"Helena Maria Viramontes loves the city, and her new novel, Their Dogs Came With Them, is a multilayered homage to the lives of “the forgotten poor ... the despised and reviled” (per Sandra Cisneros on the jacket cover) in East L.A./Boyle Heights of the 1960s. The novel weaves a fiction around this very specific neighborhood (her own hometown), and gives dramatic life to its streets and people. Capturing a complicated time in L.A history, when freeways were being built in droves and entire neighborhoods were being razed to accommodate them, Viramontes explores the communities and individuals that were left behind by the city’s progress." "Freeways are a structural theme for the novel, with these four characters the supports (as in the East-L.A. interchange), according to Viramontes in a La Bloga interview: “I realized that the structure of the novel began to resemble the freeway intersections ... And like the freeways upheld by pillars, I realized I had four pillars in four characters of which most other characters orbited around.” The freeways also serve as a metaphor for the women’s relationship to isolation. In the 1960s, the freeways’ arrival disconnected East L.A. from the rest of the city. This is also the decade that brought the Watts Riots, the Vietnam War, the Chicano Moratorium, when insular and segregational politics were vehemently contested by community. In addition to this backdrop, the novel further isolates its characters with a fictional Quarantine Authority: roadblocks and police officers that impose a strict curfew to keep inhabitants safe from rabies, and helicopters that shoot down anything/anyone moving around on the streets after hours. The characters are secluded by circumstance, and each of the four tries in a different way to create her own mini-community to compensate."
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:11:57 +0000
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