Eight Week Quiz B. Eight Week Quiz C. Eight Week Quiz D. Eight Week Quiz E. Eight Week Quiz F. Eight Week Quiz G. Mid-Book Test - Easy. Final Test - Easy. Mid-Book Test - Medium. Final Test - Medium. Mid-Book Test - Hard. Final Test - Hard. This set of Lesson Plans consists of approximately pages of tests, essay questions, lessons, and other teaching materials.
Print Word PDF. View a FREE sample. More summaries and resources for teaching or studying Bless Me, Ultima. Cico spears the golden carp and the waters run red. A priest desecrates the church altar. Florence tells him that the old gods are dying and points to the hills, where Tenorio has killed the night-spirit of Ultima, now dying in agony. Overwhelmed by all the destruction and violence, Antonio asks why God has forsaken him — and he awakens, sobbing. Ultima comforts him and suggests that he has seen too much death; growing, she says, involves change, and life is filled with sadness when a boy becomes a man.
It is time for him to go to his uncles in El Puerto, where he will learn about growth, about "growing life. Before Antonio leaves, Maria asks Ultima to bless them both. Antonio kisses Ultima and, driving away with his father, knows that he will never again see his sisters, his mother, nor Ultima in the same beauty of that sunny morning. On the journey, Gabriel tells his son that he himself became a man when he was about seven years old, while he was learning the art of being a good sheepherder.
Now it is time that Antonio learn to make a man of himself. All the things that are antithetical, Antonio realizes, must be coalesced into a new reality: the plains and the river valley, the moon and the sea, and even God and the golden carp — all must merge and be changed, for religion itself must change when it cannot answer the questioning needs of the people.
As for evil, Gabriel tells his son that "evil" is only that which people don't understand. True understanding, he says, that which Antonio seeks, takes a lifetime; it is not a simple matter of participating in a single holy communion.
Understanding means having sympathy for people, and Ultima's sympathy is so complete that she can touch and heal the souls of others. That is her magic. That summer, working alongside his uncles, silently learning to respect and care for the earth, taking note of how they all work in communion with the cycles of the moon, Antonio gathers strength. He sleeps peacefully. Late in the summer, while working at irrigating a cornfield, Antonio learns that his parents will be coming soon to take him back to their village.
Pedro agrees, stressing again how proud the Lunas are of him. Their talk is cut short when Juan arrives and talks privately with Pedro. Overhearing them, Antonio realizes that another Trementina sister has died and that Tenorio has once again vowed to kill Ultima. Juan is reluctant to become involved; their father will be angry. Pedro, however, reminds him that Ultima healed their brother Lucas; they are indebted to her.
He is also acutely sensitive to his ambiguous place in the world, as he is trapped between two competing cultural visions.
His father is a vaquero who wants Antonio to ride the llano and appreciate the open prairie; his mother is a daughter of farmers who wants Antonio to become a priest. Antonio is deeply troubled about his own uncertain destiny, but Ultima, a folk healer, guides him in his efforts to understand the world. He becomes unsure for the first time about the validity of the Catholic faith. His intense desire to know the truth, one of the major components of his character, leads him into a spiral of questioning and uncertainty regarding sin, innocence, death, the afterlife, forgiveness, and the nature of God.
For the rest of the novel, Antonio develops from childhood to maturity, as Ultima teaches him to make his own moral choices, to live in harmony with nature, to draw from all the traditions available to him, and to refrain from judging others when their beliefs differ from his own.
Bless Me, Ultima explores the difficulty of reconciling conflicting cultural traditions. In the end, Anaya suggests that a person can draw from several cultural traditions to forge a more complex and adaptable identity. Antonio is so eager to find a single, definitive answer to the questions that haunt him because he has been influenced by many conflicting cultures.
The first major conflict involves his parents. His Luna mother wishes for him to become a priest, while his vaquero father wishes for him to ride the llano. Each parent has deeply rooted cultural convictions. Next is the conflict within his town between its Spanish and indigenous cultures.
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