Billie Jean Johnston
November 16, 2000

Journey Through Shades of Past, Present, and Future

Traveling through humanity is a never ending story.  Traveling through
ethnicity is an ever changing journey.  Is race or culture a matter of color? Is it a way of life;  or a decision an individual makes?  Is it an idea one has of themselves?  In the novels, Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya 1972) and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Alexie 1993), two different minority characters, Tony and Victor, give voice to their journey of growing up and finding their place in the world in regards to their heritage. The characters, in Anaya’s and Alexie’s novels, relate to a dominant culture, pursue balance in their life by searching traditions of the past, and attempt to blend their heritage into the present allowing them passage to the future.  Their journeys differ in respect to heritage and family situation.  Their journeys parallel considering that they are both male, belong to a minority, seek individual identity, and search for their place on the planet.  Each seek peace within and without.  Although, their journeys are different, they are the same.

The characters in the two novels, belong to two different cultures.  In Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, the young, Mexican-American Anthony Juan Marez y Luna (Tony) struggles between two ways of being a Spanish-Mexican-American while also dealing with the dominant white culture.   Tony’s mother and father, although both born in New Mexico, come from two different cultures.  His father, a Marez, comes from a long line of Spanish "conquistadores, men as restless as the seas they sailed and as free as the land they conquered" (Anaya 6).  Tony’s mother, a Luna, comes from a line of farmers who have been given land grants and settle a colony during the short-lived Mexican period Her vision for Tony requires him to become a priest and be a man for the people and of the earth.  Given these two choices, Tony feels he must choose between them. Anaya introduces Tony to a different culture, as he enters school; there he meets the white dominant culture head on.  Tony, now blends a third culture into his life.  Tony’s heritage offers him two ways of being a Spanish-Mexican-American; in Alexie’s novel, Victor strives to be an Indian, period.

Victor’s culture, being different from Tony’s, breeds different cultural
problems.   Victor, a Native American Indian, in Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, searches daily for ways to survive being Indian.  Victor lives in a white world that continually divests him of the privilege of his heritage daily.  The ordinary daily erosion damages Victor--and the Native American--the most.  Alexie writes, ". . . it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff.  Mass murder, loss of language and land rights.  It’s the small things that hurt the most.  The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins" (Alexie 49).  Victor needs to learn to survive the daily-ness, the ordinary and wants someone to show him how and says:  ". . . I ha[ve] to find out what it mean[s] to be Indian, and there ain’t no self-help manuals for that . . . " (Alexie 211).   As Victor wanders through the Native American cultural maze, somewhat aimlessly and alone, Tony is surrounded with support.

Besides the difference in their heritage, another divergence between Tony
and Victor belongs in the area of family support.  Tony’s immediate family and extended family offer Tony clear paths and build a web of support and tradition around him. Tony’s father, mother, and the respected family friend, Ultima nurture, teach, and guide him in his young life.  From Tony’s father and Ultima, he learns "to love the magical beauty of the wide free earth" (Anaya 228).  He, also, learns from his father and Ultima "that the greater immortality is in the freedom of the man" (Anaya 228).   From his mother he learns, "that man is of the earth, that his clay feet are part of the ground that nourishes him, and that it is this inextricable mixture that gives man his measure of safety and security" (Anaya 228).  His mother, encouraging him to get a formal education, opens a whole new world for him.  With all the love and support of this large family, Tony finds guideposts to the future, while Victor feels lost.

Although Victor, as a young child, lives on the Reservation with his parents, they offer no real support and guidance, only alienation.  Victor’s parents need a beacon as much as Victor does.  In his parents’ alienation, they suffer and try to survive by masking  the pain with alcohol.  Victor’s father deserts him and his mother, leaving him with even less guidance.  When Victor speaks of his family, he says, "They’re all gone, my tribe is gone" (Alexie 17).  Indicating that the rest of the extended family feels just as lost as Victor does, his cousin sends him a postcard from the Pine Ridge Reservation and "says all the Indians there are gone and do I know where they went?" (Alexie 124). Victor has no real answer.  Victor believes he may be a part of the problem, thinking to himself, "Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community?" because "The
only real thing [I] [share] with anybody [i]s a bottle and broken dreams" (Alexie 74).  If no one shares the dreams and the memories, the tribal and community ties will be lost.

The stories must continue.  So, Victor decides to do his part by stopping and listening to a story of Thomas’ one day;  "Indians fight their way to the end, holding onto the last good thing, because our whole lives have to do with survival" (Alexie 32). Victor and his Native American people survive even without the strong support system that Tony has in his Spanish-Mexican-American family.

Tony and Victor do not share heritage or family/community support
systems;  yet their paths parallel in various other realms.  They both belong to groups of people considered minorities by the dominant white culture.  The
Spanish-Mexican-American culture is regarded as an "ambivalent" minority because of the history of their geography, race, and culture (White notes).  Some of the people remained on their homeland, but through an arbitrarily drawn line, they are now considered American citizens.  The Native American history writes itself differently.  The Native American people--chased, gathered, and corralled--end up on reservations.  Not all survive. When a minority culture meets the dominant culture change occurs.  When Tony and Victor meet the dominant culture, their journey changes;  and this they have in common.  They look to their roots before continuing their pilgrimage into the future.

One of Tony’s first major encounters with the dominant culture begins
with his education.  Getting lost on his first morning at school, Tony "look[s] into
the eyes of a strange red-haired boy," and this boy "[speaks] English, a foreign tongue" (Anaya 57). On this first day of school, he begins to unravel the "secrets in the letters" of the dominant culture and learns to write his name (Anaya 53).  When Miss Maestas introduces Tony to the class, he feels very different and recounts:  "the other boys and girls laughed and pointed at me.  I did not feel so good" (Anaya 58).  Tony feels further alienated when the children laugh and point at his lunch because it is different than theirs.  He leaves the room, finds others who are "different in language and custom," and in their "union f[inds] strength" (Anaya 59).  Tony feels the sociological need to belong and says, "we fe[el] we belon[g]. [. . . ] We struggl[e] against the feeling of loneliness that gnaw[s] at our souls and we overc[o]me it; [. . .]. (Anaya 59).

Tony’s first meeting with the dominant culture leaves him feeling separate and less than others. Tony and Victor share the feeling of being "less than" when meeting the dominant culture in school and elsewhere. When Victor attends a missionary school, the teacher sends a letter home to his parents requesting that they "either cut his braids or keep me home from class" (Alexie 173).   The parents respond by coming in and "dra[g] their braids across Betty Towle’s
desk"  (Alexie 173).  Trying to insult them, she reacts by calling them "Indian":  "She said it without capitalization.  She called me ‘indian, indian, indian.’  And I said, Yes, I am.  I am Indian. Indian, I am" (Alexie 173).  The incident happens on the reservation. When Victor does step off the reservation, he says, "as soon as I get off the reservation, among all the white people, every Indian gets xaggerated"
(Alexie 219).

To the Native American stepping off the reservation is comparable to
traveling to a foreign land.  In Smoke Signals--the movie based on Alexie’s book--one of the characters jokingly asks if Victor, and his friend, Thomas Builds-the-Fire have their passports before leaving the reservation because they’re "goin’ into a whole different country," and "that’s as foreign as it gets" (Smoke Signals).  Victor’s relationship with the dominant society is defensive.  He says "the most valuable lesson about living in the white world:  Always throw the first punch" (Alexie 176).  Anaya and Alexie portray Tony and Victor’s meeting of the white society as being confrontational and unkind.

Now that Tony and Victor encounter the white dominant society, they change.  They must create a new path for themselves:  a path which blends the old tradition with the new way. Tony is entrenched in the Spanish-Mexican tradition.  He continues to speak Spanish, becomes Catholic, and continues to bring the traditional foods for lunch at school.  He values the tradition of caring for the elderly and knows that his parents make the right decision by "providing a home for Ultima" because "It was the custom to provide for the old and the sick. There was always room in the safety and warmth of la familia for one more person, be that person stranger or friend"  (Anaya 4).  But, Tony constantly struggles with the question of uncertainty in following tradition when the
choice of vocation arises.  His mother insists that he follow the ways of her
people, the Lunas, and become a priest/scholar, or farmer.  His dad, although he does not insist, wants his sons to go west and follow the Marez tradition of moving and being free.  The young Tony looks back to these old ways and believes he must decide between these two forks in the road.  Tony will learn, as he matures, that he, also, has the option of creating a new path.  Victor knows he must create a new path, because the old path no longer exists.

Victor speaks of dancing, and storytelling as forms of tradition.  His
mother dances and "was a champion traditional dancer when she was younger" (Alexie 33). Victor remembers that at the age of eight or nine, "he was fancydancing in the same outfit his father wore as a child.  The feathers were genetic;  the fringe was passed down like the curve of his face," which indicates his deep down ties to tradition (Alexie 87).  When Victor’s father dies, he "fe[els] a sudden need for tradition" (Alexie 62).  He tells Thomas Builds-the-Fire, his story-telling friend, "Tell me a story," which continues the Native American way of oral tradition (Alexie 63).  Tradition is not all Victor needs to find his way to the future and voices this truth:   ". . . there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future" (Alexie 134).  All the Native American traditions that are being lost, must be replaced with new traditions.  Victor searches for replacement and must decide what he values.  Tony and Victor relate to the past, live the present, and
greet the future with uncertainty and hope.

In Bless Me Ultima, Tony constantly crosses a bridge.  This bridge connects the traditional and modern worlds:  and the worlds of minority and majority.  Tony consistently blends his heritage into the present.  Although Tony has two conflicting traditional lifestyles to choose from, he has Ultima as a role model for combining heritages. Ultima already blends the Catholic traditions and mestizo rituals of a curandera and "as a result of Ultima’s guidance, he may be able to find a middle path" (Mitchell 59).  Tony, himself, is already a blend or hybrid because "the mother and father fuse into each other’s metaphoric codes to form a hybrid product, Antonio, the new sign of mediated differences" (Bruce-Novoa 184).  Tony not only learns to read the "secrets in the letters," he learns to read the world through Ultima’s eyes:  the new way and the old way (Anaya 53).

Ultima opens Tony’s eyes to look beyond what is there and to see the link between all life.  He can be a scholar for his mother, be free like his father, and satisfy his destiny by creating his own path with "the pen and the paper--"
(Anaya 54).  Tony, with time and continuous nurturing, is successfully balancing his place in the world.  He is blending the old tradition with the new ways, and moving into the future. Tony makes rearrangements between his culture and the new dominant society;  Victor must defend his culture and find replacements for some of the traditional ways. Victor’s path grows rocky but it is passable--and possible.  One of the Native American mottoes is "Honor the Past . . . To shape the Future" (Cinimo).

Victor, and his people must unceasingly remember the past, keep the life-giving source of the tradition, and keep them alive.  The story telling is one such tradition that is vital to the Native American people.  Thomas Builds-the-Fire says of oral tradition, "Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world.  It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories. [. . .]  They are all I have.  It’s all I can do" (Alexie 72-3). The tradition of dancing can have a slant on it as far as adaptation.  Victor’s Aunt gives "lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio" and "danced topless" because "There are all kinds of dancing" (Alexie 78).  They take the Native American tradition of dancing talent and use it to survive.

But most commonly, Victor sees negative effects on his people when mixing with the dominant culture.  One area is the Native American man leaving his children:  "On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are
treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing.  It’s because white
men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how.  That’s how assimilation can work" (Alexie 34)  For the most part, Victor views the meeting of the white world and the Native American world as clashing.  The mixing of the old traditions with the new white world’s ways are conflicting.  Victor does not want to be one of the disappearing Indians and says, "Jesus, we all want to survive (Alexie 198).  Hope is seen when a couple looks at their mixed child:  ". . . she h[olds] the child born of white mother and red father and s[ays], "Both sides of this baby are beautiful" (Alexie 148). Victor’s instinct for survival gives hope, not only to himself, but to his people for the future.

As Tony and Victor journey their way through life as a minority, they
learn to relate to the dominant culture, whether it embraces them or assaults them.  Continually aware of their heritage, they walk with it proudly and at times painfully.  They cannot separate themselves from it, nor do they want to.  Tony and Victor know "The formation of an identity is inconceivable without sound knowledge of the past" (Tonn 62).  They realize they cannot know who they are, or where they are going without looking behind them, using their heritage as guideposts to the future.  As they walk into the future with this new blending of identities words evolve.  Words such as:  acculturation, assimilation, quadroon, cultural fusion, hybridity, "new American," and "Age of color" emerge to help understand, clarify, and classify humanity regarding the newly evolving
categories of race, culture, or ethnicity (White handout, Meacham 41).

As seen with Tony and Victor, cultures constantly evolve and words do not always adequately express the evolution of the "new forms [of culture that] are being generated" (Yancey 391).  In this constant journey of change, how do Tony and Victor decide their heritage?  Is Tony Spanish-Mexican-American because he decides he is?  Is Victor Native American because of his skin color or way of life?  Kenneth Lincoln says: "Beyond bloodline, tribe, government role, and national movements, being Indian is an idea of oneself, . . . a self-realizing act of the imagination that moves through a taproot into the ancestral past deep in the land," (127).  "Indian" could be substituted with Spanish, Mexican, Asian, or any of the other many cultures or heritages that exist.  For all the Tony’s and Victor’s, "being [any heritage] is an idea of oneself."  
 



Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.  New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Anaya Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima.  New York:  Time Warner Books, Inc., 1972.

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. "Learning to Read (and/in) Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Ultima" Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays. Ed. John R. Maitino, and David Peck. New Mexico:  University of New Mexico Press 1996. 179-191.

Cinimo, Elaine, Richard Roods, and Ann M. Sayers.  "The Sacred Use of Tobacco."

Lincoln, Kenneth.  "Native American Literatures: ‘old like hills, like
stars’ Three American Literatures:  Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teaches of American Literature.  Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982.  80-167.

Meacham, Jon. "Redefining Race in America."  Newsweek September 2000:  38-41.

Mitchell, Carol. "Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima:  Folk Culture in
Literature." Critique:  Studies in Modern Fiction. 17.1 1980, 55-64.

Smoke Signals.  Dir. Chris Eyre.  With Adam Beach and Evan Adams.
Miramax/Shadowcatcher.  Prod. Larry Estes and Scott Rosenfelt. 1997.

Tonn, Horst.  "Bless Me, Ultima:  A Fictional Response to Times of
Transition." Aztlan, 18.1 1987, 59-68.

White, Craig.  "American Minority Literature."  Handout.  University of
Houston-Clear Lake.  Houston. 24 August 2000.

- - - - - "American Minority Literature."  Notes.  27 September 2000.