"A Study Guide for Helena Mar?a Viramontes's ""Their Dogs Came with Them"""
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"A Study Guide for Helena Mar?a Viramontes's ""Their Dogs Came with Them""" - Gale
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A Study Guide for Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them
Helena María Viramontes
2007
Introduction
Their Dogs Came with Them, by Helena María Viramontes, was published in 2007. The title of the novel is drawn from a passage in The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, by Miguel León-Portilla, which describes how the conquerors' dogs ran on ahead of them. In Viramontes's novel, the dogs have a different significance. There is an outbreak of rabies in the East Los Angeles community where the characters live, which must be controlled by the Quarantine Authority (QA). However, the QA officers also use the quarantine as an excuse to control and persecute the neighborhood's Mexican American residents.
The novel, which takes place from 1960 to 1970, tells the separate stories of several characters, whose story lines intertwine. A freeway expansion is tearing the neighborhood apart, with bulldozers leveling homes and displacing families. The intersections and branches of the freeway become a metaphor for the characters' lives, which take place near each other but never really touch.
Through the experiences of four young women—Turtle, Ermila, Tranquilina, and Ana—Viramontes explores themes of patriarchy in the Chicano community, discrimination, segregation, violence, and poverty. Viramontes writes in a lyrical style, using many metaphors, similes, and stream-of-consciousness techniques that sometimes blur the lines between time periods and events. As the book contains graphic depictions of violence, frequent profanity, and sexual situations, it is best suited to mature readers.
Author Biography
Viramontes was born on February 26, 1954, in East Los Angeles, California. Her father, Serafin Bermudez Viramontes, had only a third-grade education and labored as a construction worker, while her mother, Maria Luisa La Brada, worked in the home. Viramontes was one of nine children, and the family also welcomed into their home friends and relatives who had recently immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico. To help make ends meet, the entire family spent the summers in central and northern California working as piscadores (harvesters), picking grapes.
A self-described bookworm,
Viramontes attended Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. The student body was predominantly Hispanic, and in 1968 students at Garfield participated in a walkout to protest the unequal quality of education offered to Chicanos. The neighborhood where Viramontes grew up was one of those bulldozed to make way for freeway expansion in Los Angeles, a major motif in Their Dogs Came with Them. After high school, Viramontes attended the progressive Immaculate Heart College with the aid of a scholarship, graduating in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in English literature.
In 1977, Viramontes's first short story, Requiem for the Poor,
won first prize for fiction in a contest sponsored by Statement, a journal for literature and art published by California State University, Los Angeles. She won the prize again the following year for her story Broken Web.
Viramontes entered the creative writing MFA program at the University of California (UC) at Irvine in 1979 but withdrew in 1981 after, as she related to Jeff Kass for the Los Angeles Times, a professor told her not to write about Chicanos, but to write about people.
While attending the program, she met Eloy Rodriguez, a biology professor, whom she married in 1983.
In the 1980s Viramontes's work began to receive more critical attention. She published her first short-story collection in 1985, titled The Moths and Other Stories. In 1988, she collaborated with María Herrera-Sobek, a professor of Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, to publish Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature, a collection of Chicana writing. The term