New Mexico Movies: Bless Me, Ultima

Bless Me, Ultima. From:wikipedia

The movie version of the classic New Mexico novel, Bless Me, Ultima, came out while I was in New Mexico, and I didn't see it then. Lo, the DVD was at the Lafayette Public Library.

Here, I reviewed the book.

Movie: Bless Me, Ultima

Provenance: Filmed in (or around) Abiquiu, New Mexico. 

The trailer below is roll-your-eyes hyperbolic about the so-called controversy of the book. Controversial. Banned. Forbidden. Burned. .... Forget about that part - look at it for the scenery! 

I liked the movie. It was pleasing. The scenery, especially, was magnificent - you can see why New Mexico is called the State of Enchantment. Amazingly, the film-makers were even able to do some justice to the marvelous New Mexico sky.

Something I liked about the trailer is that it reflects the feeling I got from this movie: "From the heart of the land, that is our land; from the heart of the culture that is our culture." Bless Me, Ultima - movie version - comes across as an American story. It is of all of us.

Decades ago, on Sunday mornings, there used to be a Christian ministry that produced half-hour morality stories set in modern times. The stories were fairly simple and the acting was serviceable. Wasn't great theater, but it wasn't bad. In fact, they were entertaining.

The movie, Bless Me, Ultima, reminded me of those half-hour episodes, where characters were presented with moral dilemmas and we saw how they handled them.

Recommended? Yes, for the scenery and for a story of Americana that many of us know little about.

New Mexico Lit: Bless Me, Ultima

Bless Me, Ultima

This will be a short review.

Bless Me, Ultima, written by Rudolfo Anaya, is a New Mexican classic, even though it was only written in 1972. But it was about New Mexico in the 1940s, specifically as it pertained to some rural New Mexicans of Mexican descent.

I want to stress its specificity because the diversity of New Mexico is such that there are so many stories to tell. Imagine the myriad combinations one can create with these variables: 

• Industry (agriculture, mining, arts, military, science)
• Culture (Anglo, Mexican, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo, Zuñi, Spanish, Chinese ... )
• Religion (how many flavors of just Catholicism alone are in New Mexico?)
• Geography and climate (desert, plains, mountains)
• Era (thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, decades ago, current)
• Gender
• History (personal, group)
• Rural, urban
• Socio-economic strata

New Mexico's heterogeneity is part of what makes it extraordinary.

But to return to Bless Me, Ultima: The story's mix of elements - magical realism, religion, desert, rural, Mexican, American, searching, a spiritual guide - I found myself unable to avoid comparisons with the images of Carlos Castaneda, whose books had a major impact on my adolescent imagination. (Never mind that Mr. Castaneda was most likely a charlatan and cult-like leader.) This comparison was unfair to Bless Me, Ultima, but there I was, regardless.


However, Marc Velasquez, a contributor to Chamber Four, loves the book, and so I offer you his review, in which he shares how the book affects him personally.