5 Books to Read After ‘The Flowers’

Dagoberto Gilb never explicitly states which city his marvelous 2008 coming-of-age novella, The Flowers, takes place in—but almost all readers immediately assume Los Angeles.

Why? That gorgeous cover of a big-eyed Latina in front of a Spanish revival apartment complex, a lit-up city skyline behind it. Racist, humorless cops. The riot that serves as the climax—oh, and the fact that Gilb grew up in the City of Angels.

But it’s very telling that many critics have placed the setting of The Flowers in the Eastside, which encompasses the Boyle Heights neighborhood of L.A. and unincorporated East Los Angeles. It has served as the cultural and political seat of Mexican American life in the city for decades.

That assumption is a problem.

From Hollywood to TikTok, politics to literature, too many people depict and consider the Eastside the sine qua non of Latino L.A. That erases the millions of Latinos spread out across the grand metropolis with distinct histories, identities, and even lingo, from the working-class Oaxacans who ended up in the wealthy Westside to escape the racism of other Mexican immigrants to the middle-class South Americans of the San Fernando Valley, which too many Americans still think is stuck in the era of Licorice Pizza.

My guess is that The Flowers takes place in South Los Angeles, the historical heart of Black L.A. that has been majority Latino for decades. The clues are there if you pay attention: Pink, the albino Black character, is treated not as an anomaly but an old-timer. The racist stepfather of the book’s protagonist, Cloyd, proudly describes himself as an “Okie,” the slur polite Californians put on Dust Bowl refugees that remains fighting words in some parts of the Southland.

Oh, and also the fact that Gilb grew up around Watts; the neighborhood’s namesake 1965 uprising happened not too far from where he lived.

Rereading this book—which deserves a place in the L.A. literary canon but probably never will get one because of its geographic opacity—made me think about other wonderful fiction works that tell the world about different parts of L.A. that are usually not associated with the Latino experience.

EAT THE MOUTH THAT FEEDS YOU

The terrain of a previous California Book Club selection, author Carribean Fragoza’s Yoknapatawpha County is the San Gabriel Valley, a collection of suburbs east of East L.A., nowadays most associated in the national imagination with its vibrant Asian American population. This 2021 instant classic rewrites Latinos into a region where they’ve been all along, mixing in dashes of surrealism and street smarts in the eyes of women, old and young, who have seen it all and know there’s more to come.

THE TATTOOED SOLDIER AND THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES

Former Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist Héctor Tobar has transformed into a modern-day James Baldwin through essays and nonfiction interrogating this country’s relationship with Latinos. But he’s also a hell of a Southern California writer for whom latinidad is as much a plot point as geography and as essential to the region’s identity as freeways. His 1998 debut novel, The Tattooed Soldier, follows the city’s Central American diaspora from their experience of the horrors of the Guatemalan civil war to their lives in the teeming neighborhoods of Pico-Union and Westlake in the weeks leading up to the 1992 L.A. riots. Far more playful—and caustic—is his send-up of my beloved Orange County, The Barbarian Nurseries, another former California Book Club selection. Protagonist Scott Torres masks his Angeleno roots in the gated estates of South Orange County, which his refined, Mexico City–born housekeeper, Araceli, discovers in a trek through the Southland that’s like a mestizo version of The Odyssey seen through Fox News.

SOME FINAL BEAUTY AND OTHER STORIES

Lisa Alvarez’s debut short story collection channels her many years of being a Mexican American English professor and activist in Santa Monica, in the deep canyons of Orange County and all points in between. What’s so beautiful about the profe’s approach to latinidad is how it allows for diversity of all sorts in these stories—spatial, class, demographic, even age. A navy veteran in the autumn of his life discovers that the FBI kept a file on him after he attended a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. in the 1940s. A hotshot politico who bears a striking resemblance to former L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tries to get a folk singer out of a tree. And, of course, January 6!

THE ENEMY SLEEPS

Latinos make up only about 17 percent of the population of Diamond Bar, a wealthy bedroom community bordering Orange County. It’s also the hometown of poet David A. Romero, whose mastery of the written form now extends to novels; his debut published this year. He uses coyotes as a metaphor for the anti-Latino racism that’s always bubbling beneath the surface in Southern California’s nicer communities, just waiting for an excuse to explode. But don’t count out the historical tricksters of the American Southwest, Romero argues: They’re survivors for a reason. Are they coyotes or Latinos? Why not both?

Join us on May 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Dagoberto Gilb will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Flowers. Register for the Zoom conversation here.

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