Anaya skillfully sets up a dialogue between Antonio and Ultima, the elderly healer who comes to live her remaining years with Antonio's family. Anaya's story covers a two-year period at the close of World War II and centers on the experiences of a young, but serious boy who is attempting to make sense of the world around him and, at the same time, grappling with the opposing expectations of his parents. and now Miguel, which was published in the early 1950s, focusing on the life of a New Mexican teenage sheepherder. Bless Me, Ultima brings to literary life a search for personal identity in the context of the social changes experienced by Chicano/as in New Mexico during the 1940s, and is in some ways similar to Joseph Krumgold's.
Bless Me, Ultima is the first in a trilogy of novels that includes Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga.
