Melting Pot Melting? Spring 1997

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T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (Viking, 1995), 355 pp.

To hear politicians and xenophobic gringos talk about the immigration "problem," one would think Mexico and the United

States were halfway around the world from each other. Their worldview is one where the lives of Americans (meaning, of course, whites) have nothing to do with those who are darker and poorer and happen to have been born on the other side of the Rio Grande. But this false dichotomy between El Norte and Latin America sooner or later breaks down as crises and the mundaneness of life reveal the real symbiotic relationship between

both peoples.

T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel The Tortilla Curtain slams this fact into readers' faces as he chronicles the inexorably linked lives of Candido and America Rincon, an illegal immigrant couple, and Delaney and Kyra

Mossbacher, an affluent yuppie couple living in a gated community in southern California. Delaney accidentally hits Candido with his car and slowly but fatefully sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to

cataclysmic disaster for both couples.

The story has nothing to do with lawsuits. It deals, rather, with the contradictory universal laws that you reap what you sow and that life is unfair. Delaney, a liberal who feels guilty about his privileged life as a nature writer, frets aloud when his community's association votes to put up a wall and gate around their houses to keep out the increasing numbers of brown strangers. But Delaney's convictions run barely a centimeter deep. The truth is revealed in the ways he responds to the real issues of justice that face him in relating with the aliens in his midst. He hopes, for example, that a $20 bill will buy Candido's appeasement for his torn-up leg.

Candido's ...

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