Bless me, Ultima?

is Ultima actually a witch?





please help i don't kno...and i need proof from the book, i just don't have my book with me so i cant figure it out.





thanks!!
Bless me, Ultima?
As I recall, she is a healer, both physically and spiritually. I haven't read the book in a number of years so I don't know for sure. I don't think she is a witch though.
Bless me, Ultima?
She is a curandera - which I believe means faith/folk healer or shaman.





A clip from an article I found...





Bless Me, Ultima takes place in the cultural richness of its author's native soil (New Mexico), one of the continent's oldest communities, a point that bears stressing because primal antiquity girds Anaya's mythic worldview. The novel presents the maturation of Antonio Marez, a boy growing up in Guadalupe, a small New Mexico farm village. The book explores his relationship with his spiritual guide, Ultima, a curandera. Narrated in the first person by seven-year-old Antonio, the events in Bless Me, Ultima unfold as if in the present, but it is soon clear that temporal distance separates the narrator from the experiences he is describing. Anaya achieves this distance by opening the story with the boy's flashback to "the beginning that came with Ultima," a period of time that moves from the year he starts school to the end of the next year when he completes third grade after precociously skipping second. Anaya separates the narrative voice from the events narrated by endowing the narrator--not necessarily the boy in the thick of the plot--with a sensitivity and insight usually reserved for adult maturity. The distancing permits the maturity of the child's vision to work; otherwise the boy's sagacity would strain the reader's disbelief beyond suspension, a concern that has nonetheless bothered some readers.





The moment Antonio's parents welcome Ultima, the curandera they respectfully call "la Grande," into their household in bucolic Guadalupe marks the boy's first clear awareness of time and signals the start of his rite of passage from a state of timeless innocence to one of adolescent understanding of the weight of time. On the first page Antonio observes that "the magical time of childhood stood," while in the final chapter he muses, "sometimes when I look back on that summer I think that it was the last summer I was truly a child." Even the vast difference in ages between the boy and the elderly Ultima becomes an emblem of the temporal changes mirrored in the plot as he learns that "things wouldn't always be the same."





In the course of the novel Antonio enters public school where, despite the initial fear of leaving mother and hearth, he quickly excels academically and also successfully engages a social network outside his family. He is catechized into the Catholic church and struggles with his growing dismay at the artifice connected with its hierarchy and bureaucracy. Much of his struggle relates to his discovery of a genuine spirituality and legitimate morality outside the church--in nature, for example, and in the legends told by "Jason's Indian." More traumatically, he encounters four deaths, including two violent killings and the drowning of his special friend, Florence, a young "heretic." Anaya balances the traumas of the deaths with Antonio's participation in the life-affirming curanderismo practiced by Ultima. She provides him with the one stable certain part of his life, satisfying both his intellectual curiosity and emotional needs and, as a result, inspiring his spiritual growth as well.





Source: Cordelia Candelaria, "Rudolfo A(lfonso) Anaya: Criticism," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 82: Chicano Writers, First Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, Gale Research, 1989, pp. 1-4. Reprinted in Novels for Students, Vol. 12.





Source Database: Literature Resource Center

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