Bless Me, Ultima

Bless Me, Ultima is a novel by the American writer Rudolfo Anaya, first published in 1972 and set in Hispano New Mexico in the 1940s.

The book is the story of a boy's education, and most of it takes place within earshot of grown-ups: the songs of the llano, the saints in the church, the stories of La Llorona, and the arguments about whether illness comes from the body or from a curse. Ultima teaches Antonio how herbs are gathered and used, and the novel treats her kind of knowing as neither superstition nor medicine but as a discipline with its own rules, including a rule about what may be done with it. Around the boy, the Márez and Luna sides of his family pull at each other, one of them associated with the roaming life of the llano and the other with settled fields, and his mother prays that he will become a priest. Anaya spent six years writing the novel and two more finding a publisher for it, and it has since become the most widely read work in the New Mexican canon, taught in schools and universities and, at the same time, one of the books most frequently challenged in American libraries.