Book Preview
Oct. 8 | 5:30–7 p.m.
University Library Croslin Room
Book Discussion: Part I, Uno - Once
​Oct. 15 | 5:30–7 p.m.
University Library Croslin Room
Book Discussion: Part II, Doce - Ventidós
Oct. 22 | 5:30–7 p.m.
University Library Croslin Room
Note: Guests may park in the R11 lot (band lot) south of the Music Building at no charge. Please see the parking attendant.
Visitor parking on TTU campus
Oct. 8
Dr. René Saldaña, Jr. is an associate professor of Language, Diversity, and Literacy Studies in the College of Education. He currently serves as the Program Coordinator for the LDLS program. Dr. Saldaña is the author of several books for children and young adults: The Jumping Tree, The Whole Sky Full of Stars, the bilingual Mickey Rangel mystery series, and the bilingual picture book Dale, Dale, Dale: Una fiesta de números / Hit It, Hit It, Hit It: A Fiesta of Numbers. His research looks at the use of culturally relevant literature in the largely underrepresented classrooms as a way to improve children's reading abilities.
Dr. Cordelia Barrera is an associate professor of Latinx and Borderlands Literatures in the Department of English. Barrera specializes in Latina/o literatures and the American Southwest as well as U.S border theory, third space feminist theory, popular culture, and film. She writes movie reviews for the borderlands journal LareDOS, and has published articles and reviews in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video and the Journal of Popular Culture.
Oct. 15
Nigel Torres is a doctoral student in the Counselor Education Department at Texas Tech University. Mr. Torres is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor (LCDC) in the state of Texas and co-owner and founder of The Practice: Healing Body, Mind, and Soul and has provided mental health services for twenty years. His article, titled "Cultural Awareness: Understanding Curanderismo," is published in American Counseling Association’s VISTAS Online. Mr. Torres plans on writing his doctoral dissertation on his apprenticeship/training (known as desarrollo) in Curanderismo.
Oct. 22
Dr. Idoia Elola is a Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures where she teaches Spanish, Applied Linguistics and Second Language Studies. She is also the academic director of the Spanish program for the Texas Tech University campus in Seville, Spain. Recently, she was recognized as a Texas Tech Integrated Scholar and was an Office of International Affairs Global Vision Award winner for the Donald R. Haragan Study Abroad Award in 2017.
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. (2010). "Jason's Indian": Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 45(2). (available through Interlibrary Loan).
Dick, Bruce, and Silvio Sirias, eds. Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Lamadrid, Enrique R. (1985). Myth as the Cognitive Process of Popular Culture in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima: The Dialects of Knowledge. Hispania. 68(3): 496-501.
Naveira, Isabel Gil. (2017). The Use of Liminality in the Destruction of Women's Roles: Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima. Odisea: Revista de estudios ingleses.
Rodriguez, María Elena. (1993). Mary Dilley, Curandera: A Modern South Texas Folk Healer. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
Pabón, Melissa. (2007). The Representation of Curanderismo in Selected Mexican American Works. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education.
Torres, Nigel and Janet Froeschle Hicks. (2016). Cultural Awareness: Understanding Curanderismo. VISTAS Online.
Trotter, Robert T. (2001). Curanderismo: A Picture of Mexican-American Folk Healing. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 7(2): 129-131.
Valentín, B. (2010). In Our Own Voices: Latino/a Renditions of Theology (e-book). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Questions for Discussion taken from the NEA Big Read Selection edition (1999):
This Reading Group is sponsored in part by the Humanities Center at Texas Tech. The 2018–2019 theme is "Play."
Rudolfo Anaya was born October 30, 1937 and for the first 14 years of his life lived in Santa Rosa, NM, barely over 200 miles northwest of Lubbock, TX. His father was from a family of vaqueros who lived and worked as cowboys and sheepherders on the Llano Estacado, as depicted in Bless Me, Ultima. Summarily his mother’s family, as depicted in the book, were farmers from Porto De Luna, NM. In 1952 he moved along with his family to Albuquerque where he attended public schools. After graduating from Albuquerque High School in 1958, Anaya attended the University of New Mexico and graduated with a BA degree in English and American Literature in 1963.
That same year he began writing Bless Me, Ultima while teaching English in Albuquerque public schools. It took him until 1972 to find a publisher for the book as no main-line publisher wanted to publish a book written in both English and Spanish with its coming of age story of a young Chicano boy from a small village in New Mexico. Much of the content in the book portrays the role of the supernatural and religion in the lives of New Mexicans. When asked to expand on this, Anaya stated, “The supernatural and ordinary, everyday worlds live side by side. There are many rituals, ceremonies, and religious practices still practiced in New Mexico that touch on the supernatural."
The sales of Bless Me, Ultima grew slowly but when a major publisher decided to publish it, sales of Bless Me, Ultima grew rapidly. Bless Me, Ultima remains in print and is regularly taught in middle-school, high school, and college classes. Due to the book's popularity, Anaya joined the English faculty at the University of New Mexico, a position he held until his retirement in 1992. Anaya still lives in Albuquerque and writes every day. Besides novels, he has written several collections of short stories, several children’s books, some poetry and several plays.