The lacuna between California’s humanistic political reputation and the grim reality of the state’s treatment of immigrants, the unsheltered, and those without means is illustrated to great effect in T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain. The novel is set in Southern California’s Topanga Canyon, where the upper class builds gated communities of mansions into combustible hillsides and two undocumented immigrants seek safety in the camouflage of brush.
Early in the novel, Delaney Mossbacher hits Cándido Rincón: “Delaney’s first thought was for the car…and then for his insurance rates…and finally, belatedly, for the victim.” He hands Cándido a twenty and sends him staggering away. Chapters alternate between the irony of Mossbacher’s self-soothing upper-class liberalism and Cándido’s struggle to stay alive with his young wife, América.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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The Tortilla Curtain satirizes Californians’ NIMBYism. “Somebody had to do something about these people,” thinks Delaney’s wife, Kyra. “They were ubiquitous, prolific as rabbits, and they were death for business.” Boyle uses hyperbole but turns a mirror on what California purports to be. What the rich couple do, what so many do, is report undocumented workers seeking employment, build a wall, and guard themselves.
Boyle lights the American dream on fire. Any epiphanies belong to Delaney, a ridiculous stereotype; Boyle indicts us for expecting them as much as he indicts his privileged white characters. The canyon burns and slides away, as does any pretense of California as a refuge for Cándido or América. There’s no salvation.•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
