Paula Moya sets the stage: a lecture on Viramontes
In a conversational lecture on Helena Maria Viramontes' novel Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), CCSRE Director and Professor of English Paula Moya set the stage for this year's 19th annual Kieve Lecture. Moya, a leading authority on Chicana/o literature and Viramontes' work, discussed the novel as inspiration for the performance lecture by award-winning playwright and producer, Virginia Grise. Attracting an enthusiastic audience of students, faculty, and staff representing a variety of disciplines and different levels of prior engagement with the novel, Moya provided unique access to the rich narrative and complex characters that are hallmarks of Viramontes' writing.
Moya guided the participants through the text towards its deeper meaning, often enriching the discussion with her reflections on Viramontes' first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. Moya and her audience compiled the dominant themes, from war to the body (both somatic and politic); chronicled the characters, their interrelationships, perspectives and purposes; and leveraged these elements to unpack the "kaleidoscopic" structure of the "multifocal" narrative that layers the interpretive matrix of the text's larger social commentary.
They also explored the novel's imagery through the lens of the author's own lived experiences and the history of displacement of East LA's Mexican-American communities in the 1960's and 70's. Moya underscored in particular the importance of the freeways. These massive infrastructural projects fast-tracked the razing of low-income and ethnic neighborhoods and this gentrification marked a pivot in the social-political conditions of that time. While for people with sufficient means to own a car freeways can offer a feeling of personal freedom, in Their Dogs Came with Them freeways act as barriers to mobility for those who lack those means. By creating physical divides that partition and isolate the geographies of LA, the freeways serve as metaphors for a system of social hierarchy designed to dispossess, forcing the characters who populate the novel to walk the streets.
Viramontes uses the freeways as an embodiment of the discriminatory ideologies that encouraged the systematic denigration and ultimate erasure of the novel's Latina/o/x/e communities, both through physical acts, as represented by the "earthmovers," and through mechanisms of social control, like the fictional "Quarantine Authority" that polices the movement of the community. It is the marriage of this arresting imagery with the choice of themes that gives this work relevancy beyond the East LA experience that Viramontes centers, demonstrating the power of her storytelling and range of impact of her work.
A collaboration between CCSRE and its partners, this talk was hosted at El Centro Chicano y Latino and organized with the help of Generaciones: A Collaborative Reading Group on Diasporic Mexicanidades.