La urbanización de la comunidad chicana en la novela Their Dogs Came With Them de Helena María Viramontes

Abstract

Boyle Heights is one of the poor communities in East Los Angeles that went through a geographic displacement during the 1960s and whose fictional story is narrated in Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them. The human and cultural tapestry of the Chicano community, narrated in the text, is inextricably connected to the destruction of space, the construction of roads, the search for identity, the vigilance of security, and the survival of the individual in the past, the present, and the future. Viramontes’s fictional work helps us understand how the community of Boyle Heights became not only a segregated space, but also a resource of cheap labor for the downtown businesses and for the city as a whole. The analysis of this novel concentrates on the interpretation of the symbolic realities lived by the characters and how the geographic displacement shapes the characters’ coming of age. Utilizing David Harvey’s theory on the ‘Urbanization of Consciousness’, this paper analyzes the narrator’s description of the physical and social space and how this description conveys an ideological message that points to the process of urbanization in a capitalist society.