Woodhead 2#

Dylan Woodhead

Act 2, Curtains Up

T.C. Boyle, in his novel Tortilla Curtain, uses a despairing, somber tone that makes reading the book challenging. The positives and encouraging events that occurred to the main characters in the book are repeatedly met with incidents of hopelessness. It seems as though everything good that happens to Candido or even Delaney is continuously met with unanticipated negative occurrences that constantly setback their advances. One example is Candido's savings, which he had earned from working for “3.25$ an hour” as a laborer for a “gaucho boss... five days in a row.” (195) After saving over 300 dollars, “they closed down the labor exchange” forcing him and America to travel outside of the Arroyo to Canoga Park, with all their money and belongings in tow, to look for work. There, Candido was offered a job by a sketchy man whose “Spanish had a North American twang to it.” (209) Candido followed him away from America and preceded to be hit with a baseball bat over his head and robbed of every penny he had. He returned to America dejected and devastated, similar to the feelings he had after his camp burned down on Thanksgiving, he return after unsuccessful days of finding work, or Delaney and Kyra’s feeling of powerlessness after the Coyote captured and killed their last dog. Boyle’s voice of despair is found throughout the book’s characters and emerges in the unfortunate events that occur to them. Its almost like Boyle’s plot line continuously goes down, never once spiking up representing a positive outcome for Candido or Delaney. Boyle’s tone and events makes the book a difficult read because of the sense of lost hope; every time it (hope) begins to form, it is once again crushed by a defining blow from an outside source.

I think Boyle, in his book Tortilla Curtain, is arguing for recognition; recognition of the difficulties and massive hardships many immigrants face everyday, and how we generally take for granted our lives, especially in Marin. I think this idea is largely and prominently represented in the title of his book, the Tortilla Curtain. The title is play on words, based on the term: The Iron Curtain, which represented the virtual and physical wall separating East Germany and Soviet Russia from the rest of the world. The Tortilla Curtain represents the hidden nature of the lives of many immigrants and the secrecy they are forced into not only by our nation's Foreign Policy, but by the public eye which is thoroughly conveyed in the book through the Arroyo community. The community that doesn’t place all the blame for the “carjackings, chop shops, (and) criminality” solely “on the Mexicans” but “everybody--Salvadorans, Iranians, Russians, Vietnamese.” (147) While many of the citizens of Blanco Arroyo are practically living in paradise with their plush homes, expensive cars, and healthy foods, they are oblivious to the distress of their local outsiders, only making it more difficult for them by paying little to nothing for a days labor and destroying the labor exchange, (192) a place that harbors their last hopes of reaching the American dream. Additionally, Boyle’s failure to present a large positive event in the book also supports the feeling of desperation for the immigrants, which creates sympathy and therefore recognition with reader (something has to stick to the reader in order for his/her to remember the problem or argument, in this case Boyle uses sympathy). In Tortilla Curtain, Boyle attempts to persuade the reader to identify a problem he believes is important, bringing it to light with a plotline of despair that connects with the readers heartstrings.