Deviance in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima
The sociology of deviance is useful in understanding Antonio Marez in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultima within the larger context of mid-century America as well as his place within the subculture of rural New Mexico. For our purposes, a deviant can be understood as anyone who violates the norms, standards, and/or laws as determined by the dominant culture, which I will be referring to as the dominant class.
According to conflict theory, the dominant class uses their influence, power, and prestige to not only gain resources and to reinforce their power, but to determine which behaviors and which groups of people are deviant and to ultimately enforce the norms, standards, and values of their class. The dominant class achieves these ends by utilizing the power and influence of their institutions such as the church, the government, and public schools in order to manipulate, control, and exploit the subordinate class by means of the denial of access to public institutions, public humiliation, intimidation, ostracization, imprisonment, death, and so on.
In the context of post-World War II, pre-Civil Rights Act America, in the days before a Catholic had ever been president, when the ground at Levittown was being broken open, when Marilyn Monroe was catching her big break, Antonio’s identity as a Catholic, Chicano-American is considered deviant by dominant white American culture. Though Antonio’s culture is somewhat insulated by virtue of its geographical location, dominant white America certainly touches Antonio’s life in significant and pervasive ways.
For example, Antonio must conform to the language norms and standards of White America in order to participate in the American schooling system. At the time, the school Antonio attends would have employed the language pedagogy of eradicationism which forces non-English speakers as well as nonstandard English speakers to completely deny their linguistic identity because other languages and non-Standard English were considered inferior, unworthy of the academy, and deviant. As Antonio remembers his experience as he enters grammar school, he recalls, “I yearned for my mother, and at the same time I understood that she had sent me to this place where I was an outcast. I had tried hard to learn and they had laughed at me” (62). Aware of his status as a deviant, Antonio must conform to the standards of dominant white culture, and so his name is Anglicized to Tony by his brothers and his friends and he learns to speak and write in English. Likewise, Antonio must speak and comprehend English in order to participate in various rituals of the Catholic Church.
The same dominant class/dominated class structure that can be observed on the macro-level also exists at the local level within Antonio’s deviant subculture of rural New Mexico. Within this community, members of the Catholic Church are the dominant class and they have the power, prestige, and influence to enforce its norms and standards as they see fit. The Catholic Church has the power to determine which behaviors are deviant and, more importantly, which groups of people are deviant and to apply both formal and informal sanctions to promote conformity. In Antonio’s community, we see deviants who are called whores, who are called witches, who are made to stand with their arms outstretched in the middle of the church aisle in penance, who are shot down by the river, who are damned to hell because they do not conform to the norms and standards of the dominant class. This young, Chicano-American boy must navigate how best to conform to both the norms and standards of dominant American culture and his local culture as well as maintain his identity within his own home because he is highly aware of the cost of non-conformity. Perhaps the greatest cost of this great struggle is Antonio’s loss of innocence in this great struggle to bridge multiple competing identities and ideologies. Works Cited Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me Ultima. New York: TQS Publications, 1972. 1-290. Print.