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: Jajedeh

Credit: Amazon

Jajadeh, written by Harry Hoge, is a work of fiction based on the facts of Apache interactions with the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans who laid claim to the same lands as the Apache.

The story begins in the early 1600s with the Apache-Spanish era, and ends circa 1865 with the death of Mangas Coloradas in the Apache-Mexican-American era.

Overall, Jajadeh is successful as a means of delivering historical information in story form. It kept my interest throughout. It is also further evidence that the very things you would believe to be fabricated because they sound so outlandish, are the things that are true. Examples include the abominations delivered upon men, women, and children of all sides. 

I do have some quibbles, however.

For example, I felt a little exasperated with the stereotypical "hands on hips, feet apart" for at least two of the women in the story, like "spitfire" Maureen O'Hara in a movie with John Wayne. I also didn't get the sudden marital turn-off between one of the early protagonists and his wife. Where'd that come from?

I thought I would learn the story behind the crown dancers (one of which is featured prominently on the book jacket), but the dance was only barely alluded to. I also didn't understand why Mr. Hoge chose to use the (apparently archaic) term "jajadeh" instead of the modern-day term "ga'an" or "gan" or "ga he" to refer to the  Mountain Spirit.

But overall, again, Jajadeh is an educational, enlightening, and interesting read.

New Mexico Lit: Pie Town

Credit: Amazon

What was the name of that family show where the dad was a minister and he and his wife had a bunch of kids? Right, right, right - 7th Heaven.

So Pie Town is kind of like that show - people with life problems that get worked out in a heartwarming way - with the help of a Tiny Tim-like character who has a spirit guide in the form of his deceased great-grandmother. And where the real New Mexican village of Pie Town is a bit of a stunt location for the book. 

I skipped through part of the book to get to the wrap-up, but even so, I missed the priest's secret. Tried to find it, and discovered I wasn't engaged enough to persevere.

If I were to liken the book to a pie, then I'd characterize it as the meringue atop a pie - airy, sweet, and fluffy.

New Mexico Lit: Apache History

I've spent most of my year in New Mexico re-reading my cache of classic, paperback sci-fi novels. With that project complete (and the books now dispersed to the universe), I've turned my attention to New Mexico-centered literature.

Recently, I visited the Mescalero Apache Cultural Museum in Mescalero. The helpful curator there recommended a number of books on Apache history, some of which I include here: 

• Cochise, Edwin R. Sweeney
• From Cochise to Geronimo, Edwin R. Sweeney
• The Apache Indians, Frank C. Lockwood
• An Apache Life, Morris Edward Opler
• I Fought With Geronimo, Jason Betsinez
• Making Peace with Cochise [journals of the peace talks], J.A. Sladen
• Mangas Coloradas, Edwin R. Sweeney 
• Merejildo Grijalva : Apache Captive, Army Scout; Edwin R. Sweeney
• The People Called Apache, Thomas Mails
• Watch For Me on the Mountain, Forest Carter

There were many more on the curator's list, including some by well-known author on the Apaches, Eve Ball. Fortunately, the Alamogordo Library has a large collection of Southwestern materials, so I've created a to-read list.

Edwin R. Sweeney is from St. Charles, Missouri, by the way. I heard that when he was a young'n, he announced to his English teacher that some day he would write a book about Cochise, with whom he was fascinated. The teacher was a little skeptical, given the lackluster attention he gave to English in the classroom. 









  

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 7: Winfield Townley Scott

Spring, Cloudcroft, New Mexico

Winfield Townley Scott was a poet. In his essay for The Spell of New Mexico, he considered each month and season of this state, as I have been doing.

Autumn, Near Percha Dam State Park, New Mexico

He asks:

... what is there about this land which sets travelers to altering their schedules and overstaying? What is there, more forcefully still, that has seized upon astonishing numbers of people who came to look, and then put down their luggage and remained?

Summer, Ocotillo and hummingbird, Leasburg Dam State Park, New Mexico

... and notes:

The breadth and height of the land, its huge self and its huge sky, strike you like a blow. There are those who at once dislike it .... there are more who at first can do nothing but stand and stare.

 

Spring, Angel Peak, New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 5: D.H. Lawrence

White Sands, New Mexico

D.H. Lawrence spent a number of months in Taos, New Mexico, between 1923-1925.

State Road 325, near Capulin Volcano, New Mexico

His essay in The Spell of New Mexico is like a song. 

... The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. ...In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new. 

Dripping Springs, near Las Cruces, New Mexico

  

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.

   

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 3: Oliver La Farge

White Sands, Alamogordo, New Mexico

An essay on New Mexico, written by Oliver La Farge, comprises Chapter 3 of the book, The Spell of New Mexico. Written before 1952, almost everything Mr. La Farge writes about New Mexico still holds true. Some excerpts from his detailed, loving description of New Mexico: 

A New Mexican native never ceases to be surprised to hear visitors .... ask the tariff on a purchase they are contemplating "when we take it back to the States." 

Indeed, a former colleague of mine on the east coast sent me a card, upon which she had affixed postage for international mailing. 

Sunset at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico

...You can be camping up in the northern mountains, and in the morning break up your camp under blue spruce and fir ... By noon you can take your break under cottonwoods in an irrigated section of orchards and corn and chili fields, and camp that night in desert where you are lucky, and distinctly relieved, when you find a water hole. 

Upper Karr Canyon Recreation Area, New Mexico

Being based in Alamogordo, I never get tired of living in the high desert but being able to reach 9000 feet of cool green forest in less than an hour, and to smell the pine. It is a wonder. 

An amiable sort of running feud goes on between the people of [Texas] and [New Mexico], keeping both on their toes. When a Texan told me one time that he was a real old timer, and that he personally had dug out the bed of the Pecos River, he Lord gave it to me to answer that, while he was doing that, I was up in the Sangre de Cristo [Mountains] melting snow to run in his ditch. 

Rio Grande, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

... on the Fourth of July, .... it is worth going to the [Mescalero Apache] celebration to see their renowned Crown Dance, a masked dance unlike any other, portraying the mountain spirits. 

Ga'an dancers. Credit: SFMOMA

Having gone to this very event, I can attest to its magic more than 50 years after Mr. La Farge wrote the above. 

... on a Sunday a Pueblo Indian, having spent the preceding week cultivating his red, blue, and yellow corn in his ancestral field, will put on his Indian clothes to sing in the chorus of a dance in which his daughter, who during the week works at Los Alamos, will take the part of the Buffalo Maiden, that during the performance Spanish-American neighbors will kneel in the bower at one side of the pueblo's plaza to sing alabados before the image of its patron saint, while artists, scientists (both anthropologists and nuclear physicists), tourists, and plain businessmen, watch the performance with appreciation and respect. 

Our Lady of Guadelupe Fiesta, Tortugas, New Mexico

[New Mexico] is ..... a land that draws and holds men and women with ties that cannot be explained or submitted to reason. 

Dilia, New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter I: Tony Hillerman

Tularosa Basin and Valley of Fires view from Highway 380, New Mexico

Awhile back, Josh, a thoughtful reader, recommended The Spell of New Mexico to me. Edited by Tony Hillerman, and published in 1976, it is a collection of essays by famous creatives who lived in or visited New Mexico.

My local library had the book, but it was missing until now. 

From Mr. Hillerman's introduction in Chapter 1: 

[Oliver] La Farge treasured New Mexico because it offered - probably more than any place in America - a rich variety of human cultures, religions, and value systems, and because it attracted and held an interesting variety of immigrants. ...

'The breadth and height of the land, its huge self and its huge sky, strike you like a blow,' [poet Winfield Townley] Scott wrote ...

To the above, I say check and check.

Angel Peak, New Mexico

Mr Hillerman described one of his special places in New Mexico:

...Those places that stir me have features in common. All are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.

One such place is east of U.S. 54 near the old Three Rivers service station north of Tularosa. The road jolts across the Southern Pacific tracks toward the foothills of the Sierra Blanca and passes a high, grassy ridge. On a July afternoon, the view from there suggests a hostile planet. The ragged stone ridgeline of the Sierra Oscura rises fifty miles to the west, and the Tularaso Basin below is lost in a haze of heat. If you climb high enough and the light is right, you can see to the southwest the glittering line formed by the gypsum dunes of White Sands and below the Oscuras the Black smudge of the lava-bed badlands. 

For me, this is one of many of New Mexico's magic places. 

This place Mr. Hillerman describes is within a Bureau of Land Management site, the Three Rivers Petroglyphs. The old service station is an art gallery, gift and coffee shop.

I have stood exactly where Mr. Hillerman describes, and looked out toward that "glittering line" that is White Sands. This place that Mr. Hillerman found magical is less than an hour from where I live in Alamogordo.


Every time I see that line of White Sands - or the distinctive Organ Mountains between Alamogordo and Las Cruces - I imagine people of centuries ago returning from a long trip, and when they see that glittering line, think, "we're almost home."

Bisti Wilderness, New Mexico