Articulating a Geography of Pain: Metaphor, Memory, and Movement in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

Los Angeles is a metropolis physically interrupted by freeways and demographically fragmented into isolated pockets of race and class. The geographer Edward W. Soja describes contemporary LA as being “difficult to grasp persuasively in a temporal narrative for it generates too many conflicting images, confounding historization, always seeming to stretch laterally instead of unfolding sequentially” (Postmodern 222). Helena María Viramontes explores the sprawled and concurrent identities of LA using a nonlinear narrative focused on 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 analyzes how Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) articulates East Los Angeles through the use of imagery, memory, and movement. The first section deals with the figurative language—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 the fractured nature of this city and its disruptive freeways. Finally, this article examines the “tactile apprehension,” à la Michel de Certeau’s theorizing of walking in the city, found in the different modes and velocities of transportation as concurrent but divergent modes of articulation (Practice 97). I argue that the novel presents multiple experiences of the city, which reveal not only the way the geography impacts the community it contains but also ways the Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming independent spatial meaning.

Set in East Los Angeles during the 1960s, Their Dogs Came with Them tells the story of four female protagonists who struggle through the isolation and turbulence plaguing their community. A high school student living with her grandparents, Ermilia Zumaya undergoes a political awakening. Ana works in an office and struggles to take care of her mentally unstable brother Ben. Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, contemplates the role of faith in her violent 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 construction of freeways, which has led to entire neighborhoods being razed and bulldozed into oblivion. 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 fluidly between the past and the present with a few blank lines between paragraphs marking a leap forward or backward in years. Characters, in turn, exist independent from one another, occasionally crossing paths; the central motif that links the characters is the fractured nature of their world.

The interrupted narrative structure of the novel and the divided urban space parallel each other, revealing the interconnectedness of community and geography. Their Dogs Came with Them 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 the background, while tied metaphorically to the narrative structure. In an interview with Daniel Olivas, Viramontes explained the novel’s development: “The list of characters kept increasing and with this increase, the stories multiplied like freeway interchanges. Having this Eureka moment, 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 illustrative of a city that cannot be easily defined or understood. Soja characterizes the myriad facets of the city: “Seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are the epitomizing features of contemporary Los Angeles” (Postmodern 193). With these contradictions come interpretive possibilities. Viramontes’s storyline, like the spatial organization of Los Angeles, consists of multiple foci. However, it is not just the narrative structure that reflects the plurality of LA. Numerous intersecting and concurrent articulations of the city are central to apprehending this space and are manifest in the novel by layered expression encompassing metaphor, memory, and movement. This multidimensional spatial understanding is not simply a theoretical issue but gives us insight into the...