Abstract
Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) captures the intimacy between place and identity for Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles’ Eastside barrio and combats the relentless destruction of their spaces and by extension their community. The novel describes a 1960s East L.A. under siege by earthmovers, freeway construction, the removal of open spaces, and government quarantine. In the face of physical erasure, Viramontes offers her novel as a container for place memories, delineating the irreplaceable yet replaced streets, stores, houses, and neighbors of East Los Angeles as a literary counterspace. Ironically, Viramontes must use the very medium of the barrio’s domination: paper. Papers prove legality and citizenship, map the streets, determine freeway paths, disrupt traffic flows, track neighbors in and out, and variously alienate Eastside residents. Yet by writing as a barrio resident, utilizing the aesthetic and cultural practices of the Eastside, describing the journeys of characters in a neighborhood about to be forever changed by the unspooling of six freeways, Viramontes builds a paper version of a barrio that is rapidly disappearing under the concrete. Through her use of multiple interlinking perspectives, non-linear narration, and the consistent metaphorical yoking of characters to places and to memory, Their Dogs Came with Them preserves the barrio from further destruction
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Notes
- 1.
In Spanish, barrio simply refers to a neighborhood, especially a distinct section of a city. In English the term refers explicitly to an insulated Latinx neighborhood (not necessarily part of a city). In East Los Angeles (among other U.S. barrios), residents often adopt the term colonia to refer to their neighborhood. According to the Diccionario Real de la Academia Española, in Spanish this term primarily means “colony,” but in Mexican Spanish it refers to distinct sections of a city (the way barrio is used elsewhere in Latin America). The word keeps the connotation of a colony however—evoking a group of people somewhat stranded in a foreign land—adding linguistic richness in its new context.
- 2.
Alicia Muñoz and Sarah D. Wald both note that Viramontes connects disappearing houses or streets to disappearing neighbors. Muñoz observes that “these metaphorical statements” “humanize[s] the landscape and permit[s] apprehension of the space” (p. 27). Muñoz also explores the relation between memory and erasure, but she does not connect memory to writing, or the role of reader as rememberer.
- 3.
These are only a few of Viramontes’ literary devices. Alicia Muñoz delineates the novel’s use of metaphor to convey the effects of displacement and dislocation; Hsuan Hsu focuses on how Viramontes utilizes metonymy to capture the contiguity of the spatial transformation impacting the Eastside.
- 4.
Sarah Wald argues that the novel critiques the injustice of differential access to transportation through consistent reference to the characters’ frustrations moving around the barrio. Yet the descriptions of waiting at bus stops, transferring, walking, and variously attempting to navigate streets without a car also provide the reader with the atmosphere of claustrophobia and entrapment that plague the characters.
- 5.
Wald aptly connects the social, and more importantly spatial, displacement of the characters by urban planning schemata to the street violence that closes the novel (p. 77).
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Rodriguez, C.M. (2022). “Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Place Memory and Literary Counterspace in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them. In: Banerjee, R., Cadle, N. (eds) Rethinking Place through Literary Form. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_5
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