Bless Me, Ultima | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Bless Me, Ultima Critical Overview

When Bless Me, Ultima was first published in 1972, it barely received a blip on the radar screen of literary criticism, despite the fact that it won the Premio Quinto Sol for its literary merit. This critical oversight was most likely due to the fact that the book was published by a small publishing house and was written in a genre that had yet to be accepted by mainstream critics—that of the Chicano coming-of-age novel.

However, by the late 1970s, the novel had been noticed by a few critics. In 1976, Francisco Lomeli and Donaldo Urioste called Bless Me, Ultima "an unforgettable novel" and stated that it was "already becoming a classic for its uniqueness in story, narrative technique and structure." Daniel Testa, in the Latin American Literary Review, criticized the novel somewhat by calling it stereotypical:

Bless Me, Ultima can be taken first of all as a...
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