RUDOLFO ANAYA

When people ask me where my roots are, I look down at my feet, and I see the roots of my soul grasping the earth. They are here... in the Southwest... I still live in New Mexico.

In many respects, I think 'Bless Me, Ultima' is a novel about the indigenous.

There is a time in the last few days of summer when the ripeness of autumn fills the air.

I have traveled to many places but have no desire to leave New Mexico.

To me, the fact that the Mexican came North in search of a better life is a tremendous epic that hasn't been written. It's an odyssey that we know nothing about. And they came with a dream for a better life.

I used to write at night. I was teaching school, and I was married, and had to do all the things that one does when one is working and has a family. But I used to write at night.

'Bless Me, Ultima' is quite autobiographical in the sense that I was writing a story about my childhood, my hometown where I grew up, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Old Highway 66 and the Pecos River. So a great deal of that environment, landscape, people, got thrown in the novel.

My father was what you would call a cowboy, a vaquero; he worked out in the ranches with cattle. And my mother came from farmers down in the valley.

Any land will flow with milk and honey if it is worked with honest hands!

The sun was good. The men of the llano were men of the sun. The men of the farms along the river were men of the moon. But we were all children of the white sun.

I made strength from everything that had happened to me, so that in the end even the final tragedy could not defeat me. And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart. --Antonio

Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people.

It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

The germ of creation lies in violence.

I've always used the technique of the cuento. I am an oral storyteller, but now I do it on the printed page. I think if we were very wise we would use that same tradition in video cassettes, in movies, and on radio.

A library is also a place where love begins.

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.

It is because good is always stronger than evil. Always remember that, Antonio. The smallest bit of good can stand against all the powers of evil in the world and it will emerge triumphant.

The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for only lasts a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.

Around me the moonlight glittered on the pebbles of the llano, and in the night sky a million stars sparkled. Across the river I could see the twinkling lights of the town. In a week I would be returning to school, and as always I would be running up the goat path and crossing the bridge to go to church. Sometime in the future I would have to build my own dream out of those things that were so much a part of my childhood.

Perhaps the best god would be like a woman, because only women really knew how to forgive

Sometimes a man has to cry. Even if he is a man.

There are many gods . . . gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards, but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones--. . . . The god of the church is a jealous god; he cannot live in peace with other gods.

I had been afraid of the awful presence of the river, which was the soul of the river, but through her [Ultima] I learned that my spirit shared in the spirit of all things.