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Trauma and the 710: The New Metropolis in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arq.2014.0009

1558-9595

Dale Pattison,

Spatial and Cultural Studies

Trauma and the 710:The New Metropolis in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them Dale Pattison (bio) In this city, where suburb, strip, and urban center have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as places. Amidst the ruins of monuments no longer significant because deprived of their systematic status, and often of their corporeality, walking on the dust of inscriptions no longer decipherable because lacking so many words, whether carved in stone or shaped in neon, we cross nothing to go nowhere. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny How does a city “house” the memory of a people no longer at “home” there? James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge In recent decades, theories that explore the politcal dimensions of space have gained significant purchase in academic discourse. The works of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault have become required reading for scholars of literature, urban planning, architecture, sociology, and numerous other disciplines. Beginning in the 1950s, these foundational spatial theorists identified the vectors of power invested in space and the tensions existing between [End Page 115] individuals inhabiting space and the institutional forces that organize and discipline those spaces. While this brand of analysis has certainly proven valuable in furthering our understanding of institutional power in the city, and has likewise given individuals critical means of establishing themselves, politically, in urban spaces, relatively little has been said on the applicability of these theories to the contemporary American metropolis. The postwar American city—different, in kind, from the European cities that inspired these theories on space—in many ways denies opportunities for memory practices, social interaction, and political engagement. This article utilizes Helena María Viramontes’s 2007 novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, to discuss the political and psychological effects of urban transformation on city dwellers of the contemporary metropolis. Viramontes comments on the ways that the urban space of the “postmetropolis,” a term coined by urban theorist Edward Soja, affects individuals and forces them to deconstruct and confront their traumatic relationship to the city. When postmetropolitan urban transformation overlays and erases street-level community spaces, city dwellers are deprived of their political connection to urban space; this process is complicated by the simultaneous erasure of memory sites, which occurs as communities are sacrificed in the name of urban expansion. Describing the freeway construction in East Los Angeles in the 1960s, which permanently erased tightly knit Mexican American communities and, along with them, sites of cultural memory, Viramontes confronts the traumatic dimensions of the postmetropolis; applying theories on trauma and space to our reading of the novel exposes its deeper social and political contours. In emphasizing the traumatic relationship between her characters and their disappearing community, she identifies the psychologically deleterious effects of urban growth. Furthermore, Viramontes’s implicit commentary on postmetropolitan space suggests that our modes of understanding and utilizing urban space as a means of empowerment are perhaps no longer applicable in the cities of the twenty-first century. Viramontes’s commentary on urban space is in part embedded in the narrative strategies she utilizes, and the final section of this article addresses the connections between textual and urban space. Through complex narrative structures that involve the reader in the negotiation of textual space, Their Dogs simulates a postmetropolitan urban environment. Commenting on Los Angeles’s complex freeway system, [End Page 116] which sends city dwellers along predetermined urban pathways that preclude productive social exchange, Viramontes utilizes fragmented, decentered narratives that, in their violent intersections, suggest the impossibility of social growth and progress in the postmodern city; the intersecting freeways, she implies through her narrative strategies, will never foster productive social exchange. Understanding Viramontes’s textual strategies is crucial to understanding her commentary on the traumatic, politically repressive dimensions of the postmetropolis, and these strategies do much to explain the difficulties faced by her characters as they flounder in a hostile, institutionally...