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The Tortilla Curtain T.C. Boyle Paperback $16.00  add to cartRead more... |
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In this explosive and timely novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle explores
an issue that is at the forefront of the political arena. He confronts the
controversy over illegal immigration head-on, illuminating through a
poignant, gripping story the people on both sides of the issue, the haves
and the have-nots.
In Southern California's Topanga Canyon, two
couples live in close proximity and yet are worlds apart. High atop a hill
overlooking the canyon, nature writer Delaney Mossbacher and his wife, real
estate agent Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, reside in an exclusive, secluded
housing development with their son, Jordan. The Mossbachers are agnostic
liberals with a passion for recycling and fitness. Camped out in a ravine at
the bottom of the canyon are Cándido and América Rincón, a Mexican couple
who have crossed the border illegally. On the edge of starvation, they
search desperately for work in the hope of moving into an apartment before
their baby is born. They cling to their vision of the American dream, which,
no matter how hard they try to achieve it, manages to elude their grasp at
every turn.
A chance, violent encounter brings together Delaney and
Cándido, instigating a chain of events that eventually culminates in a
harrowing confrontation. The novel shifts back and forth between the two
couples, giving voice to each of the four main characters as their lives
become inextricably intertwined and their worlds collide. The Rincóns'
search for the American dream, and the Mossbachers' attempts to protect it,
comprise the heart of the story. In scenes that are alternately comic,
frightening, and satirical, but always all "too real," Boyle confronts not
only immigration but social consciousness, environmental awareness, crime,
and unemployment in a tale that raises the curtain on the dark side of the
American dream.
The United States and Immigration
The
debate over immigration continues to escalate across the nation,
particularly in California, and this sampling of quotations and statistics
from various newspapers and magazines sheds light on the
issue.
History suggests that those who truly yearn to come to America
and stay will find a way to do it. (Newsweek, August 9, 1993)
In November 1994, California passed by a 59% to 41% vote Proposition
187, a bill that denies certain social privileges, mainly welfare, public
schooling, and non-emergency medical care, to illegal immigrants. (The
New York Times, November 11, 1994)
California hosts about 40% of
the nation's estimated 3.4 million illegal immigrants. (Time,
November 21, 1994)
"All Americans...are rightly disturbed by the
large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.... We are a nation of
immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately
self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our
immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop
it." (President Clinton, "We Heard America Shouting," Address to Joint
Session of Congress, January 25, 1995)
"Our immigration policy is a
measure of who we are as a people. I believe we are a people who draw
strength from our diversity and meet our challenges head on. I believe we
want and deserve immigration laws that favor those who play by the rules."
(Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator, New Jersey, The New Jersey Record, June
8, 1995)
About 800,000 people follow the rules and enter the United
States legally as immigrants each year. An additional 200,000 to 300,000
come to the country illegally. (San Francisco Chronicle, December 5,
1995)
Half of illegal immigrants do not cross the borders
unlawfully—they enter legally and overstay their visas. (San Francisco
Chronicle, March 18, 1996)
T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in 1948 and grew up in Peekskill,
New York. He is a graduate of the State University of New York at Potsdam,
and received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the
University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at
the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his
middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan, the name of one of his Irish
ancestors.
Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979),
Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy
Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East
(1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie
starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has
appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker,
Esquire, Harper's, The Paris Review, and The
Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three
children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the
architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
What is the significance of the title of the
book?
The title comes from a common phrase for the Mexican border,
The Tortilla Curtain, and I envision it in this way. We have the Iron
Curtain, which as an image is impenetrable. You picture this wall across
Eastern Europe. Then we have the Bamboo Curtain with regard to China. As I
see it, that isn't quite as impenetrable as an iron curtain. It shatters
easily and has gaps in it. It's not uniform. And now we have The Tortilla
Curtain, which is the opposite of impregnable. It's three strips of
barbed wire with some limp tortillas hanging on it. The central question of
this, and of the images of walls that appear throughout the book—the walls,
the gates, walling people out, what do you wall in, all of that—has to do
with us as a species and who owns what. Do you really own your own property?
Do you have a right to fence people out? Do we have an obligation to assist
people who come over that border, that wall, that gate? How is it that
Americans are allowed to have this incredible standard of living while
others do not? All of these questions, I think, are wrapped up in my view of
our debate over immigration.
What is your view on immigration?
I feel that, on the one hand, we do have a right to be a sovereign
nation and to protect our borders. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of
legal immigration, and no other country in the world allows this sort of
thing to happen. On the other hand, what I object to even more than that is
this kind of demonizing of a whole race and class of people, as in
considering all Mexicans, all Guatemalans, all Salvadorans to be bad because
they're invading our country as impoverished and ignorant individuals. The
final gesture of the book, I think, shows you that we are one species and we
do have to understand and appreciate that fact despite ethnic and national
differences. But it's a small gesture because I think that it's a very, very
complex issue that people have to work towards answering.
As an
epigraph to the book you use a quotation from The Grapes of Wrath.
Did you have John Steinbeck's novel in mind when you wrote The Tortilla
Curtain?
I'm not trying to re-write Steinbeck in any way. I
chose the epigraph from him because I wanted to see how the ethos of the
1930s, and the traditional liberal ethos of providing for everybody, is
applied to today.
The book is essentially set in your own backyard.
Did this prompt you to write it? Did the proposal and passing of Proposition
187 (a bill passed in California that denies certain social benefits to
illegal immigrants) factor in?
The book was somewhat misunderstood
because it came out after the 187 vote, and people attacked the book or
enjoyed it based on their own perspective. The book was actually conceived
and written prior to Proposition 187's even being drafted, and I think it
came from the fact that I lived in Los Angeles for sixteen years. Reading
about immigration in the newspaper every day and talking to people at
parties like the ones that Delaney and Kyra give, I began to get a sense of
something brewing that was akin to what happened here in Steinbeck's day,
but had the added element that the Okies of today are not American citizens
and they're of a different race.
Do you see The Tortilla Curtain
as a political novel?
I think obviously people will want to
talk about 187, and the campaign to draft a national bill like 187, but this
book isn't a political novel in the sense that it takes a position and is
meant to have people agree or disagree with that position. It's political in
a different sense. I don't think political novels work because they have "an
ax to grind." If you have "an ax to grind," then you have to sacrifice
aesthetics and the discovery of the book in order to make your point or to
make people join your party or to see your point of view. I write a book
like The Tortilla Curtain from having lived here and picked up on
everything going on that finally resulted in 187, and from trying to sort
out my own feelings. I don't have a position when I begin a book, any book.
I write in order to put some hypothetical elements together and see what
will happen. I don't know what's going to happen even chapter by chapter,
and I don't know what's going to happen at the end of the book. That's a
process of discovery, which is why I write novels rather than, let's say, a
polemic, to discover how I feel about the issues, but particularly about
this issue.
Critics and readers on both sides of the immigration
issue had mixed reactions to The Tortilla Curtain. Why do you think
the book generated so much controversy?
I'm not presenting any
answers, and I think that's why the book was very controversial. People want
a polemic. They want to raise their fist in the air and say, "Yes, you're on
our side." Well, I'm not on your side. I am presenting a fable, a fiction,
so that you can judge for yourself. A lot of people simply read the book and
flew off the handle because it either accords with what they want it to or
it doesn't. People want things to be very clear-cut. Here's the issue and
here's how I stand on it. But I think it's much more complex. I think it has
to do with biology. You may notice that Delaney is a nature writer. Well,
nature writers are generally very liberal, even radically liberal on all
issues except one—the issue of immigration, on which they are more
reactionary than anyone. The reason for this is they argue that there are
six billion people on the planet now, and who is the enemy of the
environment? Who is the enemy of clean air, clean water, all the dwindling
animal species? Well, it's us. Us, human beings. Our species. And this is an
element of the book which is very important and has been overlooked. There
is this population pressure on the world in all the industrial nations, not
simply the United States. England, Germany, and France all have huge
influxes of immigrants, and I'm wondering, what does this mean and how are
people going to deal with it? I think ultimately, as you see in The
Tortilla Curtain, it may simply exacerbate racist
tendencies.
What research did you do to prepare for the writing of
The Tortilla Curtain?
It may sound silly, but I've always
felt an affection for Mexico and Mexican culture. I grew up in New York, as
you may know, and the language I studied from eighth grade on was Spanish.
In fact, the only language I can speak besides English is Spanish. I've
always been attracted to the culture, and even before I moved to California
I had traveled in Mexico and Central America. When I decided to write this
book, I knew that I had to see one thing only. And that was the fence at the
border. So I went back to Tijuana, where I hadn't been for some years, and
spent the day there. I talked to people. I walked along the fence. I saw
people waiting to climb over the fence with little plastic bags with
everything they owned in them. I saw the border guards eyeing me
suspiciously from the other side. I saw the huge fence the U.S. is building
out into the water, and so on, just to get a feel for that again and see
what it's like. And it's a real war zone, it's a real disaster, Tijuana, let
me tell you.
The search for the American dream is a theme that
resounds throughout The Tortilla Curtain. Do you think there is such
a thing as the American dream?
I've addressed this throughout all
of my work, our material obsession, all the stuff I've written about eating
and how much we have and the surfeit of things; my story "Filthy with
Things," for instance. What is the American dream? Well, the American dream
is, "you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you make it, you have a house,
you live in the suburbs, and you drive a new car." What is that? That is a
material dream. If you have nothing, then you have material dreams.
Presumably, if you have an education and you have enough to eat, then you
can have aesthetic dreams or humanistic dreams. Easy for me to say. I have
every material thing I could want. I didn't become a writer to make money. I
became a writer because that is my obsession and that's how I view the
world. As a novelist, my job is to try to inhabit people of any culture, to
be a person of another sex, or another race, or another ethnic group. I
think it helps me to understand them, and it helps the reader to understand
them, too.
What writers do you admire? Have any of them influenced
your work?
I admire hundreds of writers of the past and present and
many, many of them have influenced my work. A writer who has influenced me
with regard to this type of book is Steinbeck because I'm re-examining his
ethos, as we said. In terms of satire, people like Flannery O'Connor and
Evelyn Waugh have been influential on me, writers who are sort of angry
about the way things are happening in society, and so they hold up certain
behaviors to ridicule.
What are you working on now?
I'm
working on a historical novel entitled Riven Rock about the psychopathology
of love. It's set in my new hometown of Santa Barbara, and it deals with
actual historical figures. The story centers around Stanley McCormick, the
son of the man who invented the reaper, and his wife, Katherine Dexter. It's
quite a wonderful and extraordinary love story.
- At the beginning of the story, Delaney accidentally hits
Cándido with his car. "For a long moment, they stood there, examining each
other, unwitting perpetrator and unwitting victim." How does this encounter
set the tone for the events that follow? Does it come full circle in the
final scene?
- The novel is forged on the cultural, social, and
financial differences between the Mossbachers and the Rincóns. It alternates
between the two couples' points of view, allowing the reader to enter the
lives of both families. How does this technique propel the story? Do you
feel that you got to know each of the couples equally well? Was the author
fair in his portrayal of each of the couples? Is he too harsh in his
portrayal of the Mossbachers, as one reviewer suggested?
- Cándido
and America crossed the border in search of a better life for themselves and
their unborn child. They do not ask for much and are willing to work hard,
yet they are constantly met with resistance and failure. There are numerous
references to Cándido's bad luck. Is he unlucky? Is there anything he could
have done to have changed his luck? What does this story say about the
American dream?
- The symbol of the coyote appears throughout the
novel and represents illegal Mexican immigrants. In his nature column,
Delaney writes, "The coyote is not to blame—he is only trying to survive,
to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him."
He concludes the same column by writing, "The coyotes keep coming, breeding
up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are
cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable." How do these passages reflect
Delaney's mixed feelings about illegal immigrants? Is he a hypocrite? As the
novel progresses, Delaney's humanistic beliefs give way to racism and
resentment, and he directs his rage at all illegal immigrants onto Cándido.
When confronted with evidence that Cándido is not the vandal at Arroyo
Blanco, he destroys it. Why does Delaney need to believe that the vandal is
Cándido? How does Delaney evolve from being a "liberal humanist" to a
racist?
- Boundaries—both real and imagined—play a large role in
the novel, especially the front gate at Arroyo Blanco Estates. In what other
instances do boundaries appear and what do they represent? What roles do the
different characters play in constructing these boundaries?
- In a
recent interview Boyle stated, "If it's satire, it has to bite somebody, has
to have teeth in it, otherwise it's useless." How does satire affect The
Tortilla Curtain and the telling of the story? Is it a successful
technique?
- The novel concludes with Delaney confronting Cándido
with a gun, followed by a mud slide. In an almost simultaneous moment,
Cándido realizes his baby is missing and reaches down to offer Delaney a
hand. One is a frightening image and the other an act of generosity. How do
these contrasting images play off one another? Did the conclusion leave you
with a feeling of hope or despair?
- During an argument with Jack
Jardine, Delaney makes the following statement: "Do you realize what you're
saying? Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country—and neither of us
would be standing here today if it wasn't." In another instance, Jack says
to Delaney, "What do you expect, when all you bleeding hearts want to invite
the whole world in here to feed at our trough without a thought as to who's
going to pay for it, as if the American taxpayer was like Jesus Christ with
his loaves and fishes." How do these two sentiments play out in the novel
and in the larger issue of immigration?
- The author stated in the
Conversation section of this guide that he feels it is a novelist's job to
inhabit people of other races and sexes, for his own understanding of an
issue as well as for the reader's. Did The Tortilla Curtain help you
to better understand the issue of immigration and the people
involved?
- The author does not offer a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, for which he was praised by several reviewers. Do you think he should have offered a solution?
