Access provided by Macalester College (12 Jun 2013 11:54 GMT)

Articulating a Geography of Pain:Metaphor, Memory, and Movementin Helena Marıa Viramontes’sTheir Dogs Came with ThemAlicia MunozMacalester College

Los Angeles is a metropolis physically interrupted by freeways and demographically frag-mented into isolated pockets of race and class. The geographer Edward W. Soja describescontemporary LA as being “difficult to grasp persuasively in a temporal narrative for itgenerates too many conflicting images, confounding historization, always seeming to stretchlaterally instead of unfolding sequentially” (Postmodern 222). Helena Marıa Viramontesexplores the sprawled and concurrent identities of LA using a nonlinear narrative focusedon the disenfranchised residents of East Los Angeles, communicating this “difficult to grasp”

urban space through the novel’s fractured narrative style and content. This article analyzeshow Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) articulates East Los Angelesthrough the use of imagery, memory, and movement. The first section deals with the figurativelanguage—metaphor—that binds the characters to their environment and vice versa.The second section analyzes the theme of memory and its impermanence as it relates to thefractured nature of this city and its disruptive freeways. Finally, this article examines the“tactile apprehension,” a la Michel de Certeau’s theorizing of walking in the city, found inthe different modes and velocities of transportation as concurrent but divergent modes ofarticulation (Practice 97). I argue that the novel presents multiple experiences of the city, whichreveal not only the way the geography impacts the community it contains but also waysthe Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming inde-pendent spatial meaning.

Set in East Los Angeles during the 1960s, Their Dogs Came with Them tells the story offour female protagonists who struggle through the isolation and turbulence plaguing theircommunity. A high school student living with her grandparents, Ermilia Zumaya undergoes apolitical awakening. Ana works in an office and struggles to take care of her mentally unstablebrother Ben. Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, contemplates the role of faith in herviolent surroundings. Finally, Antonia Gamboa, a young female gang member known as“Turtle,” lives on the street while passing as a male. A major source of disruption is the con-struction of freeways, which has led to entire neighborhoods being razed and bulldozed intooblivion. Furthermore, a Quarantine Authority, set up to protect the residents from rabid dogs,polices and regulates the movement of the community.1 The action of the novel moves fluidlybetween the past and the present with a few blank lines between paragraphs marking a leap

......................................................................................................� MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2013. Published by Oxford

University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt004MELUS � Volume 38 � Number 2 � (Summer 2013)2 4

forward or backward in years. Characters, in turn, exist independent from one another, occa-sionally crossing paths; the central motif that links the characters is the fractured nature of theirworld.

The interrupted narrative structure of the novel and the divided urban space parallel eachother, revealing the interconnectedness of community and geography. Their Dogs Came withThem is, among other things, a narrative about the impact of the freeways on the community,their construction being a second conquest.2 However, these highways remain largely in thebackground, while tied metaphorically to the narrative structure. In an interview with DanielOlivas, Viramontes explained the novel’s development: “The list of characters kept increasingand with this increase, the stories multiplied like freeway interchanges. Having this Eurekamoment, I realized that the structure of the novel began to resemble the freeway intersections”(“Interview”). The exponential increase of intersecting routes in a freeway interchange is il-lustrative of a city that cannot be easily defined or understood. Soja characterizes the myriadfacets of the city: “Seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions arethe epitomizing features of contemporary Los Angeles” (Postmodern 193). With these contra-dictions come interpretive possibilities. Viramontes’s storyline, like the spatial organization ofLos Angeles, consists of multiple foci. However, it is not just the narrative structure that reflectsthe plurality of LA. Numerous intersecting and concurrent articulations of the city are central toapprehending this space and are manifest in the novel by layered expression encompassingmetaphor, memory, and movement. This multidimensional spatial understanding is not simplya theoretical issue but gives us insight into the people and community, facilitating compre-hension of the history and experience of urban Chicana/os.

To contextualize the physical space of Los Angeles as well as Viramontes’s novel, we mustfirst look at the rise of the freeways in the mid-twentieth century. Before the arrival of thesehighways, the streetcar system of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries decentral-ized the city of Los Angeles, offering greater mobility to its residents and allowing them tocombine urban living with small town charm (Brodsly 80). The ease of transportation appealedto recent Mexican immigrants and provided the working class with access to employmentopportunities beyond their local neighborhoods, meaning that work, leisure, and home couldbe spread out across the widening expanse of Los Angeles. Streetcars also created a sharedspace between people from various backgrounds who ultimately depended on them to getaround the city (Avila, Popular 189). However, the streetcar could not keep pace with theremarkable sprawl of Los Angeles and would lose out to the rise of the flexible, individualisticautomobile.

The mass adoption of the automobile by Angelenos led to the eventual demise of thestreetcar and the construction of the freeways. According to Martin Wachs, “By 1920 thecitizens of Los Angeles had one automobile per nine people, by far the highest rate ofautomobile ownership in any major American city, and growth was accelerating” (112).The increased number of cars on city streets resulted in traffic congestion and, at times,accidents between public transit and private vehicles; city streets were not wide enough toaccommodate both, despite hasty attempts to remedy the situation. The decrease in transitridership as well as legal settlements resulting from accidents took a financial toll on the publictransit providers. While residents continued to use public transit for work trips, many beganrelying instead on the comfort and ease of their automobiles for social excursions. Further, thetransit system struggled to adhere to schedules while navigating increased automobile traffic,leading many residents to switch from riding to driving. In an effort to meet rising costs, transit

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

2 5

providers sought permission to raise fares but were opposed by customers who complainedthat bad service and unclean vehicles did not merit a higher fare (Wachs 115). By the late 1930s,streetcars “were described increasingly as symbols of urban blight, too primitive for thenew image of Los Angeles” (Klein 11). Slowly, this mode of transportation deteriorated,allowing for a greater focus on the integration of the automobile into the city.

The decentralization of the city and the prevalence of automobiles required a more efficientway of moving into and through the city than that previously offered by city streets, andautomobile-exclusive uninterrupted expressways were proposed as the solution. The under-taking of such a project, entailing construction through populated areas, demanded certaincosts and strategic urban planning. Two federal acts in particular, the Collier-Burns HighwayAct of 1947 and the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, facilitated theprocess by providing necessary funds. The latter, however, required the adoption of uniformfreeway design standards originally promulgated for more rural settings, and the funding thataccompanied those standards would trump potential long-term social costs. The new freewaysomitted the lower speed limits, smaller widths, tighter curves, accommodation for publictransit, and stoplights that would have allowed for a less disruptive integration with the existingcityscape (Wachs 131). The identity of the landowners and communities who would bear thebrunt of this con/destruction was left to be decided.

The city’s displacement of residents was justified through a discourse of progress thatemphasized the citizen’s willingness to make sacrifices for the city’s modernity. However, theselection of those required to make such sacrifices was neither random nor equitable. In fact,aspirations of social engineering were attached to the projects. Post-war public campaignsutilized militaristic language to promote a “blitzkrieg” to “raze” the “outworn, dilapidatedbuildings” and created metaphors of curing the city as a dentist would a diseased tooth, “bycleaning out the affected area and guarding it against further trouble” (qtd. in Klein 13-14).Multi-ethnic working-class communities were considered a “blight” by federal agencies andslated for removal to achieve a more utopian vision of Los Angeles. As Eric R. Avila explains,“the pattern of freeway construction in 1950s Los Angeles followed the recommendations ofthe ULI [Urban Land Institute] to coordinate highway construction with slum clearance”

(Popular 207). Furthermore, the practical concerns of compensating the displaced and over-coming popular opposition were seen as more manageable in low-income neighborhoods(Gottlieb 195). Highway designs were coupled with the demographic fact of the migration ofwhites to the suburbs, leaving minority, poor, and immigrant communities in the city centerswhere freeway construction would necessarily be most dense.

Freeways ultimately contributed to the modernization of Los Angeles and became a symbolof progress, but the Eastside bore much of the cost of this autopian vision. During the 1950sand 1960s the communities of East Los Angeles were burdened with the construction of sevenfreeways. The social and political ramifications of these structures prompted Rodolfo Acuna todescribe the community as “under siege” (106). The new corridors cut through the city,devouring twelve percent of the land, exacerbating the housing shortage, and disruptinglocal businesses (Villa 82). Demographic changes followed the physical disruption, displacingten percent of the community’s residents and creating racial pockets subdivided by the free-ways, themselves lined by insulating high walls (Acuna 12; Avila, Popular 213). The scars of thisso-called progress would remain with the community for generations.

Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them delves into the effects of the physicaldisruptions brought on by the freeways, allowing for an analysis of the relationships between

M u n o z

2 6

the spatial and the social. Using the work of Doreen Massey as a point of departure, Mary PatBrady underscores the importance of narrative in the production of space and highlightsChicana literature as a particularly fruitful narrative vein to be mined. Massey, amongothers,3 critiques those views of space and place that understand them as flat, devoid ofimplications, or fixed; she suggests instead that they are better conceptualized as multipleand shifting in their identities. “The spatial,” she writes, “is social relations ‘stretched out’ ”

(2). In adopting this relational view, Massey highlights the production of space as an ongoingact that depends on the interaction among the expressions of multiple conceptualizations.As such, place “depends crucially on the notion of articulation” (Massey 8). This concept ofarticulation makes an implicit connection to language, an association employed by Brady toexplore how literature can interrogate the construction of a space and its residents.

A history of geographical displacement among the Chicano community has brought abouta preoccupation with space.4 As Brady notes, “Chicanas write with a sense of urgency aboutthe power of space, about its (in)clement capacity to direct and contort opportunities, hopes,lives” (9). These authors contribute their own spatial insights, critiquing the productionof space, assessing its effects, and offering alternative conceptualizations. Of particular impor-tance is their attention to narrative detail. Brady contends, “Chicana literature suggests, indifferent terms than those that currently dominate space studies, the myriad ways in whichnarrative techniques, stylistic conventions, plot dilemmas, and resolutions, as well as poeticand dramatic crafting, interrogate how space and social relations (re)constitute each other”(12). The forms of articulation present in Viramontes’s novel can therefore unearth a newapprehension of Los Angeles.

The first narrative device Viramontes uses to create a new understanding of Los Angeles isfigurative language. Acknowledging the emotion-laden aspects of spatiality, Viramontes relieson such tools to make the surroundings felt. Her descriptions of the neighborhood houses in theopening chapter employ personification, simile, and metaphor to convey a sense of loss andpain: “Chavela’s blue house looked as empty as a toothless mouth. . . . Tongues of paint curledfrom the rotted wooden door and whispered to the child of horrific grief” (9). These meta-phorical statements connect the vacant residences to a mouth and tongue, ultimately linkingthem to a human body. By giving affective power to these images, Viramontes humanizesthe landscape and permits apprehension of the space. Sirens become the “the street’s mournfulplea” (172) and the earth’s wounds grow “into gorges of open sobbing pain” (98). Viramon-tes’s visceral presentation of LA gives her readers emotional insight into the community,allowing them an empathetic understanding of the corrosive social impact of the destructivechanges to the neighborhood’s geography.

Conversely, she further explores the causal relationship between people and space byutilizing the flip side of the same metaphorical coin, describing her characters through inani-mate imagery. The dysfunctions of the neighborhood are reflected on their bodies. In narratingTurtle’s recollections of her childhood, Viramontes writes: “Ama was part of the house,carelessly repaired with cardboard and duct tape like her cracked windows. Frank was partof the house, a loose, exposed wire ready to electrocute anyone who touched him” (161-62).Turtle herself is described in these terms: “He must have been there all along like a crack on thesidewalk” (83).5 A gang member’s stutter is illustrated as “words snagging on his set of teethlike tattered pieces of clothing on barbed wire” (231). Viramontes’s gloomy figurative languagereflects the turbulent atmosphere that surrounds the residents; the neighborhood is sufferingand so are they. She transmits her “historical geographic critique . . . through the compelling

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

2 7

affective register of tragedy” (Villa 117). Beyond being negative, her comparisons of people toharmful objects or surroundings in disrepair (cracked windows, tattered clothing, barbed wire,exposed wire ready to electrocute) reveal the potential danger of a community eating away atitself; a gang member’s very words are in conflict with his own teeth. With this language ofinternal discord, Viramontes illustrates a space where external conditions foster downwardspirals, and society harms itself because of the physical conditions around it.

The freeway, which Viramontes’s narrative structure echoes, also has its own specialmetaphorical language. According to David Brodsly, it is “a concrete testament to who weare, and it continues to structure the way we live. Both the dominant role the freeways play intransportation and their sheer permanence have made them the backbone of southernCalifornia” (2). The novel’s characterization of the freeways as “woven arteries” (12, 77)affirms their centrality to Los Angeles as well as society’s dependence on its concrete landscape.Through this metaphor, the city is transformed into a living organism; as arteries providelife-giving blood to the human body, the freeways provide for the city’s necessary commerce,growth, and daily movement. As Wachs states, “It is a lifeline by which millions are suppliedwith their daily sustenance” (106).

Presenting an alternative view, Viramontes’s Ermila wryly observes the double-edgednature of this indispensible infrastructure: “Four freeways crossing and interchanging, loopingand stacking in the Eastside, but if you didn’t own a car, you were fucked” (176). Viramonteschallenges the necessity of the freeways by recognizing the contradictions inherent in theirconstruction. She takes the well-used and positive metaphor of freeways as arteries and exposesthe negative side by casting the corridors as a damaged body whose arterial roads are ripped,amputated, and gruesome: “the incomplete onramp bridge being constructed above theboundary of the Chinese cemetery . . . resembled a mangled limb, as if a monster dinosaurhad bitten into it, and a mesh of electrical wires hung out of broken cement like arteriesdripping mounds of heaved-up rubble” (169). In this wrenching and violent description, thefreeway’s corporeality is described not in the language of growth and development, as might beexpected of a construction project, but in terms of rending and consumption.

The building of the freeway has taken its toll on the community, a cost Viramontes illus-trates while continuing the language of the body: “But now the freeways amputated the streetsinto stumped dead ends.” Her choice of a verb most commonly used to express the severingof a living limb again echoes her analogy of the city to a live but mutilated body. Moreover, asthe narrator explains, the lives of the absent neighbors now “itched like phantom limbsin Mama’s memory” (33). It is the street that is amputated, but it is she (Tranquilina’smother) who continues to feel the presence of those missing parts. In this way, Viramontesreinforces the connection between the physical structures of the city and the psyche of thepeople who live in it.

Another way in which Viramontes articulates the fractured city is through the strugglebetween memory and erasure, which constitutes the second narrative device. The firstchapter begins with a short vignette detailing a scene between Chavela, soon to be one ofthe “phantom limbs” in Mama’s memory, and a young Ermila. Surrounded by notespasted to the walls with instructions and facts, Chavela packs her belongings while thechild observes. The juxtaposition of her boxes and the reminder notes suggests that sheattempts to save both her possessions and her memory from erasure. The construction ofthe freeway will soon wipe out her home. It is not the first time she has had the earthpulled from under her, she declares: “displacement will always come down to two

M u n o z

2 8

things: earthquakes or earthmovers” (8). Chavela has seen the erasure produced by thisdisplacement: “The earthquake’s rubble . . . yielded only what was missing; shoes withoutshoelaces, flowered curtains without windows, a baby rattle without seeds in its hollowbelly, an arm without a body” (7). The mundane fragments uncovered by the earthquakeserve only to draw attention to what is no longer there, to what has been lost. Consequently,Chavela responds by working to fortify her memory against this erasure. Raul Homero Villadiscusses Viramontes’s use of memory in urban space, arguing that in her short story“Neighbors” (1985) her character’s will-to-memory reflects her “own authorial struggle todiscursively render the consequences of East Los Angeles’ social-geographic subordination intousable, transmittable community knowledge through the medium of her fiction” (126).Viramontes’s foregrounding of this episode in the opening chapter, with its emphasis onmemory, suggests that the community must learn from its past in order to survive.Memory creates friction with changes occurring in the city that threaten to erase not onlythe community’s streets but also its past knowledge of itself.

Even without the action of the earthmovers, those outside the limits of this particu-lar section of the city regard it as a void. When the storeowner Ray goes to the police togive a statement, his citizenship is questioned, leading him to the following defensive innerdialogue:

Ray had lived all of his life in Monterey Park, just a twenty-minute drive from where the incidentoccurred. . . . If the man didn’t believe him, just give him a map, Ray requested, for proof, andhe’d point to YOU ARE HERE, point to the blank spaces of erasure, the unrecorded topographywhere things happened, tears shed, injustices . . . that only residents who had lived there all theirlives would know. (259)

The passage offers a striking apparent contradiction: HERE specifies a location, but in this casethat location is defined by its nonexistence. Ray acknowledges the dominant perspective ofthose outside his community, illustrating it with the map, and argues for the superiority of hisown social cartography. The YOU, referring to both Ray and the police officer, affirms theirshared localization; however, the authority epitomized by a police station, and the officer’sstatus, signal the presence of a perspective different from Ray’s. This authoritarian point ofview is exemplified by the map, which would selectively depict his neighborhood as nothingmore than a network of streets and freeways. From this viewpoint, that space constitutes avoid—a place without history. In contrast, Ray offers the social cartography possible throughthe memory of residents like him, which holds the power to fill in those blank spaces and givemeaning to the place and the people within this space.

A specific area of erasure is explored in a scene between Turtle and her brother Luis at the710-freeway excavation site. As they walk alongside the newly dug trench where the freewaywill soon lie, Luis pulls up the little orange flags that line the embankment, resisting the spatialchanges marked by the Caltrans surveyors, or as Luis puts it, “fucking with ’em” (225). Turtle,upon reaching the bottom of the trench, comments on the neighborhood’s topographicaltransformation:

To the right and left of her, the walls resembled legs sprawled apart. Her sneakers stood beneathmiles of earth that had been heaved up, plowed aside, carted off and carried away in preparation forthe rolling asphalt of the Interstate 710 Long Beach and Pomona freeways. Severed tree roots juttedfrom mud walls. It was another planet altogether and she gazed above her at the high ridge andmarveled at how far down the tree roots had grown. Except for the horizon being erased by the

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

2 9

night, she saw nothing above them. Out of sight, out of mind, and over the embankment,everything was forgotten. Nonexistent. (225-26)

Viramontes casts the walls of earth as sprawled legs waiting to be violated by the oncomingonslaught of asphalt. Turtle enters this space of violation, the realm of the freeway, and findsit to be a world of erasure, where the accumulated history of the land has been obliterated.The severed tree roots are reminders of the depth of the people’s connection to the land andof what once was there but now is absent. The physical space of the embankment takes it a stepfurther, disconnecting Turtle from her surroundings. Her inability to see beyond its wallsreinforces its power of erasure; from within the world of the freeway, the world she once knewceases to exist.

The friction between memory and erasure is further elaborated in the graffiti displayedon freeway bridges and sidewalks. Graffiti, as Avila states, “is a highly visible reminder of theOther-inner city Chicano and Black youth. While the city spends 150 million dollars a year inits war on graffiti . . . [it is] unable to stop the expressions of power sprayed onto the wall,which articulate presence, convey identity, and personalize the impersonal universe of thesprawling metropolis” (“Folklore” 25-26). As part of his welcome into the McBride Homeboys,Luis and his new friends attempt to accomplish these very goals in an even more permanentfashion by seeking out freshly laid cement in which to etch their names. While the young mentag the space for the thrill of conquest and to commemorate their bond, this gesture carriesa deeper significance: it marks with memory the very structures that are responsible for thefracturing of the neighborhood. Furthermore, Viramontes immediately undercuts the efficacyof this remembrance:

The boys would never know that in thirty years from tonight, the tags would crack from theearthquakes, the weight of vehicles, the force of the muscular tree roots, from the trampling ofpassersby, become as faded as ancient engravings, as old as the concrete itself, as cold and clammyas a morgue table. And in those thirty years the cracks would be repaired here and there with newerpatching cement, making the boys’ eternal bonds look worn and forgotten. Not even concreteengravings would guarantee immortality. (164)

While Avila stresses that graffiti can act as a record of otherwise forgotten inhabitants, trans-forming the cold concrete into a personalized canvas, Viramontes, by adopting a different timescale, points to the ultimate futility of such chronicling. She again employs metaphoricallanguage to critique the freeway construction, comparing the concrete to a morgue table.For her, the concrete continues to provoke unease and the diction of decline (“crack . . .trampling . . . faded . . . old”). The freeways are still fundamentally a force of erasure, ultim-ately rendering fruitless any attempt to etch into them a lasting statement.

The third narrative device Viramontes employs in establishing the spatial meaning of EastLos Angeles is movement. Movement occurs on different planes and at various speeds, fromthe freeways to the sidewalks, each carrying with them and creating distinct perspectives andmeanings. Beginning with the pedestrian plane, it is helpful to recall Certeau’s well-knownessay “Walking in the City,” included in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), whereinhe conceptualizes the act of walking as one way through which people appropriate the urbanspace; footsteps become “a style of tactile apprehension” (97). From the vantage point of the110th floor of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, Certeau takes voyeuristic pleasurein seeing the mapped-out city that lies below. This view, away from the street’s chaos,allows the city to be read as a legible panoramic text, one in which all the components of

M u n o z

3 0

the city, as well as their relation to each other, can be simultaneously perceived. Certeausupposes this perspective is similar to the way the planner, urbanist, or cartographerhas conceived this space, and it is this orderly, rational, and idealized view that he refers toas the “Concept-city.” However, at ground level, the footsteps of pedestrians may complicateor even contradict this master plan: “The Concept-city is decaying” (95). For Certeau themovements of a walker—crossing, taking detours, rejecting certain paths—further contrib-ute to the creation and meaning of that urban space.6 As he explains, “The act of walking is tothe urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. . . . It thusseems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation” (98).These passers-by write an urban “text,” opposing the rational order of the city despite notbeing able to read it (93). In this manner, their movements act as forms of resistance againstthe spatial organization of Manhattan.

Certeau writes about a particular type of urban experience and spatial layout—dense,vertical, grid-formed, and pedestrian-focused. As Fran Tonkiss notes, “The experience ofwalking in the city, so central to Certeau’s conception of the everyday, will be very differentdepending on which city you are walking in, why you are walking, and who you are” (129).Certeau’s understanding of the semantic structure of the city resonates with Manhattan. It is acity more easily grasped because “it has a number of well-defined characteristic districts, set inan ordered frame of rivers and streets” (Lynch 67). Even if we consider driving as another typeof enunciation of this city, the traffic density of streets in Manhattan often keeps pedestriansand drivers traveling at comparable speeds. In other words, Manhattan continues to be legibleand less variable; most of the movement through the city occurs at street level (with theexception of the subway system).7

Unlike Manhattan, Los Angeles forces us to constantly shift our apprehension of its frag-mented, sprawling nature.8 The city is “a landscape filled with violent edges, colliding turfs,unstable boundaries” (Soja, “Los Angeles” 448). Physically, there are several levels of navi-gation through this urban space—street level, freeways set above or below the ground, pedes-trian bridges—all of which create a multi-layered narrative whose levels operate at differentspeeds. Los Angeles is a more complex “text.” Viramontes’s novel implicitly critiques Certeau’saccount by proposing another form of rendering this discursive community through inter-rupted spaces and different modes and velocities of articulation.

Certeau explores the “murky intertwining daily behaviors” through which individualsand multitudes subvert the disciplinary power embedded in the organization of the city(Practice 93). In theory, the spatial layout of a city conceptualized by planners and authoritiesregulates its subjects, dictating or suppressing their movements. This panoptic administration,which Certeau connects to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the structures of power, seeks toimpose control through “mechanisms and technical procedures . . . capable, merely by theirorganization of ‘details,’ of transforming a human multiplicity into a ‘disciplinary’ society.”Concurrently, the daily tactics of this space, such as pedestrian movement, will be carried out inways that its power structure cannot predict, degrading the disciplined ideal of the city.As he further explains, these “tricky and stubborn procedures . . . elude discipline without beingoutside the field in which it is exercised” (96). Thus, the nature of the restrictions imposedupon the space is significant to understanding how daily practices articulate the city.

The identity and impact of such restrictions found in the setting of Viramontes’snovel begins to be revealed through analyzing the movement of one of her most marginalizedcharacters. Abandoned by her mother and with her brother fighting in the Vietnam

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

3 1

War (1955-1975), Turtle resigns herself to walking the streets of East LA, living day by day. Therestrictions that she encounters while moving about the city originate from two very differentpower structures.9 The Quarantine Authority in Viramontes’s novel draws upon the socialreality of curfews and police regulation of the era, as well as a historical outbreak of rabies inLos Angeles in 1955.10 According to Certeau’s theorization, such heavy police regulation ofmovement can be thought of as an attempt to strictly enforce the plan of the “Concept-city.”11

Operating concurrently in the space of Viramontes’s novel is the nongovernmental demar-cation and subdivision of territory imposed by the competing gangs of East Los Angeles.Turtle’s movements through the city are informed not just by the restrictions of the QuarantineAuthority but further by her interpretations of the markings of the McBride and Lote M gangs,the other authorities present in her neighborhood: “She could read, Turtle wasn’t stupid. Thecross-outs, tags, new gang emblems thrashed all over McBride’s graffiti on the walls of thebridge—all bad news. . . . The Lote M vatos meant business and crudely chiseled away atthe calligraphic tags—Alfonso aka Big Al, Sir Santos, Palo, Lucho Libre, Luis Lil Lizard,Turtle, McBride Boys Que Rifa” (217). Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino discusses the delinea-tion of space and power relations through graffiti tagging:

The space available to Mexican American youth in the barrios (and housing projects in particular)for recreation and social interaction was severely restricted due to the carving up of theseworking-class neighborhoods. . . . Placas represented a system developed by Mexican Americanyouths by which they could divide what little space (territory) was left. . . . Operating on that level,placas were designed by them to serve as a public check of the abuse of power in the streets. Barriocalligraphy became an innovation developed by the Mexican American street youth culture tosignal and monitor visually the social dynamics of power through coded symbology in the economyof restricted public space. (76)

The gangs exist outside of the formal structures of power; their markers, unlike the QuarantineAuthority’s barricaded streets, police checkpoints, and broadcast curfew, are decipherable onlyto some; the order they seek to impose cannot be read from Certeau’s aerial view. Nevertheless,just like the governmental authority, they must be taken into account by the pedestrian whomoves through the territory: “Turtle knew how to work the streets, how to avoid the Quar-antine Authority who enforced the curfew, how to hide from the Lote M Homeboys and mostlyhow to keep away from her own McBride Boys” (20). By communicating her vision of East LosAngeles through the impediments to Turtle’s movements, Viramontes draws attention to therealities of oppressive governmental forces as well as dangerous nongovernmental authorityoriginating from within the community.

One description of Turtle’s movements toys with Certeau’s theorization of the act ofwalking as an enunciation of space. As Turtle moves through the neighborhood with sporadichaste, vaulting walls, scaling fences, and sprinting across bridges, keeping her eyes out forrival gang members and helicopters, she imagines Luis’s voice offering instructions: “S forSize up the situation” (219); “U for Undue haste makes waste”; “R for Remember where you are”(220). These instructions continue throughout the chapter, spelling out the word S/U/R/V/I/V/A/Land originating from the US Army Field Manual issued by the Department of the ArmyHeadquarters to Luis. While she recites these instructions, she wanders from one cemetery tothe next, taking refuge from the “living side” of the streets. Turtle’s declaration of this wordexplicitly announces her intention to survive and, together with her fraught movements, con-nects the struggle for life in her neighborhood to that of her brother in Vietnam. Furthermore,

M u n o z

3 2

this dire literal and ambulatory enunciation contrasts with Certeau’s heroic vision of Manhattanpedestrians. As Tonkiss notes, “Certeau can easily be criticized for his tendency to get misty-eyedover the ordinary user, engaged in the commonplace heroics of crossing to walk on the sunnyside of the street. There is clearly a kind of bathos in thinking of ordinary inhabitants of a cityas ‘poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungle of functionalist rationality’ ” (129).The pedestrian navigation of Viramontes’s characters, on the other hand, is laden with desper-ation and despair: one crosses the street not to get to the “sunny side” but to evade the “livingside.”

Turtle continues her perambulations through the streets of East LA, articulating the spacethrough her walking but this time without any accompanying vocalization:

Up the darkened path of a hillside driveway was the entrance to Sybil Brand Institute for Women,nestled like a natural outcropping of granite up high on one of the hills. She crossed the street toavoid the entrance but felt the mist of sorrow like a ghost late at night. Turtle walked in haste, thezoom of dreary cars passing, passing houses and makeshift fences. . . . [T]he porch lights switchedon and off and neighboring eyes made security checks for possible escapees from the prison. OnceTurtle reached the top of the hill, she spotted a column of lights surrounding a university parkinglot across the great divide of the 10 Interstate freeway. . . . At the freeway bridge, she turned andwalked southward and then climbed a small winding side street. Woolwine Avenue narrowed intoone car road, where Turtle discovered a vacant lot used for old furniture discards. Leg boards andcloth material and wire lay exposed like old bones. . . . Hands in her pockets, Turtle stitched overher earlier watery footprints, uphill and downhill, coming and going to nowhere and back. (266)

Viramontes contrasts the haste of Turtle’s walk to the zoom of the cars, highlighting twodifferent yet parallel velocities by which Los Angeles can be experienced. The speed of thecars would not allow for much interaction between its passengers and the spaces they pass;places would become blurs. By describing the cars as “dreary,” Viramontes further marks thisway of seeing the city as gloomy—perhaps even lifeless. There is also quickness in Turtle’swalk, but her footsteps move toward production, combating the “great divide” physicallyimposed by the freeway. From on top of the hill, Turtle has a bird’s eye view of the interruptedstructure of the city. Her path brings her to what has been forgotten in the streets of theEastside—a women’s correctional facility, less-transited streets, and abandoned furniture—affirming their existence by her presence. The words “coming and going to nowhere and back”

point to circularity in her movements. However, Turtle’s walk is not an aimless stroll.Viramontes’s deliberate use of the verb stitched suggests the creation of a layered narrative.The retracing of her steps is a binding force between past and present in a fractured space.

In addition to the movement of pedestrians, the flow of traffic through the innumerablefreeways and streets provides concurrent and overlapping expressions of this urban space.In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Reyner Banham trumpets the cen-trality of the freeways to Los Angeles’s architectural identity and the freeways’ positive modernsymbology. The architectural historian casts the freeway system as one of the four ecologicalmodels of the city “seem[ing] to have fixed Los Angeles in canonical and monumental form,much as the great streets of Sixtus V fixed Baroque Rome” (17). Banham lauds Los Angeles forits “language of movement” (5), declaring, “all its parts are equal and equally accessible fromall other parts at once” (18). However, this autopian vision, in which freeways are icons andpeople of color are invisible, has been critiqued for its drive-through perspective that ignoresissues of class and race, neglecting both the identity and the impact of the freeways on thecommunities they pass (Avila, Popular 248n30; Klein 36n43; Villa 85). Viramontes illustrates

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

3 3

this critique in the novel’s articulation of the city. While highlighting the negative repercussionsof freeway construction, her references to driving are minimal, de-emphasizing the centralityof this action, and implicitly combating an autopian vision. Viramontes’s use of automotivemovement consistently directs the reader’s attention away from the anonymous freeway andtoward the circumstances of the underclass at street level.

The only instance wherein Viramontes follows one of her main characters as she drivesaround the city comes when Ana searches for her schizophrenic brother Ben. In this sequence,the narration adopts Ana’s perspective and expresses the movement of driving through thefamiliar restrictions of the freeway and the unease and disorientation of unknown streets.While on the I-5, she finds herself trapped in a gridlock of cars despite “her freeway savvy.”The freeway narrows both her physical and psychological fields of view to only those on hersame path, resisting any substantive connection between travelers; each driver is an island,carrying on as if no one else is watching: “the driver on her left picking his nose, the driver tothe right applying lipstick on her mouth” (276). Moreover, the freeway drivers are all trying toreach their destinations with little regard for the areas and communities through which theypass; while on this plane of movement, one can traverse without contact or engagement.Quickly, Ana’s frustration with the freeway leads her to abandon it, turning her car and thereader away from that plane and back to that of the streets.

Ana’s detour forces the reader to acknowledge the neglected space beneath the freeway:“She exited and ended up in an unfamiliar city block of boarded-up warehouses . . . lost in themaze of downtown streets. She drove beneath the overpass at the edges of a no-man’s-landwhere a single eucalyptus tree stood tall and slight, an anomaly of nature. Otherwise thedeserted area revealed the congealed remnants of squatters like scabs on a wound.” Thelone eucalyptus tree serves as a reminder of what once existed but has been razed by freewayconstruction. By drawing the parallel to scabs on a wound, Viramontes reminds us that thescars of this past destruction have yet to heal completely. The overpass, described as a “con-crete catacomb of pillar and girder” (276), further marks this belly of the freeway with thelanguage of death and injury. Viramontes constructs the plane of movement beneath thefreeway, at street level, through observational and aware driving that will not allow ignoranceof local conditions.

Viramontes again turns away from the freeway by resisting the LA narrative cliche of high-speed pursuit in a scene where Turtle flees the police. Indeed, the language used to depict thegenesis of the chase is animated and militaristic. As Turtle jumps headfirst into Santos’s movingPontiac and they speed away, fleeing the pursuing helicopter, the reader is treated to a flurry ofthrilling phrases: “whooshing blades . . . storm-force speed . . . military maneuver . . . fluores-cent explosion . . . two-tire wheelie . . . roared away” (271). However, Viramontes deliberatelywithholds the continuation of that first-hand account. She cuts away from this storyline for twochapters, and when she finally resumes it, she uses the detached and chopped languageof a police report. Viramontes supplants her earlier two paragraphs of action with a singlesterile verb: “rendezvoused” (296). This factual and straightforward report subverts anyexpectation of the excitement and entertainment often provided by Los Angeles’s high-speedpursuits. Viramontes chooses to articulate their movement on the freeway with impersonal anduncomplicated language, conveying the unnuanced perspective inherent in the freeway andrefusing it the attention she reserves for the plane of street movement.

The tension between the two planes of movement is further developed in two scenes.When Turtle is a child, a grocery store worker accosts her upon suspicion of shoplifting.

M u n o z

3 4

He stops her near an on-ramp to the 710, and when his frisking for produce turns to molest-ation, Viramontes dwells on the impassiveness of the freeway travelers: “Not one driver fromall those cars zooming on the new freeway bridge, not one driver driving the overpass of the710 freeway construction, not one stopped to protest, to scream, What the hell do you thinkyou’re doing, motherfucker, pinche puto, get your fingers off her tits baboso!” (24). Twoconcurrent levels of articulating movement are present: the pedestrians on the street andthe cars zooming on the freeway above. The movement of the freeway takes place at a differentelevational plane from that of the street and is characterized by high velocity; both of thesetraits contribute to the anonymity of this articulation. Furthermore, the use of the freewaynecessitates access to a car, which implies a certain economic standing. In contrast, the streetlevel plane of motion is slower, beneath the overpass, and characterized by unavoidable con-frontation with the underclass. Viramontes does not let the reader flit by on the speedy over-pass but forces him or her to linger with an impoverished young girl being molested for stealinga tin of black olives.

The disconnection between the plane of the freeway driver and that of the pedestrian isechoed in a passage from Ben’s writings, which describes a man driving home from work andspotting a woman standing on a pedestrian bridge over the freeway:

If the woman stood on a pedestrian bridge overlooking the Hollywood 101 Freeway, let’s say, onewould think the woman who was not old entertained the idea of suicide and the driver wouldmaintain a diligent view from the rearview mirror. Could the driver know what the womanthought? In order to envision her life, one would have to think of her with greater generosity. . . .One would need much more than obvious assumptions in order for the driver to turn off theignition key, set the parking brake and ask after her. One would have to be close enough to lookinto her eyes, jump into the trunk of her heart, lift the stage curtains to see behind her props. It wasone thing to assume, another to conjure, and yet another to feel for her. One would need metaphorto love her. (125)

Again, the chasm between the experiences of different classes and races is expressed throughmovement. It is not a simple matter for a freeway driver to reach a pedestrian bridge: the drivermust wait for the next exit, loop back around through unfamiliar streets, find the bridge, exitthe car, and climb the stairs to reach the woman. The two are not only moving at differentspeeds and on different levels, but they are separated from one another by numerous obstacles;they are on overlapping but nonintersecting tracks. However, this time a solution isproposed—that of metaphor. According to John Alba Cutler, “the point for Ben is not forthe driver of the car to understand what it means to feel what the woman feels, but rather forhim to feel for her—to feel in her direction. Literature here seeks to impel action. Whateverits form, it should take us out of our cars and bring us face to face with people whose liveswe have previously ignored” (166).

Their Dogs Came with Them provokes a visceral reaction; it is a novelistic punch to thegut. The geography of East Los Angeles is articulated through layered planes of movement,critiquing a monochromatic view of the experiences of its inhabitants while illustrating thedistance between them. Viramontes’s continued juxtaposition of the forces of memory anderasure illuminates the stakes her characters face and points to a community’s memory as anecessary and subversive tool of survival. The aggressive use of metaphor not only conveysinsight into the interaction between the community and its decaying landscape, but it alsofosters empathy toward these marginalized residents. In a personal interview, Viramontesacknowledges her use of this tool as a bridge, stating, “metaphor is an incredibly important

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

3 5

part of any type of building of empathy. I want you to know what it is like to be erased.I want you to know what it is like to have a voice and see that voice silenced. I want you toknow what it is like to resist it in the smallest, tiniest ways but nonetheless resist it”(Telephone). Each of these elements serves to reinforce the agency of the community in creatingindependent spatial meaning for its city and, in so doing, reveals a path to resist allowing thefreeways to become a second conquest. Viramontes uses these narrative techniques to accom-plish more than merely informing an audience; she seeks to incite a response by making herreader recognize, remember, and reach for those bodies underneath the overpass.

In the final scene, Viramontes both embodies the violent results of spatial racism and usesthese devices one more time to ennoble the small steps of a resident toward resistance. A beatingturns into a bloodbath narrated with brutal language when Turtle relentlessly strikes a man whopreviously fought one of her fellow McBride Boys. Violence erupts out of the street and claimsthem both, so that they become the latest to fall not knowing why they have torn each otherapart: “Why? Because a tall girl named Antonia never existed, because her history held nomemory” (324). Viramontes suggests that Turtle has finally succumbed to the erasive conse-quences of spatial racism. It has not only segregated the community; it has physically destroyedthem. Tranquilina witnesses their brutal deaths and rebels against this conquest, reclaiming thehumanity of her fellow Latinos by shouting at the sharpshooters: “We’rrrre not doggggs!” herwords rattling into each other and forming a primal scream of existence (324). Refusing theauthorities’ commands, Tranquilina moves forward: “Two inches, four, six, eight, riding thecurrents of the wilding wind. Riding it beyond the borders, past the cesarean scars of the earth,out to limitless space where everything was possible if she believed” (325). By resisting, bymoving, Tranquilina overwrites the physically carved and metaphorically scarred community,demonstrating Viramontes’s hope that identity and independent spatial meaning can be foundthrough transgression.

Notes

1. According to John Alba Cutler, Helena Marıa Viramontes has suggested that the QuarantineAuthority represents the “brutal police repression following the Chicano Movement Marchof August 29, 1970” (165).

2. Viramontes takes the title of the novel, the dog metaphor, and the epigraph from MiguelLeon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (1962).

3. Mary Pat Brady makes clear that, in referring to the production of space, she followsthe insights of Doreen Massey, Edward W. Soja, and Henri Lefebvre, as well as those providedby Chicana/o authors such as Jose David Saldıvar and Marıa Amparo Ruiz de Burton, to namea few.

4. There are numerous examples of geographical displacement within Chicano history,among them the redrawing of the US/Mexico border in 1848 and the Battle of Chavez Ravine(1951-1961). In her analysis, Brady further stresses the ramifications of the obviously spatialcolonization process as a way of explaining Chicanas’ attention to the production of space (9).

5. As I previously noted, Turtle is a female, but her appearance and behavior cause her to beperceived as male by others; hence, the use of the pronoun he.

6. In this emphasis on walking there is, of course, a resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s flaneur,the bourgeois walker who engages the city. While Michel de Certeau’s walkers are meant to be

M u n o z

3 6

more ordinary, they still project the same aimlessness and leisure often noted in Benjamin’sParisian flaneur.

7. I will not address the underground subway system because I am concerned with atype of movement through the city that is both visual and physical. For a discussion of theNew York City subway and Certeau’s theories about urban tactics and strategies, see GarrettZiegler.

8. Certeau understands the urban space that is New York City, but he is disconcerted byCalifornia as suggested by his essay “Californie, un theatre de passants” (1981).

9. For a general discussion of the policing of social boundaries through architecture in LosAngeles, see Mike Davis (221-64).

10. The Chicano inhabitants of East LA experienced policing of their movements during the1943 Zoot Suit Riots, the 1968 Chicano Blowouts, and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. As toViramontes’s quarantine, according to Bridget Kevane, in 1955 “seventy rabid dogs roamed thestreets and fifty-two people were bitten. Viramontes builds upon and exaggerates this event . . .creat[ing] a virtual police state in East Los Angeles complete with check-points, governmentsurveillance, aerial observation, sharpshooters and curfews” (25).

11. According to Fran Tonkiss, “Where spaces are heavily policed, the desire for transparencybecomes very clear; actualized in the curfews, cameras, check-points or barricades that seek tomake order and make visible people’s use of space. Such spaces represent extreme (even ifcommon) versions of what Certeau calls ‘the concept city’ ” (129).

Works Cited

Acuna, Rodolfo. A Community under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the LosAngeles River, 1945–1975. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publ., UCLA,1984. Print.

Avila, Eric R. “The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Culture, and Identity in PostwarLos Angeles.” Aztlan 23.1 (1998): 15–31. Print.

—. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. Print.

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1971. Print.

Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency ofSpace. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.

Brodsly, David. L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981.Print.

Certeau, Michel de. “Californie, un theatre de passants.” Autrement 31 (1981): 10–18. Print.

—. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Cutler, John Alba. “On Recent Chicano Literature.” Western American Literature 44.2 (2009):159–67. Print.

A r t i c u l a t i n g a G e o g r a p h y o f P a i n

3 7

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. 1990. London: Verso, 2006.Print.

Gottlieb, Robert. Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City.Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 2007. Print.

Kevane, Bridget. Profane and Sacred: Latino/a American Writers Reveal the Interplay of theSecular and the Religious. Lanham: Rowman, 2008. Print.

Klein, Norman M. “The Sunshine Strategy: Buying and Selling the Fantasy of Los Angeles.”20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict. Ed. Klein and Martin J.Schiesl. Claremont: Regina, 1990. 1–38. Print.

Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Trans.Lysander Kemp. Boston: Beacon, 1962. Print.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1960.Print.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Print.

Sanchez-Tranquilino, Marcos. “Space, Power, and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti andChicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–1978.” Looking High and Low: Art and CulturalIdentity. Ed. Brenda Jo Bright and Liza Bakewell. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1995. 55–88. Print.

Scott, Allen J, and Edward W. Soja, eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End ofthe Twentieth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Print.

Soja, Edward W. “Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring toRestructuring-Generated Crisis.” Scott and Soja 426–62.

—. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso,1989. Print.

Tonkiss, Fran. Space, the City, and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms. Cambridge:Polity, 2005. Print.

Villa, Raul Homero. Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture.Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Print.

Viramontes, Helena Marıa. “Interview with Helena Marıa Viramontes.” Interview by DanielOlivas. La Bloga. Blogger, 2 Apr. 2007. Web. 21 Nov. 2010.

—. Telephone interview. 5 May 2011.

—. Their Dogs Came with Them. New York: Atria, 2007. Print.

Wachs, Martin. “The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policiesand Future Prospects.” Scott and Soja 106–59.

Ziegler, Garrett. “The Politics of the Third Rail.” Space and Culture 7.3 (2004): 283–301. Print.

M u n o z

3 8