Fear In The Novel The Tortilla Curtain

This essay reads T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain (henceforth TC) as a novelization of Mike Davis's concerns in recent books like City of Quartz and, especially, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (hereafter CQ and EF respectively). If on the one hand I use the tradition of Marxist geography to produce a reading of TC, on the other hand I use Boyle to enrich Davis' work and both to illuminate current realities.1

While it is routine to use social theory to deepen our appreciation and understanding of fiction, here, I use fiction to produce knowledge of the referent and so view for this purpose fiction as social theory. Both Davis and Boyle write about the border problems accompanying the physical and mental geography of capital accumulation, with L.A. functioning as a microcosm for neoliberal globalization and its problems. EF is in one sense about the political economy of ecological disaster, of fire and flood and its ecological consequences. But it is just as much about how this condition is ideologically transformed—“the dialectic of ordinary disaster” in his words—into a powerful ecoracism (EF 3).

A central point for both Davis and Boyle is that the racialized political economy of urban sprawl, white flight in essence, has led parts of the city and outlying suburbs to “sprawl” into the wilds of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, leading to a complex “ecotone” where “wild” and “urban” interpenetrate: wildlife becomes more urban while domestic species go feral. The ideological counterpart is more to the point here though. Wild predators are criminalized as “gangbangers” and “serial killers”— cougars and coyotes becoming symbols of urban disorder—while “the urban underclass is incessantly bestialized as predators”: “in ripe Hegelian fashion, the social construction of nature is typically mirrored by the naturalization of purely social contradictions” (EF 208)

In the novel's opening pages, Delaney Mossbacher, driving up the congested mountain road to his home outside L.A., accidentally hits Candido Perez. The main characters in Tortilla Curtain consist of these two men and their wives. One couple is upper middle class and white, living in what becomes a gated community, the aptly named Arroyo Blanco Estates. Delaney Mossbacher is a self proclaimed “liberal humanist” who writes a weekly environmental newsletter about local ecology; his wife, Kyra Mossbacher, is a hi-end real estate agent worried about the invasion of too many brown people in ...