Bless Me, Ultima (probably deleted later)

I just don't get it. Here is a landmark of world literature, written by a Chicano American, an American revelation of fiction on the level of Moby Dick, Huck Finn, My Antonia, and Invisible Man. A work that's equal parts Cather, Marquez, IB Singer, Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare. In 1972 it sold 300,000 copies purely by word of mouth, and then it disappeared. But unlike so many American one-hit wonders, Rudolfo Anaya plugged on to the very end - 35 books. Its author died in the last year, and as far as commemorations go, it was as though he never existed.

Bless Me, Ultima, is the perfect book for our time. A book as great as Melville ignored by the critical establishment because its writer was Chicano, and a book still ignored by the intersectional vanguard because.... why exactly?

If you want to read and promote a book that convinces the world that the lived experience of minority demographics can summon aesthetic glories which no other can summon, there it lies - the ultimate evidence that more equal representation benefits art, and yet when I go on goodreads, literally one person I know has read it, and one person has marked it as 'to read.'

But that's the thing.... The fact that Bless Me, Ultima still goes unnoticed in spite of its author's death, in spite of its extreme usefulness in proving right every claim about the benefit of listening to unheard voices, and however true that sentiment obviously is, what that makes this book is exhibit A that most people who talk about more equal representation in art don't care about art, they care about making art into an arm of ideological propaganda, and might let art and artists burn to the ground rather than let art exist as something more complex than the messages they want it to carry. Artists, as opposed to businessmen or scientists, have few real bases of power, and it's not like most artists have ever studied politics, so rather than revolutionize areas of human endeavor like technology or industry that demonstrably change people's lives, the world of woke goes after arts where most practitioners never had much power or security to begin with, and go through their days feeling so humiliated that convincing them of the necessity of a revolution is very easy.

Shame on both the literary establishment, so overwhelmingly white and male, for ignoring this book, and shame on the woke vanguard for ignoring its own best argument. This is the kind of book that whatever you're reading, you have to put everything down to read, it's proof that the Great American Novel may have been written by a person of color, and has been staring at us from our grandparents' shelves for fifty years; yet nobody knows about it, nobody shows evidence of wanting to find out about it, and nobody's shown any desire to search it out. You owe reading this book to yourselves, your students, your friends and family, your world.

In any event, I really like this book....