CCQC Carmen Colosi

In T.C. Boyle`s The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle describes the culture of Arroyo Blanco Estates to sound vaguely familiar to the culture in Marin County. In Marin, many people are concerned about their intake of unhealthy foods and are very serious about their daily vitamins and minerals. In the Novel, Kyra--a middle class woman-- makes sure that her son gets his, “medley of fresh fruit each morning,” while she, “ washes down her twelve separate vitamin and mineral supplements” (31). Marin County is crawling with health food stores such as Good Earth advocating that one should eat consciously and thus creating a culture of people spending a good amount of time trying to find foods that are GMO-free, Gluten-free, and 100% vegan. Likewise in the novel, “Delaney was awake at 7,” in order to make his family a breakfast that included, “fresh fruit, granola with skin milk and brewer`s yeast, high fiber bar...Vitamins. Whole Grains” (33-34). Delaney spends around 2 hours of his day focused on the production of a healthy and wholesome breakfast with the fervor that a stereotypical Marinite would put into their diet.

  In The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, the scene where America is brutally attacked and raped is placed next to the scene where Delaney is at the car dealership looking to buy a new car to replace his stolen car highlights the irony of Delaney`s upsettedness at his “problems” and stolen car. America the young immigrant who lives in the creek bed comes home after a day of work to find two men waiting for her and eventually, “his fingers moved inside her, in her private parts, squirting acid into her” (141). Boyle then goes on to describe how upset the white man Delaney is about how his car was stolen after he came back from his hike by saying that he felt, “violated, taken, ripped off “ (146) By placing a passage about rape next to a passage about a stolen car, the passage about rape comes off as more important than the one about a stolen car. Boyle emphasizes the irony of the extent to which Delaney is upset about his minuscule problems.