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1 ”Jasón’s Indian” Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima The critical and pedagogical problem posed by Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima is that, while it is regarded as a classic of Chicano/Latino literature and even of ethnic American literature generally,1 the narrative is driven by personal identity issues which do not seem connected to the larger issues of collective identity at the heart of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and early 1970s—a movement which largely strove to construct and celebrate an ethnic identity based on mestizaje, hybridity, and the recovery of an indigenous past. The struggle of the novel’s young protagonist, Antonio (or “Tony”) Márez, to negotiate a dual inheritance, the elements of which seem incompatible if not mutually exclusive, may call to mind Gloria Anzaldúa’s well-known description of the mestiza who also negotiates apparently incompatible aspects of identity: “The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality” (79). But, unlike Anzaldúa’s new mestiza, who is, conceptually , fully a product of the Chicano movement’s antagonism toward hegemonic Anglo culture and of its valorization of indigenous heritage, Anaya’s representation of identity conflict appears highly personal—a family matter without larger implications for Chicanos.2 Antonio’s father’s side of the family , the Márez clan, is associated with the freedom of the vaquero who roams the expansive llano; the Lunas, his mother’s family, are linked with the more stable life of farming. The conflict for Antonio is whether he will become a vaquero, following in the footsteps of the Márez men, or a farmer like his Luna uncles—or even a priest, his fervently Catholic mother’s dearest wish. These alternatives seem strikingly disconnected from the issues that provided a rallying cry for the Chicano movement and that generated an empowering , collective sense of self for Chicanos. As Genaro M. Padilla, looking back on the body of critical reaction to the novel, observed in 1989, “Many critics objected to Bless Me, Ultima (1972) on the grounds that it seemed non-referential even though it was set in a definable historical moment in a New Mexi- 40 On Latinidad can village”;3 there was simply no obvious connection to “the social contexts of the novel” (128).4 There are no struggles in Bless Me, Ultima—as there are in the much earlier Mexican American bildungsroman Pocho (1959) by José Antonio Villarreal—with issues of assimilation and integration versus cultural preservation, no obvious or foregrounded “Anglo” influences trying to Americanize Antonio at the expense of his Mexican roots. Passing references to Antonio’s education in the English language and the “old people [who] did not accept the new language” (180), or to his discomfort when he brings a lunch of tortillas to school and is mocked by children with “sandwiches [. . .] made of bread” (58), seem tangential—perhaps even irrelevant—to the core identity conflict of the novel. As Juan Bruce-Novoa decisively states, “Antonio is not torn between an Anglo and a Chicano world, but between two ways of being Chicano” (183); and given that the term “Chicano” connotes a self-conscious, politicized, collective Mexican American identity, even that description seems inaccurate. Growing up some two decades before the Chicano movement, Tony is absolutely unaware of being a “Chicano,” much less torn between different modes of chicanismo. And even if we understand Bruce-Novoa to be referring more simply to colliding strains of Mexican American heritage (e.g., Spanish and indigenous) which Antonio, much like Anzaldúa’s “New Mestiza,” must negotiate, it is hard to see how the particular familial choices that are constructed for Tony (plain or valley, cowboy or priest, etc.) might serve this kind of “referential” capacity.5 Perhaps in response to the implied censure of the novel for not being “Chicano enough” (Cantú 13), some critics have focused on its ostensibly ethnic “content”—those elements of Ultima which serve as “ethnic markers,” including bilingualism and code-switching as well as “folklore” or “pagan” figures like La Llorona and the golden carp.6 Indeed, it is by now a critical commonplace in Anaya scholarship that Bless Me, Ultima “draws deeply on Native American mythology” (Kanoza 160).7 Such...

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