The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles by Dean J. Franco (review)

We have witnessed in recent years the trend to place “critical” in front of historically marginalized areas of scholarly inquiry such as ethnic and gender studies. The ambition behind this move seeks to challenge traditional approaches to these studies’ respective subjects by foregrounding nascent theoretical approaches to move beyond presumably essentialist and outmoded intellectual formations. Yet one of the most lamentable casualties of this trend is an abandoned engagement with the comparative. Indeed, many scholars have— understandably, in some instances— veered away from comparative ethnic and gender studies because of the way “just like” approaches literally compare one group to another rather than acknowledge their historical, political, and spatial linkages. Dean J. Franco’s The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles, however, is both analytically astute and attentive to the interlocking lived realities of the communities on whom his book focuses, thus elegantly breathing new life into the practice of comparative ethnic studies.

Kicking off the book’s first chapter on Helena María Viramontes’s 2008 novel Their Dogs Came with Them and the Boyle Heights organization La Union de Vecinos, Franco asks: “How can we compare— literatures, cultures, places, people— without collapsing difference into sameness? How do we maintain specificity and the contingency of experience, even while seeking some understanding across experiences?” (33). For the duration of the book Franco masterfully evades a flattening out of Chicana/o, African American, and Jewish American experiences and the literary expressions representing them in favor of illustrating the commonalities circumscribing their interconnected everyday lives. With a focus on the figure of “the neighbor” and “the neighborhood” as sites from which metaphorical and metonymic possibility manifest, the book’s introduction, three chapters, and conclusion maintain “that precisely because different racial and ethnic groups occupy the same space at the same time, or come into contact through economic and imaginative borderzones, we miss the vital co-constitution of racial identities when we do not compare” (31).

Along with the focus on Viramontes’s Chicana/o-populated Boyle Heights neighborhood in chapter 1, chapters 2 and 3, respectively, focus on African American and Jewish American LA neighborhoods. Yet cordoning these topographies based on ethnic population hardly structures Franco’s adopted interpretive strategy. Rather, as with his examination of the Watts Writers Workshop, Franco illustrates how Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg— a Jewish American man who resided in Beverly Hills—financed the Workshop in predominantly African American Watts as a way to signal the ability to traverse neighborhood divides categorized by race and class. Yet while Schulberg’s desire to bridge these two communities does materialize metaphorically, concretely conjoining these disparate spaces is marred by inevitable racial conflicts foreseen by an interlocutor and correspondent by the name of James Baldwin. Turning to Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel The Sellout, Franco compellingly concludes that the perpetual spatial subordination of disenfranchised groups cannot lead to freedom when the imperatives for such, modeled by Schulberg, are cast in monocultural liberal terms. In contrast, chapter 3, with attention paid to Jewish neighborhoods, understands the eruv as an exemplary “counter-public.” Here, Franco assesses a range of Jewish neighborhoods— public and private, sacred and secular— which live up to the eruv’s translation from the Hebrew as “mixture.” These include the LA Eruv, Boyle Heights (the subject of the first chapter), and the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi’s 2010 film, My Neighborhood. Drawing on his own rich family history in Southern California (at times anchored in the very locations he appraises), Franco substantiates his argument that we must consider literature as akin to the neighborhoods in which we attain experiential knowledge of race and space.

Indiscriminately following the advice of recent “critical ethnic studies” scholars to move “beyond compare” would result in a missed opportunity to learn from Franco’s comparative and...