The Tortilla Curtain

“He’d held up the lure of all those things, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, the glitter of the North like a second Eden; sure, a young girl like her and an old man like himself with gray in his mustache—what else was he going to tell her?”

Cándido had spent a decade working seasonally in the United States and understands that the picture he paints for América is romanticized. However, despite his experience and the many struggles he has faced in the United States, he still decides to return and make a home there. His faith in the American Dream had not been tarnished by the discrimination and inequality he knows exists.

“They were both perfectionists, for one thing. They abhorred clutter. They were joggers, nonsmokers, social drinkers, and if not full-blown vegetarians, people who were conscious of their intake of animal fats. Their memberships included the Sierra Club, Save the Children, the National Wildlife Federation and the Democratic Party. They preferred the contemporary look to Early American or kitsch. In religious matters, they were agnostic.”

This passage describes Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher and is heavy with the irony laced throughout The Tortilla Curtain. The Mossbachers are stereotypical upper-middle-class liberal Americans. They have time for leisure activities and like to show off their values, as well as their ability to give, with memberships to organizations that support their various causes. Their actions, however, contradict the values they signal through their memberships.

“Even Delaney felt himself momentarily distracted from the bloody evidence in his pocket. Crime? Up here? Wasn’t that what they’d come here to escape? Wasn’t that the point of the place? All of a sudden, the gate didn’t sound like such a bad idea.”

As Delaney sits in the community meeting, preparing to raise the issue of the coyote attack, he is distracted by various accounts of crime that could have been prevented with the proposed gate. The passage illustrates not only his weak resolve and ability to be influenced but also the self-centered nature of his beliefs. He has no awareness of what is happening to others in his community.

“This was the U.S.A., plumbing capital of the world, the land of filtration plants and water purifiers and chlorine, and everyone knew of the gringo fascination with toilets: how could the water be unsafe? Here, of all places? But it was. He’d been here before, in this very spot, and he’d been sick from it. Could she even begin to imagine how many septic fields drained off of those mountains?”

The stream near Cándido and America’s camp is contaminated, and they must boil the water before they drink it. This is amazing to América, who expects the United States to be cleaner and more sanitary than Mexico. For all his talk of conservation and complaints about “people like [the] Mexican” who are destroying the environment (11), Delaney’s lifestyle, his house on the hill, is the true source of pollution.

“By arrangement with the local citizens, the labor exchange closed down at noon—they might have been liberal and motivated by a spirit of common humanity and charity, but they didn’t want a perpetual encampment of the unemployed, out of luck and foreign in their midst.”

This passage describes the limited tolerance of the community’s white residents. On the surface, they are welcoming and charitable, willing to support and welcome immigrants. However, the limited hours of the labor exchange suggest that the local community’s support is largely surface level. They want to appear supportive to absolve their guilt but stop short of actual goodwill.

“The bathroom was dated, unfortunately, by its garish ceramic tiles, each with the miniature yellow, blue and green figure of a bird emblazoned on it, and by the tarnished faux-brass fixtures and cut-glass towel racks that gave the place the feel of the ladies’ room in a Mexican restaurant.”

The passage reveals some of the casual racism that the white characters engage in throughout the novel. Kyra’s assessment that the tacky, dated bathroom is similar to a Mexican restaurant implies her belief that Mexican culture is inferior. She believes the bathroom’s resemblance cheapens an otherwise nice house.

“It sat high on a bluff above the canyon at the end of a private drive, with an unobstructed view of the Pacific on one side and the long green-brown spine of the Santa Monica Mountains on the other. Way below it, like some sort of fungus attached to the flank of the mountain, lay the massed orange tile rooftops of Arroyo Blanco.”

Throughout the novel, the Da Ros house represents the unattainable nature of the American Dream. Even though the Mossbachers have a more-than-comfortable existence, especially when compared to Cándido and América, the Da Ros house makes their life look small and even crude.

“‘Delaney, believe me, I know how you feel. You heard Jack Cherrystone speak to the issue, and nobody’s credentials can touch Jack’s as far as being liberal is concerned, but this society isn’t what it was—and it won’t be until we get control of the borders.’

The borders. Delaney took an involuntary step backwards, all those dark disordered faces rising up from the streetcorners and freeway on-ramps to mob his brain, all of them crying out their human wants through mouths full of rotten teeth. ‘That’s racist, Jack, and you know it.’”

Here, Jack Jardine talks to Delaney in the grocery store and explains why he supports Arroyo Blanco’s gate. This is one of the only instances in the novel when Delaney calls someone out on their racism, but his “involuntary” reaction to the wall and the image that it conjures suggests that Delaney holds his own racist stereotypes of immigrants coming from the South. As their conversation progresses, Delaney doesn’t challenge Jack again and eventually lets the argument go, voicing his acceptance of the gate.

“His impulse was to intercede, to put an end to it, and yet in some perverse way he wanted to see this dark alien little man crushed and obliterated, out of his life forever.”

In the parking lot of the grocery store, Delaney sees Cándido but does not acknowledge him in any way. Usually, Delaney suppresses his more unsavory impulses, but in this case, he quashes his inclination to come to Cándido’s aid, marking a key shift in character. The passage also illustrates the irrational hatred that Delaney is starting to develop for Cándido, who has done nothing but force Delaney to reckon with his own biases and racism.

“Since the riots she’d met dozens of couples like the Greuterts. They all wanted something out of the way, something rustic, rural, safe—something removed from people of whatever class and color, but particularly from the hordes of immigrants pouring in from Mexico and Central America, from Dubai, Burundi and Lithuania, from Asia and India and everywhere else in the known world. Brown people. Colored people. People in saris, serapes and kaffiyehs.”

In this passage, Kyra speaks bluntly about why her wealthy, white clients want to move away from the city. Buyers come to her complaining of the “crowded” city, looking for peace and an escape from crime. However, Kyra knows to interpret this as meaning that many of her buyers simply want to be far away from “people of whatever class and color.”

“She was seventeen years old, the youngest of eight, and her parents had loved her and she’d gone to school all the way through and done everything that was expected of her. There were no strange men, no hands in her lap, there was no living in the woods like a wild animal. But here it was. She rose to her feet.”

The passage contrasts América’s childhood in Mexico with her new life in the United States. Contrary to the stereotypes that many of the white characters express of Mexico as a dirty, impoverished place, América’s childhood was happy and comfortable. She has never experienced anything like the indignities and dangers she now faces in the United States.

“There’d been a moment there, handing over the keys to the young Latino, when he felt a deep shameful stab of racist resentment—did they all have to be Mexican?—that went against everything he’d believed in all his life.”

Delaney’s “stab of racist resentment” indicates a further degradation of his values. When his car is stolen, he immediately visualizes Cándido’s face and assumes the crime was committed by “Mexicans.” His resentment of the Latino valet, who he quickly decides must also be Mexican, illustrates that Delaney’s racism is no longer confined to figures he finds threatening or suspicious. He begrudges the mere presence of the innocent young man because of his race.

“She looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out, to know that men were her enemies—men in uniform, men with their hats reversed, men with fat bloated hands and fat bloated necks, men with traps and guns and poisoned bait—and she saw the den full of pups and the hills shrunk to nothing under the hot quick quadrupedal gait.”

On one of the long afternoons alone in the canyon, América sees a coyote and begins to imagine that she is the animal. Since arriving in the United States, América has suffered violence at the hands of several men, including José Navidad, Jim Shirley, and Cándido. In the sense of kinship that she feels with the animal, América acknowledges the extent to which she feels hunted by men, and she envies the coyote’s ability to outrun them.

“He was wrestling with his feelings, trying to reconcile the theoretical and the actual. Those people had every right to gather on that streetcorner—it was their inalienable right, guaranteed by the Constitution. But whose constitution—Mexico’s? Did Mexico even have a constitution? But that was cynical too and he corrected himself: he was assuming they were illegals, but even illegals had rights under the Constitution, and what if they were legal, citizens of the U.S.A., what then?”

By this point, halfway through the novel, Delaney has let go of many of his liberal-humanist ideals. However, he is still struggling to develop a new belief system. Much of Delaney’s internal struggle can be attributed to the disconnect between the theoretical and the actual. His liberal-humanist ideals were all theoretical; when he was obliged to put them into practice for the first time, they crumbled. Now, he is in the process of defining new beliefs.

“They lived in their glass palaces, with their gates and fences and security systems, they left half-eaten lobsters and beefsteaks on their plates when the rest of the world was starving, spent enough to feed and clothe a whole country on their exercise equipment, their swimming pools and tennis courts and jogging shoes, and all of them, even the poorest, had two cars. Where was the justice in that?”

Here, Cándido contemplates the injustice of the closed labor exchange and the treatment that he and América have received in the United States. Confronted by the excess he sees around him, Cándido is frustrated and angered by the blatant discrimination and inequality. He knows that the people he sees around him have more than enough resources and can help him if they want. However, they choose to make his life more difficult by closing the labor exchange.

“This solution, to one who wishes fervently to live in harmony with the natural world, has always been anathema (after all, the coyote roamed these hills long before Homo sapiens made his first shaggy appearance on this continent), and yet, increasingly, this author has begun to feel that some sort of control must be applied if we continue to insist on encroaching on the coyote’s territory with our relentless urban and suburban development. If we invade his territory, then why indeed should we be surprised when he invades ours?”

Delaney’s column on the coyote population offers another clear insight into his changing values. His call for “some sort of control” references his shifting views on immigration, echoing Jack Jardine’s comments about the border and Kyra’s rationale for shutting down the labor exchange. Outside of the metaphorical ramifications of the column, Delaney is also admitting that there could be a case for greater separation between man and nature, indicating that even his relationship to the natural world, and therefore his supposedly most closely held beliefs, are beginning to shift.

“To see her puppy taken like that, right before her eyes, and on top of everything else…it had been too much, one of the worst experiences of her life, maybe the worst. And Jordan—he was just a baby and he had to see that?”

Here, Kyra contemplates the loss of her second dog and the trauma of seeing it taken by the coyote right in front of her eyes. She worries about her son having experienced this tragedy and being exposed to the cruelty of the world at such a young age. Her reaction is typical of the irony that Boyle employs throughout The Tortilla Curtain. In contrast to the repeated catastrophes and humiliations that the Rincóns are subject to, Kyra’s assertion that the loss of her dog was “the worst” experience of her life is laughable.

“‘No, no, that’s not the problem,’ Delaney said, and why shouldn’t he defy Kyra and Jack and stand up for what he believed in? But then he saw that phantom car again, the one with the rumbling speakers and impenetrable windows, and he hesitated. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll call you,’ and turned to walk away.”

Here, Delaney’s neighbor asks him to stand up against the wall, even though Kyra is publicly supporting the project. The neighbor assumes that Delaney’s reluctance is due to fear of defying his wife, and Delaney seems to be trying to convince himself that opposition to the wall is still what he believes in. However, Delaney’s vision of the “phantom car” suggests that he has begun to support the wall secretly; his reluctance has nothing to do with creating tension between himself and Kyra.

“All at once she understood: garbage, they were going to eat garbage. Sift through it like the basureros at the dump, take somebody else’s filthy leavings, full of spit and maggots and ants. Was he crazy? Had he gone mad with the knock on his head? Even at their lowest, even in Tijuana in the dump they’d been able to scrape together a few centavos to buy steamed corn and caldo from the street vendors.”

Eating out of the dumpster marks a new low for América and Cándido. The act is unthinkable to América, who feels she will “die of shame”; it is something she never imagined doing, especially not in the United States. Their desperation illustrates how the discrimination and inequality the Rincóns have faced have turned them into the stereotypes they have been accused of being. They have become the “bums” that the residents of Arroyo Blanco think they are.

“Their friends and neighbors were gathered there with them, refugees in Land-Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes and Jeep Cherokees that were packed to the windows with their cardinal possessions, the college yearbooks, the Miles Davis albums, the financial records, the TVs and VCRs, the paintings and rugs and jewelry.”

This is another example of the irony that Boyle uses to convey the inequality between the Mossbachers and Rincóns. As the residents of Arroyo Blanco flee the fire, their status as “refugees” is contrasted by their luxury vehicles and the superfluous nature of the possessions they choose to save. The cars packed with nonessentials indicate that the residents of Arroyo Blanco don’t have to worry about basic survival in the same way the América and Cándido do.

“That was when Delaney felt the tall Mexican’s eyes on him. It was like that day out on the Cherrystones’ lawn, the same look of contempt and corrosive hate, but this time Delaney didn’t flinch, didn’t feel guilt or pity or even the slightest tug of common humanity. He threw the look back at the son of a bitch and put everything he had into it, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw ached.”

Delaney accuses José Navidad of starting the fire without a scrap of evidence besides having seen him one day in the canyon. Faced with the threat of losing his home in the fire, Delaney feels personally attacked, and this fear completes the transition out of his liberal-humanist values. For the first time, his racism begins to transform into actual violence and a palpable desire to harm another individual.

“In a heartbeat he was up over the top and scrambling along the outside of the wall, hunched low over his feet, angry suddenly, raging, darting on past the plastic sheeting until he found the dog’s dishes and the scrap of carpet and tucked them under his arm—and fuck the dog, he hated that dog, and fuck the fat lady who owned him too; they could buy another dish, another carpet, and who cared if a poor unlucky man and his wife and daughter died of want right under their noses? He wasn’t going to worry about it anymore, he wasn’t going to ask—he was just going to take.”

Like Delaney, Cándido experiences a transformation by the end of the novel. Fed up with the injustice and discrimination directed at him, Cándido finally abandons his quest for honest work and steals the things he needs to build the shack for América and the baby. He recognizes that playing by the rules has gotten him nowhere, so he gives up on some of his own values.

“All he wanted was work, and this was his fate, this was his stinking pinche luck, a violated wife and a blind baby and a crazy white man with a gun, and even that wasn’t enough to satisfy an insatiable God: no, they all had to drown like rats in the bargain.”

Here, Cándido contemplates the depth of his bad luck. Throughout the novel, he has claimed to be cursed and blamed his continued misfortunes on this bad luck. In reality, his inability to find work and support his family is the result of the marginalization and discrimination he is subject to because of his status as an undocumented immigrant. Without this barrier, his “bad luck” might be less apparent.