Communion And Union:Rudolfo Anaya’s Quest For Chicano/a Cultural Nationalism In Bless Me, Ultima

The question of the Indian heritage in Chicano/as’cultural origins emerged again during the Chicano Movement. Yet unlike the previous stance of indifference and denial taken by some Mexican Americans, an increasing number of Chicano/as began to embrace their Indianness proudly and publicly. Chicano artists during the Movement, represented by Rudolfo Anaya, also demonstrated much affinity for their Indian heritage. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima demonstrates patently his positive stance on this issue.This paper takes Anaya’s "New World Man" as a point of departure and proceeds to analyze the Chicano cultural nationalism and its decolonization function in the novel. The holism Anaya advocates actively in the fiction, the invocation and adaption of the Aztec mythology, as well as abundant imagery of Jungian mother and rebirth archetypes, all bear out the novelist’s purpose in promoting Chicano cultural nationalism. In the meanwhile, Anaya’s narratives of Chicano community and cultural nationalism effect a process of decolonization, as Chicanos, like other ethnic minorities in the USA, confront internal colonialism, culturally, economically, and politically. Anaya’s quest for Chicano cultural nationalism epitomizes the general pursuit of Chicano artists during the Chicano Movement.Aided by the postcolonial theory and John Hutchinson’s theory on cultural nationalism, this thesis focuses on how holism in Bless lays the foundation for Chicano cultural nationalism at the outset. The Aztec mythology, ghost, and Jungian archetypes constitute the leitmotif of the following chapter, which strives to elucidate how Anaya’s invocation of the Aztec mythology exhibits his communal imagination of enriching and forming a new community sensibility and ethnicity. It also demonstrates how the two major Jungian archetypes in Bless Me, Ultima manifest the writer’s effort to identity with the Indian culture. The last part brings to the fore the internal colonialism Chicanos confront in the USA. By subjecting under close scrutiny the factual evidences of cultural assimilation in the novel, it analyzes how Chicano cultural nationalism Anaya advocates in Bess serves to combat the neo-colonial domination in the USA. Furthermore, Anaya’s effort at decolonization accords with the general pursuit of Chicano Movement in dismantling the neo-colonialist powers in the USA.