Los Angeles is a metropolis physically interrupted by freeways and demographically fragmented into isolated pockets of race and class. The geographer Edward W. Soja describes contemporary LA as being “difficult to grasp persuasively in a temporal narrative for it generates too many conflicting images, confounding historization, always seeming to stretch laterally instead of unfolding sequentially” (Postmodern 222). Helena Maria Viramontes explores the sprawled and concurrent identities of LA using a nonlinear narrative focused on the disenfranchised residents of East Los Angeles, communicating this “difficult to grasp” urban space through the novel’s fractured narrative style and content. This article analyzes how Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) articulates East Los Angeles through the use of imagery, memory, and movement. The first section deals with the figurative language—metaphor—that binds the characters to their environment and vice versa. The second section analyzes the theme of memory and its impermanence as it relates to the fractured nature of this city and its disruptive freeways. Finally, this article examines the “tactile apprehension,” a la Michel de Certeau’s theorizing of walking in the city, found in the different modes and velocities of transportation as concurrent but divergent modes of articulation (Practice 97). I argue that the novel presents multiple experiences of the city, which reveal not only the way the geography impacts the community it contains but also ways the Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming independent spatial meaning. Set in East Los Angeles during the 1960s, Their Dogs Came with Them tells the story of four female protagonists who struggle through the isolation and turbulence plaguing their community. A high school student living with her grandparents, Ermilia Zumaya undergoes a political awakening. Ana works in an office and struggles to take care of her mentally unstable brother Ben. Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, contemplates the role of faith in her violent surroundings. Finally, Antonia Gamboa, a young female gang member known as “Turtle,” lives on the street while passing as a male. A major source of disruption is the construction of freeways, which has led to entire neighborhoods being razed and bulldozed into oblivion. Furthermore, a Quarantine Authority, set up to protect the residents from rabid dogs, polices and regulates the movement of the community. The action of the novel moves fluidly between the past and the present with a few blank lines between paragraphs marking a leap