A writer’s particular lens on the place where he or she grew up is distinctive. Even when you gather a group of writers who grew up in the same geographical region, they’re likely to perceive those closely situated locations from a range of angles. The streets might be the same, but what the writer sees about those streets and cities is different. Another California Book Club title, Stay True, by Hua Hsu, places readers in Northern California on the UC Berkeley campus. The East Bay looks different to CBC author Tommy Orange in his novel There, There. Similarly, our upcoming title Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, by D. J. Waldie, takes us into Lakewood in Southern California, roughly 22 minutes from South El Monte, where Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is set; both locations are in Los Angeles County and yet are quite different.
Fragoza’s collection of 10 stories follows the lives of characters grappling with seemingly insurmountable challenges such as grief, trauma, rage, and the experience of being consumed—both metaphorically and literally. With each turn of the page, characters and metaphors are used to weave a living tapestry of unease that simultaneously navigates both the real-life San Gabriel Valley and the story’s emotional landscape.
While fantastical elements are present in some stories, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You also portrays the Los Angeles region that shaped Fragoza’s upbringing. She grew up in South El Monte near the San Gabriel River. Fragoza’s South El Monte disrupts what she sees as a common stereotype that Chicanos predominantly live in urban spaces. Her childhood unfolded in what could be likened to the suburbs—an area not characterized as white-collar but rather a diverse community encompassing individuals of Mexican, Cambodian, and Southeast Asian descent. We experience this region throughout the collection in both large and small ways: when one of the narrators describes walking over concrete and dirt paths to get to a swap meet or when a character’s surroundings are struck by lightning (and sagging houses border undeveloped land) or even when Emmanuel, one of Fragoza’s characters, is introduced as being from South El Monte.
“There’s something about this place that really feeds our imagination and provides a fertile background,” said Fragoza in an interview with Zyzzyva. El Monte and the San Gabriel Valley have also shaped the fiction of Salvador Plascencia, Michael Jaime-Becerra, and Toni Margarita Plummer, Fragoza said.
In Plascencia’s debut novel, The People of Paper, El Monte undergoes a captivating fictionalization. It serves as the vibrant stage for Plascencia’s imaginative narrative about a divorced father and his lime-addicted daughter, who immerse themselves in a flower-picking community that transforms into the epicenter of the novel’s spiraling complexities. The city is vividly depicted through both deliberate acknowledgment (“fifteen hundred miles from the city of Guadalajara, and while there were no cockfights or wrestling arenas, the curanderos’ botanica shops, the menudo stands, and the bell towers of the Catholic churches had also pushed north”) and nods to the community, such as the inclusion of the El Monte Flores street gang and a description of the familiar experience of consuming menudo before church.
Jaime-Becerra, the author of the short story collection Every Night Is Ladies’ Night, is another author whose work is deeply informed by El Monte. Readers are brought into the lives of Mexican American characters navigating the streets of El Monte in the 1980s: Jose Luis arrives from Chihuahua. Pregnant Mini is trying to survive in El Monte with her young nephew. Unlike Fragoza’s and Plascencia’s books, Jaime-Becerra’s stories eschew the fantastical. Instead, they plunge into realistic, tangible challenges. Mariachis, mechanics, teenage girls, and concerned mothers grapple with the complexities of moving forward. El Monte’s streets, drawn with specific detail, serve as familiar images for those acquainted with the area: “To make up some time, Georgie decides to go down Valley Boulevard instead of taking Garvey into El Monte. The banks and the movie theaters and department stores with shiny display windows give way to thrift stores and feed shops with gold pyramids made of hay.”
Plummer developed the stories of her title character in The Bolero of Andi Rowe: Stories largely within the setting of the San Gabriel Valley. The tales unravel the problems Andi encounters as she embarks on her journey in Southern California and also grant readers intimate access to others’ intrapersonal conflicts: a border guard navigates the weight of his profession and his family history; a woman finds unanticipated dimensions to her attraction to an employee. Plummer writes of the landscape, “The houses in South El Monte all look more or less the same. There are variations in the placement and size of their windows, in the shape and depth of their porches. But mostly they are just one-story boxes with stucco slapped on.”
Fragoza is not the first to have written about this bustling community (and she won’t be the last), but in her interview with Zyzzyva, she expressed her hope for others who write about the city. She said: “I’m a strong believer in place-based writing, and to me that means the places will tell you the stories. It’s not necessary, and maybe not correct either, to come in and try to tell the story about a place when the place has its own stories. The stories are there, and it’s our job to listen to them.”•
Join us on December 21 at 5 p.m., when Fragoza will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Kelly Link to discuss Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
