and in principle in Bless Me, Ultima, it’s the healer who comes to guide me.

A curandera is a healer. These are women, it can be a man, who practice helping people when they’re sick. Bless Me, Ultima takes place in a small town in eastern New Mexico, and it’s really the setting of my hometown, Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Many of the characters who appear are my childhood friends.

I used the write late at night. I felt something behind me, and I turned, and there is this old woman dressed in black, and she asks me what I’m doing. And I say “Well, I’m trying to write about my childhood, you know, about growing up in that small town,” and she said, “Well, you’ll never get it right until you put me in it.” And I said, “Well, who are you?” And she said “Ultima.”

Ultima is the curandera who comes to stay with Antonio’s family at the beginning of the novel. With Ultima, he begins to experience something different. He begins to see a totality of life, and he begins to see beauty where there was no beauty. He begins to ask questions about life and death and about good and evil. You get a sense that this woman is so powerful, she can not only be at his birth, but now that he is almost seven, she can be at his rebirth.

There isn’t only one way to look at the world. Ultima says that there are other ways. So I started to write, and I would write poetry, I even tried writing sonnets. During that time, I would write poetry for girls that I met because this was a great way to meet girls. But one never knows, you know “I’m going to be a writer, I’m going to be famous, this book will be known thirty years after I write it,” that doesn’t happen. You just do it because somehow that’s what you’re meant to do.

I started writing Bless Me, Ultima when I was a student at the university. I was learning to write, it was a first novel. I had to learn to use my culture, my traditions, my history, and put them in a novel, and that hadn’t been done. Night after night after night, revision after revision of a novel, is kind of insanity, you know?

Finally I got it to a point where I thought it was ready, and I started sending it around to east coast publishers, and it was rejected many, many times. One time I was reading a magazine by a press in Berkeley, Quinto Sol, and for the first time, they were publishing Chicano literature. And I remember turning to my wife and saying, “You know, I can write as good as those guys.” And so I packaged the novel off and sent it to them, and they wrote back and said “Yeah, we want to publish it, not only that, we want to give it a literary prize,” and that was the beginning of my publishing career.

I believe that every writer has to have a guide, especially if you’re going to deal with questions that have to do with human nature, the good and evil in our lives. But the key to writing for me has always been to go as deep as I can into the story because that’s where we discover ourselves, that’s where we make a connection to every human being that has ever existed. That’s what ties us together, that’s what makes us human.

And that’s where the guide comes in, the mentor. And so Ultima becomes a mentor for Antonio in the story and becomes a mentor for me, the writer.

Somehow. Bless Me, Ultima captures the soul of a people, of a community. It’s not very often that we can do it as writers, and that’s to be shared with the world.

I am Antonio in the novel, obviously I have this connection to him because I’m seeing the world from his point of view, first person, but I think for the reader the end is, you know, let the reader decide what does Antonio become. Does he become a priest? And I say no, maybe he becomes a writer!"

Interviewer: "If you were a book, what book would you be?"

Anaya: "If I were a book, I would be a notebook that has not been written in, so I could write my own story."