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Trauma and the 710

Postmetropolitan space, in its capacity to transform and absorb communities, is constantly in a state of growth and transition. Preplanned communities stretch the boundaries of urban space, and “edge cities,” Joel Garreau’s term for self-sustaining suburban zones on the fringes of the city, are incorporated into the metropolitan area at a rapid pace. Inner-city freeway systems facilitate this growth, and as quickly as these systems are built, the neighborhoods and communities that they carve their way through are transformed and forgotten.

Their Dogs Came with Them describes the transformation of an East L.A. barrio in the 1960s, when the construction of the 710 and 60 freeway interchange displaced residents of the community and perpetrated devastating institutional violence on the Mexican American families who lived there. Viramontes follows several characters within the novel’s ten-year frame, revealing how the freeway construction contributes to the dissolution of the neighborhood and places residents in positions of psychological and physical vagrancy. Their Dogs probes the traumatic effects of the loss of community and, more broadly, addresses the widespread material, social, and psychological impact of urban growth on individuals living in the postmetropolis.
One of the chief concerns for Viramontes and her characters is the possibility of confronting trauma in a city under constant transformation, where construction and growth is continually erasing important sites of cultural and social production. As many critics have noted, postmetropolitan cities, unlike their European predecessors, do not lay claim to history as a defining component of their identity (Jameson, Postmodernism 16). Rather, growth, transformation, and adaptability prove more vital to accommodating large populations and facilitating the flow of labor and consumption. Perpetually in a state of erasure, then, history has difficulty locating itself in posturban zones, and city-dwellers, therefore, lack access to spaces that facilitate the processing of trauma; the traumatic event occurs, paradoxically, as postmetropolitan growth erases sites of memory, and, in this erasure, precludes the very possibility for confronting
trauma—through urban space—on personal or collective levels. These sites of memory, or what Pierre Nora has termed “lieux de memoire,” function as critical repositories for individual and cultural memory, and, more importantly, provide sites in which to contest institutional, archival history. In Their Dogs, memory is invested in the physical sites of the barrio, which connect its residents to their Mexican American heritage. Erasing these sites of memory and co-opting the channels necessary for psychological and spatial production, the city enacts subtle, but powerful, institutional violence.
For Viramontes and her characters, these lieux de memoire are, from the novel’s first pages, under threat of erasure. She writes, “In a few weeks, Chavela’s side of the neighborhood, the dead side of the street, would disappear forever. The earthmovers had anchored, their tarps whipping like banging sails, their bellies petroleum-readied to bite trenches wider than rivers. In a few weeks the blue house and all the other houses would vanish just like Chavela and all the other neighbors” (12).⁵ In this opening chapter, the unnamed “Zumaya child” (5), later revealed to be the orphaned Ermila, confronts the realities of urban erasure, as her grandmother, Chavela, is forced to evacuate her home to make way for the freeway construction. Viramontes here establishes the house’s critical role as a




⁵ Viramontes’ descriptions of the destruction being wrought by the “earthmovers,” which appear throughout the novel, hearken back to Steinbeck’s description of the bulldozers churning the Oklahoma landscape in The Grapes of Wrath. Like Steinbeck’s bulldozers, Viramontes’ earthmovers are symbols of institutional power. If one were to take this further, the intertextual resonances between the two works could position Their Dogs, itself, as a kind of textual lieu de memoire, insofar as it provides a site for a particular, discursively-defined set of memory practices.