Their Dogs Came With Them - Social Connections

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.