Ithaca is a city of migrants, all arriving with our various cultures, experiences, and memories. Our stories give color and depth to life in this "centrally isolated" New York town. We're particularly fortunate when authors such as Helena MarÃa Viramontes share their stories.
Cornell English Professor Helena Viramontes recently received a $50,000 Fellowship grant for artistic excellence. That recognition is, no doubt, due to works such as her most recent novel, Their Dogs Came With Them. In this book, Viramontes offers a profoundly gritty and moving portrait of everyday life in Los Angeles, California in the 1960s. The book shifts back and forth in time, following four young women growing up in tough neighborhoods and turbulent times.
Three of the girls struggle against personal relationships. The novel begins with "Turtle," whose adoration of her brother leads her to hide her true self in a gang identity. Turtle lives on the street, finding refuge in the cemetery. Ana spends her life trying to save her mentally ill brother from his inner demons, acting as a buffer between him and an unfeeling time and culture. Orphaned Ermila lives with her grandparents, a reflection of their lost daughter. Out of a silent childhood, she gradually develops self awareness and political consciousness. Viramontes intimately portrays these young women and the men they are intimately connected to. Men who inevitably fail them in the end, drawing them into a vortex of violence.
Their Dogs Came With Them shines a light in the dark place that was life in L.A. neighborhoods literally being torn apart. Familial and cultural ties which might otherwise hold people together were tragically disrupted by the development of the L.A. freeway. The construction bites off their neighborhood in "endless trenches into the earth that resembled a moat, fortifying their safety from all that furious violence outside."
Ermila's grandmother paces the house, trying to escape a feeling of entrapment and find peace. "No sooner would her sense of consolation override any panic than she realized that the construction of the freeway was ridding the neighborhood of everything that was familiar to her. The memory of who lived where, who buried their children's umbilical cords or grew lemons the size of apples, done away."
Viramontes novel asks, who is inside and who is outside? Who is being protected from what? She tells stories, rarely shared, of marginalized people - the homeless and the insane. In a crazy time and place, it seems the only "sane" option is to lose your mind.
And yet, some of the Barrio girls manage to find their way. They hold onto faith, inner strength, or awakening political consciousness. The fourth young woman, Tranquilina, may be the only "free" person in the book. She is not only free of troublesome relationships, but free of expectations. Though bound to a life of spiritual endeavors by her missionary parents, Traquilina freely steps into her destiny. In the last pages of the novel, only Tranquilina can see through the hallucinatory haze of the times to recognize who the victims are and who are the perpetrators. She fills herself with the "embrace of ancestral spirits" and resists the fear which destroys people as easily as wild dogs.
"Tranquilina closed her eyes to hear her heart beating. She summoned the stories of Papa and Mama's miraculous escape. ... Shouting voices ordered her not to move, stay immobile, but she lifted one foot forward, then another, refusing to halt... riding the currents 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."
Viramontes writes a series of finely detailed stories that interconnect in the manner of a complex neighborhood. Gradually we understand each individual minutely, watching their personalities form on the edge of social control and chaos, seeing how they cope or fall apart.
Their Dogs Came With Them is a difficult book. It is as raw as the urban streets of the 1960s, and filled with turmoil, confusion, and darkness even in the midst of heat and blinding light. This is a book on the edge, about the edge.
Viramontes' gripping, street tough prose leads us through a surreal dance of death with confidence and clarity. The journey may not always be comfortable, but it is highly rewarding. Viramontes' ability to bring these stories alive is proof enough of hope and rebirth.
|
|
