No tierra firme : Retrieving Loss in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

Abstract

Helena Maria Viramontes’s 2007 novel Their dogs came with them conjures up the life of a few blocks in the Chicano barrio of East L. A. As ecocritics would put it, the narrative is firmly “emplaced” and as such it belongs to a well established tradition of Chicano and Chicana narratives testifying to the power of fiction in helping maintain a sense of community and territory. Yet, the story also makes it clear that the time of origin is a time of loss, and that bonding rituals are rituals of death. Meanwhile, the persistent marks of a lost native tongue endow the narrative with a ghostly quality suggesting that the only community it may produce is a shaky one, in a ghost town whose phantom citizens are united by a common experience of loss, which becomes the creative energy at the heart of fiction.