E3W Literature | University of Texas

Helena María Viramontes
Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel
Atria, 2007
328 pages
$23

Reviewed by T. Jackie Cuevas

“Pay attention, Chavela demanded. Because displacement will always come down to two things: earthquakes or earthmovers.”

Helena María Viramontes’s richly poetic new novel interweaves narratives of four young Chicanas marginalized within their own Chicano communities during the volatile 1960s. The novel opens with an epigraph from Miguel Leon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (1962). In the passage, Aztec (Mexica) people describe the arrival of Spanish conquistadors and their canine companions: “Their dogs came with them, running ahead of the column. They raised their muzzles high; they lifted their muzzles to the wind. They raced on before with saliva dripping from their jaws.”

The narrative begins with a child watching an old woman pack up the contents of her home, which is about to be demolished by bulldozers, or “earthmovers”: “The bulldozers had started from very far away and slowly arrived on First Street, their muzzles like sharpened metal teeth making way for the freeway.” Throughout the book, Viramontes invites readers to draw connections between the Aztecs under siege and the experiences of poor and working-class Chicanas/os displaced by the increased urbanization of East LA.

Viramontes draws somewhat on stock characters of Chicano literature yet avoids the pitfalls of stereotyping by crafting them into complicated individuals. The protagonists include four Chicanas: Turtle, a homeless gang member who lives her life on the streets passing as a man; Ermila, a student at Garfield High School; Tranquilina, the daughter of zealous Christian missionaries; and Ana, a young professional struggling to take care of her schizophrenic brother Ben. Each of these characters attempts to navigate a world filled with the pervasive threat of violence. Moments of fantastical absurdity and frequent shifts across plot lines create a sense of uncertain location in time and space, fashioning an uncertain world in which the characters face various types of displacement, loss, abandonment, violation, madness, and extreme loneliness.

In the novel, the threat of a potential rabies pandemic leads the city to place the already distressed East LA under quarantine, cordoning off neighborhoods with a system of roadblocks. At these checkpoints, residents must show proof of ID, adhere to strict curfews, and suffer brutalities imposed by the police force called the Quarantine Authority (QA). The fictional events allude to times when Chicano neighborhoods have experienced especially violent policing of their everyday movements, such as during the 1940s Zoot Suit Riots, the school walkouts during the 1968 Chicano Blowouts, and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. By drawing on this history, Viramontes represents Chicanos as an internally colonized people and explores how marginalized groups negotiate their desire to decolonize their own minds and lives.

Viramontes is the author of the highly acclaimed The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and the novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). Viramontes also co-edited, with María Herrera-Sobek, Chicana (W)Rites: On Word and Film (1995) and Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature (1996). Her latest work is certainly a significant contribution to the growing body of Mexican American literature. In an interview in the May/June 2007 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Viramontes describes her larger project as a writer as one of breaking down borders. Of the actual border between Mexico and the US, particularly the US attempt to control the flow of Mexican immigrants by erecting a “border fence,” Viramontes says: “I’d like to think that I am dismantling it, one word at a time.”