Times of Conflict: Bless Me, Ultima as a Novel of Acculturation

Abstract

the reader with the richness of the ethnic history of Chicano culture, and at times it cre ates nostalgia the innocence of youth and the chance to find again one's own identity. Not only is it a novel that contains a rich panorama of visual imagery as it describes the New Mexico landscape of the 1940s, but it is also a novel of realistic concepts about life and living that face ordinary and not-so-ordinary people. One important view of the novel, largely overlooked, is a reading of Bless Me, Ultima in terms of the power struggles that are a result of acculturation, and how power, if diminished in one cultural discourse, often accelerates in another, where the use of one type of power makes up the inadequacies that may exist from the loss of another. No matter how many other meanings can be attributed to the text, the underlying themes that the novel examines involve the conflicts of power within cultural structures as a result of acculturation: who has it, and who does not have it. Acculturation, regardless of what else it may be, is a strong political issue with far-reaching ramifications not only the people physically and psychologically involved, but generations of people yet to come. By choosing open forms over closed ones as a result of opting for conflict over reso lution, the Chicano narrative should function to produce creative structures of knowledge to allow its readers to see, to feel, and to understand their social reality

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