61 pages • 2 hours read
T.C. BoyleThe Tortilla Curtain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Arroyo Blanco”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to racism and xenophobia. It also depicts offensive language, a racial slur, and a scene of rape and sexual assault.
Delaney Mossbacher hit a man with his car while on his way to drop off his recycling. He remembers flashes of the accident and his initial worry first for his car, then for his insurance premium, and finally for the victim. Getting out of the vehicle, Delaney could not find the man and began to think that a gang had staged the accident. However, he soon spotted a Latino man bleeding on the side of the road. Delaney tried to ask the man if he needed a doctor, but he refused. Relieved that the man would not die, Delaney gave him $20 when he asked for money.
Delaney is disturbed by the accident and gets lost on the way to the recycling center. He cannot get the image of the man out of his head, wondering how the man will recover from his injuries. He realizes that the man must have refused treatment because he is undocumented and afraid of deportation. The thought inspires a wave of sorrow in Delaney, and he tries to imagine the man’s life. He wonders how the man ended up on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in the middle of the day, and Delaney realizes that he must be camping in the canyon. Quickly, Delaney’s guilt turns into anger. The man is camping in a state park, littering and polluting the environment, and Delaney seethes at the thought of “the whole world [turning] into a garbage dump, a little Tijuana” (11).
Delaney tries to check himself, reminding himself that the man is not necessarily a criminal just because he speaks Spanish, but this does not quell his doubts. He suddenly notices that all the men around him working at the recycling center are Latino, just like the man who jumped in front of his car. He thinks he has lived in Los Angeles for two years but has never noticed these men “silently going about their business” (12).
After finishing the recycling, Delany heads to the Acura dealership to repair his car. He tells the man he thinks he hit a dog, or perhaps a coyote, feeling guilty for leaving the man on the side of the road and betraying his “liberal-humanist ideals.” While his car is in the shop, he calls Kyra, his wife, and quietly confesses that he hit a man, “a Mexican,” on the canyon road. Kyra is shocked and indignant. She worries that the victim will sue and cannot believe Delaney did not call the insurance company. He insists they don’t have to worry, saying, “I told you—he was Mexican” (15).
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Cándido Rincón is severely injured after being hit by a car: his left hip and knee hurt, one arm hangs useless, the side of his face has been scraped raw, and he has symptoms of a concussion. Making his way home, Cándido collapses and falls into a dream of his time in Tijuana. His young wife, América, was sick, and they had no money after being robbed by the coyotes smuggling them across the border. An old man picking through the garbage had told Cándido, “Life is poor here” (17), and he thinks about how he had replied to the man, “but at least you have garbage” (18).
Seventeen-year-old América feels “like death on two feet” when she finds Cándido at the bottom of the path (18). She had spent the day traveling to Venice for work following the address a Guatemalan woman had given her. However, there was nothing at the address, and América had gotten lost on her way home. Panicked, exhausted, and frightened by the outside world, she first thinks that Cándido is passed out drunk on the path. When she realizes the extent of his injuries, she understands she is “in the worst trouble of her life” (20).
Back in their camp, América takes Cándido’s $20 and buys supplies while Cándido lies by the fire, consumed by his pain and lost in memories of his childhood in Mexico, which are interrupted by América holding out a Styrofoam cup of broth. The smell makes him sick, and América insists he needs a doctor. Cándido refuses, knowing that seeing a doctor would mean facing La Migra, the immigration authorities, and deportation. He assures América that he is not going to die, even though “he wasn’t so sure” (22).
The following day, Cándido’s pain has intensified. He is delirious for much of the next two days. He cannot remember América’s name, and she cries by his side. Finally, however, Cándido recovers. He remembers everything about his young wife, including her pregnancy with their first child. For the rest of the afternoon, América sleeps, and Cándido contemplates his situation. He thinks the accident continues his bad luck, worrying that he is too injured to work and wondering how they will get money to eat.
The next morning, four days after Cándido’s accident, América wakes up at dawn, trying to sneak off to the labor exchange to find work before Cándido wakes up. It is “a slap in the face” to him (26), making him feel like an old man unable to provide for his family. He forbids her to go, unable to accept the blow to his pride, and worried that men would take advantage of “a barefoot girl from the country who didn’t know a thing about the world” (26). She reminds him of their dwindling food supplies and of everything he promised her when they moved north: a little house of their own with a yard and a gas range. Cándido is in no shape to climb out of the ravine, so he has no choice but to watch América walk away.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
High above the ravine, Delaney lives in Arroyo Blanco Estates with his wife Kyra, his stepson Jordan, his wife’s two Dandie Dinmont terries, and her Siamese cat. Four days after the accident, Delaney is still haunted by the memory of it, but he continues with the obligations of his daily life. He gets Jordan ready for school while Kyra, the family’s “chief breadwinner,” gets ready for her high-powered real estate job. In the afternoons, Delaney writes a column called “Pilgrim at Topanga Creek” for the naturalist publication Wide Open Spaces. He loves spending time in nature, even if sometimes the state of the world, with pollution and overpopulation, overwhelms and saddens him.
This morning, however, is interrupted by a shriek from the dogs outside. A coyote has jumped into the fenced backyard and taken one of the terriers away with it. Delaney rushes out into the hillside after the animal, shouting, followed by Kyra in her bare feet. There is no sign of either the dog or the coyote in the dense brush, and they finally have to give up. Delaney thinks of his neighbors who routinely leave food out for the coyotes, unaware of the consequences. They only worry about the danger from immigrants and criminals, whom they want to keep out of the community by constructing a large gate.
That night, Delaney attends Arroyo Blanco’s bi-monthly meeting. He is armed with the dog’s bloody paw, which he discovered in the bushes, determined to illustrate the dangers of feeding wildlife once and for all. The meeting focuses on constructing a gate that Delaney calls “an absurdity, intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even” (42), but he avoids speaking out against it publicly because the rest of the community wants to proceed with its construction. As the meeting continues, residents discuss recent increases in crime and the need for protection from the outside world. Finally, Delaney cannot wait any longer. He raises his hand and begins speaking about the problem of feeding the “indigenous coyote population.” The other attendees complain that he is not speaking to the question, and Delaney pulls out the dog’s mangled leg, shouting and waving it about.
After his outburst, Delaney sits outside the community center while the other residents vote on the gate proposal. He is approached by Jack Jr., the gangly 18-year-old son of Delaney’s neighbor, a lawyer. Delaney had asked Jack Jardine for advice after the accident, and now Jack Jr. wants more details on where the incident happened. Delaney confirms that he thought the injured man was camping in the ravine, although he isn’t sure why Jack Jr. is interested. He excuses himself, thinking he needs to put the dog’s leg in the freezer.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
América goes to the labor exchange against Cándido’s wishes even though she has no luck there. Cándido thinks about his life back in México. He reflects that he had known América since she was just four years old; she was the youngest sister of his first wife and the flower girl at their wedding. Now 33, Cándido married América’s sister, Resurrección, at 20 years old. He had just returned from his first season working in the US and felt like a king with the money he had made. However, he reflects that his hometown and nearby villages became “villages of women” for much of the year as the men migrated north to work. Often, the women were unfaithful when their men were away, and after seven seasons working in the US, Cándido came home to find Resurrección pregnant and living with another man.
He spent months drinking away his sorrows before heading north again. However, he was caught at the border and returned to Tijuana, where he begged for change and sometimes performed on the street. Any money he made was spent on more alcohol until finally, “his fall was complete” (54), and he returned home completely dejected. He made charcoal to support himself and spoke to no one. One day, he saw América in the street; she was so beautiful and grown up that he did not recognize her. She was 16, and he promised to take her to America.
Back in the ravine, he worries about the harm that could befall América at the labor exchange and finally falls asleep in the sun. When he wakes, Cándido is incredibly thirsty. He knows that the water from the stream must be boiled first, but he cannot wait. He drinks straight from the ground and then falls back asleep. When he wakes again, there is a pain in his stomach, and he rushes to relieve himself behind a boulder. Weakened by the diarrhea, he hears voices coming down the ravine. Cándido worries that immigration authorities have caught América. However, the intruders are “overgrown boys” who go through Cándido and América’s few possessions and then throw them into the creek. Before leaving, they write “beaners die” on the nearby rocks.
Up at the labor exchange, América thinks about her husband. He treats her like a child, and while she admits she is afraid, América knows she can take care of herself. She is the only woman at the labor exchanges, and the headman, Candelario Pérez, tells her there isn’t much work for women. Nevertheless, she waits for hours, worrying about what she and Cándido will do for food if she cannot work. Finally, another woman sits next to her, an American who speaks a little Spanish and introduces herself as Mary. At first, América thinks that Mary is offering her work, and she is shocked to realize that Mary, “a gringa in her own country” (60), is looking for the same work as América. As Mary takes a drink from a flask, América wonders how she went from being “a good student and a good girl who always respected her parents and did as she was told” to competing with “a common drunk” for work (60).
At noon, the labor exchange breaks up, and América feels the men’s eyes on her as she returns to the canyon path. It makes her think of her and Cándido’s failed attempt to cross the border and the coyote who had betrayed them. They had been ambushed by a group of men who stripped América of her clothes before they had been able to run away. The border patrol had caught her naked in “the most humiliating night of her life” (62).
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The Tortilla Curtain is divided into three parts, each with eight chapters that alternate between the perspectives of the Mossbachers and the Rincóns. Within each chapter, the third-person narration changes between the perspectives of Delaney and Kyra or Cándido and América, respectively. The novel opens with an epigraph from John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which reads: “They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable” (xi). In Steinbeck’s novel, the quote refers to “Okies,” migrant workers from Oklahoma, and how they were viewed as less than human in other parts of the United States. The quote references the attitude toward Mexican immigrants in The Tortilla Curtain, who are constantly othered and discriminated against. It also implies that discrimination against the poor and working class has plagued the US for generations and that Mexican migrants face the most recent incarnation of this abuse.
Although Delaney calls himself “a liberal humanist” and takes pride in his open-mindedness, he others Cándido from the very start, describing him in racist terms as “a dark little man with a wild look in his eye” (3), who “must have been crouching in the bushes like some feral thing” (3). His attempt to reduce the accident to “abstract terms” represents his attempt to remove Cándido’s humanity from the equation, therefore expunging Delaney of the guilt of hitting and severely injuring another person. This attitude introduces the theme of Prejudice, Xenophobia, and Implicit Bias. Delaney holds deep biases against Mexican people, which are revealed as his thoughts and feelings vacillate wildly after the accident. He thinks, for example, that the migrants camping in the canyon are “thoughtless people, stupid people, people who wanted to turn the whole world into a garbage dump” (11), before quickly reminding himself that “[j]ust because [Cándido] spoke Spanish didn’t make him a criminal” (11-12).
For Delaney, the novel’s central conflict rests on the struggle he faces when his “liberal humanist ideals” meet reality. In theory, Delaney is progressive and accepting. He calls Arroyo Blanco’s proposed gate “intimidating and exclusionary, antidemocratic even” (42), and brags about his lack of “juvenile macho hang-ups about role reversal” (36), content to do the housework while Kyra earns the family’s income. Delaney’s liberal self-image props up a holier-than-thou attitude, allowing him to see himself as more intellectual and sensitive than others in Arroyo Blanco. But his professed values hide a more conservative, self-centered interior. After the accident, he begins noticing Latino people around his community and considers that “he’d never really thought about it before, but they were everywhere” (12), suggesting just how detached from reality he and his values are.
Both Delaney’s hypocrisy and the theme of Colonization of/and the Natural World are explored when Delaney takes comfort in visiting the car dealership after he hits Cándido. Delaney has “always hated” the dealership because it blemishes the natural beauty of the hills. But after the chaos and guilt of the accident, the building becomes “a bastion of the familiar and orderly, where negotiations took place the way they were supposed to, in high-backed chairs, with checkbooks and contracts and balance sheets” (13). This is another early example of how fragile Delaney’s values are; he quickly turns his back on his commitment to nature in favor of what better serves him: the familiar comfort of modern order. Delaney’s reflections reveal that his value for nature is primarily aesthetic and that he is happy with human colonization of nature—such as subdivisions—when they serve his bourgeois tastes. The incident in which a coyote kills Kyra’s dog also foreshadows the shallowness and prejudice at the heart of Delaney’s supposed affinity for nature. He claims to oppose his neighbors feeding wild animals from a conservationist standpoint, but really he is angry that something has been taken away from him. As the novel progresses, the coyote comes to represent the Mexican immigrant to Delaney, a creature encroaching on Delaney’s territory and taking his privileges, like his purebred pets, away from him. The pun with coyote, the Spanish term for the human traffickers who stole from Cándido and América, points to the way that nature, colonization, exploitation, and xenophobia intertwine.
The chapters featuring Cándido and América introduce the theme of The Contradictions of the American Dream. As América ventures out of her camp looking for work, she begins to see how the reality of the US does not live up to Cándido’s promise of a country where “everyone, even the poorest, had a house, a car and a TV” (26). She is shocked, for example, to see a white man begging on the street: “[I]f he had to beg in his own country, what chance was there for her?” (19). She struggles with this question again when she meets Mary at the labor exchange, and the novel’s early chapters start to illustrate how América sometimes feels she is worse off in the United States than in Mexico. As the youngest daughter in her family, she was always loved, cared for, and well-fed. Now, however, she is penniless and reduced to stealing for the first time in her life. Described as “a child,” the innocent and beautiful América is as far from a criminal as could be, and her character directly contradicts the many stigmas that Delaney and other white characters believe about Mexican immigrants. Her name foreshadows the way her character’s arc will mirror the erosion of her hopes for America the country: from the land of promise to the land of exploitation and suffering.
After spending a significant amount of time working in the United States, Cándido seems to be aware that his shiny image of “the North like a second Eden” is an exaggeration at best (29). He is constantly worried about the dangers of the streets and does not share América’s romanticized optimism. However, he argues, “what else was he going to tell” América to convince her to go with him, a man so much older than herself (29). The loss of his first wife was a blow to Cándido’s ego, knocking him down after feeling like “a god” in Mexico with the money he made in the United States. América’s insistence on working is another blow to Cándido’s self-esteem, so he vehemently resists, wanting to preserve his young wife’s innocence and dependence upon him less out of a desire to protect her and more out of a desire to prevent her from leaving him as her elder sister did. In reality, Cándido repeatedly fails to protect América and even becomes violent with her himself, suggesting that his concern is less for América’s safety and more for his own ego.
Related Titles
By T.C. Boyle
