The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle: Characters and the American Dream

Boyle's Motives and Personal Views on Immigration

The much-talked-about "American Dream" — that elusive vision of homeownership, educated and successful children, a middle-class income, and acceptance as a functioning part of the great, diverse U.S. economic and social structure — is but an "American Myth" to many immigrants arriving in this country. It is certainly a myth for many thousands of Mexicans coming to the United States and attempting to carve out a better life for themselves. Boyle's novel offers readers a close-up, graphically realistic view of the hardships that confront those immigrants, juxtaposed with the "good life" of an affluent family living behind stylish walls.

This review of The Tortilla Curtain compares and contrasts the main characters — Delaney Mossbacher (and his wife Kyra) and Candido Rincon (and his wife America) — in order to reach a greater understanding of those issues. The paper also incorporates the views of writers, critics, and scholars, drawing on academic journals, to address the broader picture of Chicano labor history and the deeper meaning behind Boyle's literary effort.

While the novel clearly seems to paint an empathetic picture of the horrors of being a Mexican immigrant in America, it is important to note that the author's personal views on the clash between illegal immigrants and affluent American citizens in the Southern California setting appear to be anything but empathetic. In fact, Boyle's views seem to coincide with those of the political right — that is, a strongly anti-immigrant position. Is it important to know an author's personal feelings about the emotional issues he confronts and writes about? The answer is yes, if one is truly searching for meaning, value, and truth in one's studies.

With that in mind, according to an in-depth research paper published in Studies in Contemporary Fiction on Boyle's novel (Hicks 2003), the author was interviewed prior to the novel's completion about his opinions on California's Proposition 187, which was approved by voters in 1994.

The passing of Proposition 187 (Mailman 1995) made immigrants "a much maligned species" and was "an effort to drive out undocumented aliens and to deter their entry by cutting them off from medical and other public services." According to Mailman's New York Law Journal article, Proposition 187 also cut off illegal immigrant children from attending schools in California. When you deny education to a cultural group arriving in the United States as immigrants, you effectively prevent them from raising their standard of living — keeping them in the trenches of manual labor.

The Character of Candido Rincon

When asked about Proposition 187 (Hicks 2003), Boyle opined that denying education to undocumented immigrants is not a good idea because "we don't want to make an underclass of untouchables and so on." But as to cutting off health and human services to illegal immigrants, and "rounding up people who are illegal aliens" — that is "good," Boyle stated. "It's the first step toward getting control over the borders," he continued. Allowing police and immigration authorities to "deport people" is a good idea, Boyle asserted, and "once deported, you should be fingerprinted and if caught again, you should be put in prison with hard labor."

Boyle added: "Not that I have anything against anybody, it's just that you have to have some determination in a free society as to who belongs in it and who doesn't."

It does not take long for the author to paint the picture that many affluent Southern Californians — and indeed many affluent Americans from coast to coast — hold of illegal immigrants. When readers first open the book, Delaney's car has hit Candido, "a frail scrambling hunched-over...dark little man with a wild look in his eye" (3). Candido had "red-flecked eyes" and "rotten teeth," and he had been "crouching in the bushes like some feral thing, like a stray dog or bird-mauling cat..." (4).

Delaney's first reaction, upon realizing he has hit another human being, is that Candido must be "obviously insane, demented, [or] suicidal." Delaney immediately worries about his insurance rates going up — a detail in screaming editorial contrast with the fact that there is an injured human being nearby — and frets about the damage to his car. When Delaney does attempt to locate the injured Candido in the bushes (6), he finds "a shopping cart, pocked with rust," which to any alert observer of American life signals a sad homeless person's plight. It also suggests a homeless lifestyle, and many Americans believe that homeless people have chosen that lifestyle rather than been thrust into it.

These initial descriptions cast Candido as something akin to a wild creature, not a human being. They set the tone, in terms of foreshadowing, for the rest of the story. Candido was a "jack-in-the-box" (7) — which is, of course, not only a toy but a chain of fast-food restaurants — and appeared as "loose-jointed as a doll flung in a corner by an imperious little girl." Worse yet, by getting in Delaney's way, Candido had "ruined [Delaney's] afternoon." Candido was nothing more than a "sad bundle of bone and gristle" who had been "launched...over the side of the canyon like a Ping-Pong ball shot out of a cannon."

As to Candido's experience of what happened, readers learn (16) that he "felt as if a bomb had gone off in his head," the kind of bomb that the Americans "dropped on the Japanese." Here, Boyle cleverly connects the fact that Delaney's automobile was a Japanese car — a freshly waxed Acura — and Candido, to complete the paradox, feels like a victim of America's atomic attack on Japan. The author may be subtly suggesting that just as the United States destroyed Japan yet Americans later embraced Japanese automobiles, so too might Americans one day embrace the Mexican contribution to the U.S. economy and Mexican culture more broadly. That may be a stretch, but when studying novels by skilled authors, one must remain open to all literary brushstrokes.

As to Candido's injuries — "the flesh was still and crusted, as if an old board had been nailed to his head" — Boyle seems to suggest that Candido is figuratively crucified, a kind of alien Christ. Readers also understand what would have happened had the roles been reversed: Delaney would have been rushed to a hospital in a state-of-the-art emergency vehicle, attended to by highly trained paramedics, and received the finest medical care available through his HMO. But, as Boyle suggests through descriptive narrative (17), none of that emergency care will be offered to the illegal Candido. Rather, he will be saved from the "vultures scrawling their ragged signatures in the sky" because "America would help him" by brewing "some tea from manzanita berries" to "combat the pain," while his young wife America bathed his wounds and fussed over him.

True to his humble status, Candido does not immediately feel like a martyr. Instead, he thinks of those worse off than himself, like "the penitents at Chalma, crawling a mile and a half on their knees, crawling till bone showed through the flesh."

Boyle has a knack in this novel for connecting and restating images to color his characters and maintain dramatic tension. On page 10, Delaney believes Candido has "vanished around the bend" while time seemed a "tattered fabric of used and borrowed moments." Then on page 20, Candido lies beside the fire his seventeen-year-old pregnant wife has built to keep him warm, "dreaming with his eyes open" of the day in his childhood when his father struck an opossum with a stick. "The opossum collapsed like a sack of cloth," Boyle writes, "and it lay there, white in the face and with the naked feet and tail of a giant rat, stunned and twitching." We find the phrase "tattered fabric" echoed in "a sack of cloth," and when Candido revives that memory of the stunned opossum, "that is how [Candido] felt now, just like that opossum." The author reinforces the idea that not only does Candido feel like an animal, but his people — these interlopers into rich U.S. territory — are treated like animals. Even if Candido did go to a doctor, which he could not afford, "the man from La Migra — the Immigration — would be standing there with his twenty questions and his clipboard."

Another repeated image Boyle uses is the cat. At the novel's opening (4), Delaney believes he hit something with the crudeness of a "bird-mauling cat." And on page 25, America rises early and tries to leave their crude campsite, moving "silent as a cat." Boyle's descriptive narrative for Candido eventually drops even below the animal kingdom. He turns to the vegetable world (24), describing the "crushed" left cheekbone as "staved in like the flesh of a rotting pumpkin." Then Boyle compares Candido's battered face to "one of those monsters that crawl out of moonlit graves in the movies." But, as the author pointedly observes, "who cared how ugly he was as long as he can work?" — and of course that is precisely why Mexicans come to the United States, for work, as part of the American Dream.

While poverty-stricken America and Candido are toughing it out in the brutally unwelcoming canyon environments around Los Angeles — notably Topanga Canyon — Delaney Mossbacher, an affluent writer, is penning his monthly column for a magazine called Wide Open Spaces. Ironically, Delaney has been writing about the "flora and fauna of Topanga Canyon" (32).

To Candido (49), that very canyon, with its "little clearing by the stream," its "leaves" and "rocks," seemed "unchanging, eternal, as dead as a photograph." Living there, he saw it as "a jail cell and he was a prisoner, incarcerated in his thoughts." At least prisoners had the opportunity to read, listen to a radio, or find a place to sit and "take a contemplative crap" — while for Candido, his prison was unchanging: he dozed, woke up, and slept again. There were no license plates to make or rocks to break. Just a sun that was always "in the same place in the sky" (50).

Some of the juxtapositions in this novel are so obvious they almost come across as didactic and slightly preachy, but they are, in the main, appropriate and effective. For example, the things that depress Delaney are issues such as the loss of habitat for the Florida manatee, the spotted owl, the panda, and the pine marten, and the "steady and relentless degradation of the environment" in general. "There were days when he worked himself into such a state he could barely lift his fingers to the keys." How ironic that Delaney can barely lift his privileged fingers, while Candido — who manages to avoid despair even after being struck by a car — can barely lift his battered and poverty-ridden body off the cold dirt of the canyon floor where he hides to avoid deportation.