Catholicism as Environmental Protest in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

Abstract

The geographical region of the US Southwest now known as New Mexico has been colonized by successive waves of invaders. First, the Spanish arrived carrying with them a militant Catholicism that sought to uproot and replace Native spiritualities. Next, the newly independent Mexican government also used Catholicism as a tool of colonization to counter the threat of Native uprisings and Anglo-American encroachment. Finally, following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, New Mexico was overrun by Anglo settlers as US policies uprooted Spanish and Mexican landowners from their inherited land grants. While Catholicism remained the dominant religion among the mestiza/o population, Native spiritualities were also able to subvert and influence the direction that this now-distinctive New Mexican Catholicism would take. While scholars have read the decolonial and environmental justice themes at work in these Native spiritualities in both Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), I argue that the Catholic faith of the characters in these novels also plays an important role despite the religion’s use as a tool of colonization in the past. Different from the hybridization process used by the Roman Catholic church to erase/subsume indigenous spiritualities, the iterations of Catholicism in these novels seek a more subtle subversion of the faith’s colonial history. By recognizing the function of guilt within the Catholic church to control behavior, these novels throw this guilt back on the colonizer by redefining the Catholic terminology of sin as harm against people of color and the earth.