Their Dogs Came with Them

Their Dogs Came With Them (2007) is a novel by Helena Maria Viramontes. Viramontes was born in East Los Angeles into a Mexican American family. She attended Garfield High School and later Immaculate Heart College where she earned her BA in English Literature. During her time in school, Viramontes became deeply influenced by the Chicano Movement. Their Dogs Came With Them is Viramontes most recent work. Seventeen years in production, Their Dogs is acclaimed for its complex characters and personal, gritty writing style. The novel is largely based on Viramontes's childhood in East Los Angeles. The book focuses on the freeway construction and difficult conditions for the Mexican Americans living in this area at the time. It also explores the formation of Chicano youth gangs and their impact on Chicano communities.

Plot summary

Helena Maria Viramontes’ novel, Their Dogs Came With Them, follows the lives of Mexican immigrants living in East Los Angeles during the 1960’s. Viramontes tells each character’s story chapter by chapter, but the lives of the characters often intermingle. Additionally, her narration style changes from past to present, giving the reader a glimpse into the character’s childhoods and how those upbringings shaped them. Each is affected differently by the growing urban landscape, intensified by freeway construction displacing homes, and the Quarantine Authority who use roadblocks to keep residents in East Los Angeles, “supposedly” protecting them from rabid animals.

Turtle, a girl so desperate to belong, acts like a boy to please her gang member brother, Luis Lil Lizard, who is resentful about having a girl for a sibling. After growing up in an abusive home environment, she too joins the McBride Homeboys and then lives on the streets when her brother goes to fight in Vietnam. Ermila, orphaned after her parents ran away, lives with her grandparents who do not understand the rapidly changing times and the younger generation. Her close group of school friends becomes her family, and together they experience the Chicano power movement as well as serious family and relationship problems. Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, is optimistic about religion despite witnessing horrible atrocities, like the cruel and revengeful murder of Ermila’s cousin Nacho, committed by the McBride Boys. And last there is Ben, who gets a scholarship to USC and has a chance of getting ahead, but is gravely depressed. As a child he loses his mother, and then he accidentally leads another boy in front of a truck, killing the boy. Witnesses falsely claim that Ben tried to save the boy, and thus Ben leads a life of guilt. Together, these characters, their environments, and their families, emotionally depict the struggles of being an immigrant in Los Angeles during the 1960’s.

Reception

The release of Their Dogs Came With Them happened in 2007 and since then the popularity of the book is growing. Kate Soto writes in an article that Viramontes looks to critique to colonist exposing the problems ignored with the highway construction. The title and the story works to expose how the Quarantine Authority worked to control the people using the dogs as an excuse. Representing the power and government, the story illustrates how the people were mistreated and used. In an interview, Viramontes says that she writes in an effort to take people to the place and the time with the people. She wants to readers to experience the book along with the characters. She writes about a place and a cultural construct that no longer exists in East LA but only exists in her memory which allows her to write fiction as she pleases(Rokitka). Viramontes’ book, Their Dogs Came With Them works to expose what she experienced as a child illustrating how those in power, the colonists, the Quarantine Authority affect those who are weak.

Social Connections

“I do remember a time when there weren’t any freeways, and then I do remember the neighborhood, whole city blocks abandoned, then chewed up, our neighbors disappeared. It devastated, amputated East LA. from the rest of the city. The bulldozers resembled the conqueror’s ships coming to colonize a second time and I felt a real desire to portray the lives of those who disappeared.” Helena Maria Viramontes, interview with La Bloga

As evident by the excerpt from Viramontes' interview, her writing is motivated by her love for the people she writes about. She wanted to tell the story of every Mexican American living in East Los Angeles during the political and social upheaval of the 1960s-1970's. The novel uses her own childhood experiences and items such as the Vietnam War, the Chicano Moratorium, poverty and Chicano gangs, and the construction of the freeways as a backdrop to an intricately woven story of four different female protagonists. The freeway construction is an important theme in the novel and to the social climate in East Los Angeles of the time. Having no political voice, Chicano communities could not stop the destruction of neighborhoods, displacement of homes, and the isolation of divided East L.A. which followed the freeway construction. Within the context of the novel, each of the four female protagonists directly experience this isolation and attempt to accommodate for it in their own ways such as joining gangs or returning to religion. Each must find a way to survive in the aftermath and wake of being forgotten in Los Angele's progress. In addition to these very real issues, Viramontes also introduces a fictional entity called the Quarantine Authority. Composed of road blocks and police who enforce curfews that effectively 'Quarantine' the Chicano community from supposed rabid dogs. In effect, the Quarantine Authority becomes the conquerors of the Chicano neighborhood and the embodiment of the stifling isolation that the characters and communities at large from the novel experience.