Their Dogs Came with Them.

• Author: Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod
• Position: Book review

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Their Dogs Came with Them, by Helena Maria Viramontes. New York: Atria, 2007.

Born in East Los Angeles, Helena Maria Viramontes represents the longstanding Chicano community, a Spanglish-speaking population that preserves a perhaps nostalgic sense of Mexico's cultural essence no longer recognized by modern Mexicans. While her first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, was an eloquent if chilling description of farm-worker life in Central California, her substantial new novel is not centered on the Chicano experience. It could take place in any US urban community, in conditions where modernization and sprawl leave older zones in decay and human lives in disregard.

The characters in Their Dogs Came with Them are not immigrants. They were born in the United States and are disenfranchised, starving, seeking shelter at night in a cemetery. A main character became involved with gangs when she was eleven, but these now exist peripherally; she prefers to survive on her own. "Turtle" is on the streets because her parents split and her mother left the state. The person who cared for her, her older brother, died in Vietnam. On one occasion, she sits on a crumbling home's porch--on the "living" side of First Street--contemplating the bulldozers that inhabit the other side, now demolished. These creatures inhabit her old neighborhood for years, while a freeway ramp is built.

Other main characters, whose perspectives are interspersed, include Ermila, also from First Street; Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries from Texas who minister to the homeless; and Aria, who becomes friends with Tranquilina as they both try to help her at-times disappeared, mentally ill brother. Ana and her brother are the children of a middle-class, strict, and abusive father, and a Mexican mother who deserted. Tranquilina suffered a trauma in Texas, but never revealed it to her much older parents, who seem more like children she cares for. She and Aria possess a calming, healing presence and great sensitivity as they move through the milieu of despairing lives. Ermila's parents are stated to have died during the 1960s movement. She was at first in foster care, then sent to live with her aging and nearly destitute grandparents on First Street.

Their Dogs Came with Them does not easily fit a genre. Part historical--documenting the experience of a Los Angeles demolished in the early 1960s for the expansion of the freeway system--it also has a science-fiction...