Anaya's writing of "Bless Me, Ultima" coincided with one of the principal upheavals of the move toward liberation, the Civil Rights Movement including the Chicano farm labor movement led by Cesar Chavez. Tonn points out that events surrounding the struggle for civil rights, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and later of Martin Luther King Jr., urban disturbances such as Watts and Detroit posed deep-seated "challenges to the dominant self-image of United States Society…" "…leading to fundamental shifts in societal values and mores."