The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle

From the Publisher

Men and women with brown faces and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Library Journal

Go tell it in the valley: Boyle's newest novel is, according to the publicist, "a timely, provocative account" of immigration in central California. With a 100,000-copy first printing and a 25-city tour, you know the publisher expects this book to be big.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide

Reading Group Guide

INTRODUCTION

In this explosive and timely novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle explores an issue that is at the forefront of the political arena. He confronts the controversy over illegal immigration head-on, illuminating through a poignant, gripping story the people on both sides of the issue, the haves and the have-nots.

ABOUT THE TITLE

In Southern California's Topanga Canyon, two couples live in close proximity and yet are worlds apart. High atop a hill overlooking the canyon, nature writer Delaney Mossbacher and his wife, real estate agent Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, reside in an exclusive, secluded housing development with their son, Jordan. The Mossbachers are agnostic liberals with a passion for recycling and fitness. Camped out in a ravine at the bottom of the canyon are C·ndido and AmÈrica RincÛn, a Mexican couple who have crossed the border illegally. On the edge of starvation, they search desperately for work in the hope of moving into an apartment before their baby is born. They cling to their vision of the American dream, which, no matter how hard they try to achieve it, manages to elude their grasp at every turn.

A chance, violent encounter brings together Delaney and C·ndido, instigating a chain of events that eventually culminates in a harrowing confrontation. The novel shifts back and forth between the two couples, giving voice to each of the four main characters as their lives become inextricably intertwined and their worlds collide. The RincÛns' search for the American dream, and the Mossbachers' attempts to protect it, comprise the heart of the story. In scenes that are alternately comic, frightening, and satirical, but always all "too real," Boyle confronts not only immigration but social consciousness, environmental awareness, crime, and unemployment in a tale that raises the curtain on the dark side of the American dream.

The United States and Immigration

The debate over immigration continues to escalate across the nation, particularly in California, and this sampling of quotations and statistics from various newspapers and magazines sheds light on the issue.

• History suggests that those who truly yearn to come to America and stay will find a way to do it. (Newsweek, August 9, 1993)
• In November 1994, California passed by a 59% to 41% vote Proposition 187, a bill that denies certain social privileges, mainly welfare, public schooling, and non-emergency medical care, to illegal immigrants. (The New York Times, November 11, 1994)
• California hosts about 40% of the nation's estimated 3.4 million illegal immigrants. (Time, November 21, 1994)
• "All Americans...are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.... We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it." (President Clinton, "We Heard America Shouting," Address to Joint Session of Congress, January 25, 1995)
• "Our immigration policy is a measure of who we are as a people. I believe we are a people who draw strength from our diversity and meet our challenges head on. I believe we want and deserve immigration laws that favor those who play by the rules." (Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator, New Jersey, The New Jersey Record, June 8, 1995)
• About 800,000 people follow the rules and enter the United States legally as immigrants each year. An additional 200,000 to 300,000 come to the country illegally. (San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 1995)
• Half of illegal immigrants do not cross the borders unlawfully--they enter legally and overstay their visas. (San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 1996)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in 1948 and grew up in Peekskill, New York. He is a graduate of the State University of New York at Potsdam, and received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan, the name of one of his Irish ancestors.

Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

A Process of Discovery: A conversation with T. Coraghessan Boyle

Q: What is the significance of the title of the book?

A: The title comes from a common phrase for the Mexican border, the tortilla curtain, and I envision it in this way. We have the Iron Curtain, which as an image is impenetrable. You picture this wall across Eastern Europe. Then we have the Bamboo Curtain with regard to China. As I see it, that isn't quite as impenetrable as an iron curtain. It shatters easily and has gaps in it. It's not uniform. And now we have the Tortilla Curtain, which is the opposite of impregnable. It's three strips of barbed wire with some limp tortillas hanging on it. The central question of this, and of the images of walls that appear throughout the book--the walls, the gates, walling people out, what do you wall in, all of that--has to do with us as a species and who owns what. Do you really own your own property? Do you have a right to fence people out? Do we have an obligation to assist people who come over that border, that wall, that gate? How is it that Americans are allowed to have this incredible standard of living while others do not? All of these questions, I think, are wrapped up in my view of our debate over immigration.

Q: What is your view on immigration?

A: I feel that, on the one hand, we do have a right to be a sovereign nation and to protect our borders. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of legal immigration, and no other country in the world allows this sort of thing to happen. On the other hand, what I object to even more than that is this kind of demonizing of a whole race and class of people, as in considering all Mexicans, all Guatemalans, all Salvadorans to be bad because they're invading our country as impoverished and ignorant individuals. The final gesture of the book, I think, shows you that we are one species and we do have to understand and appreciate that fact despite ethnic and national differences. But it's a small gesture because I think that it's a very, very complex issue that people have to work towards answering.

Q: As an epigraph to the book you use a quotation from The Grapes of Wrath. Did you have John Steinbeck's novel in mind when you wrote The Tortilla Curtain?

A: I'm not trying to re-write Steinbeck in any way. I chose the epigraph from him because I wanted to see how the ethos of the 1930s, and the traditional liberal ethos of providing for everybody, is applied to today.

Q: The book is essentially set in your own backyard. Did this prompt you to write it? Did the proposal and passing of Proposition 187 (a bill passed in California that denies certain social benefits to illegal immigrants) factor in?

A: The book was somewhat misunderstood because it came out after the 187 vote, and people attacked the book or enjoyed it based on their own perspective. The book was actually conceived and written prior to Proposition 187's even being drafted, and I think it came from the fact that I lived in Los Angeles for sixteen years. Reading about immigration in the newspaper every day and talking to people at parties like the ones that Delaney and Kyra give, I began to get a sense of something brewing that was akin to what happened here in Steinbeck's day, but had the added element that the Okies of today are not American citizens and they're of a different race.

Q: Do you see The Tortilla Curtain as a political novel?

A: I think obviously people will want to talk about 187, and the campaign to draft a national bill like 187, but this book isn't a political novel in the sense that it takes a position and is meant to have people agree or disagree with that position. It's political in a different sense. I don't think political novels work because they have "an ax to grind." If you have "an ax to grind," then you have to sacrifice aesthetics and the discovery of the book in order to make your point or to make people join your party or to see your point of view. I write a book like The Tortilla Curtain from having lived here and picked up on everything going on that finally resulted in 187, and from trying to sort out my own feelings. I don't have a position when I begin a book, any book. I write in order to put some hypothetical elements together and see what will happen. I don't know what's going to happen even chapter by chapter, and I don't know what's going to happen at the end of the book. That's a process of discovery, which is why I write novels rather than, let's say, a polemic, to discover how I feel about the issues, but particularly about this issue.

Q: Critics and readers on both sides of the immigration issue had mixed reactions to The Tortilla Curtain. Why do you think the book generated so much controversy?

A: I'm not presenting any answers, and I think that's why the book was very controversial. People want a polemic. They want to raise their fist in the air and say, "Yes, you're on our side." Well, I'm not on your side. I am presenting a fable, a fiction, so that you can judge for yourself. A lot of people simply read the book and flew off the handle because it either accords with what they want it to or it doesn't. People want things to be very clear-cut. Here's the issue and here's how I stand on it. But I think it's much more complex. I think it has to do with biology. You may notice that Delaney is a nature writer. Well, nature writers are generally very liberal, even radically liberal on all issues except one--the issue of immigration, on which they are more reactionary than anyone. The reason for this is they argue that there are six billion people on the planet now, and who is the enemy of the environment? Who is the enemy of clean air, clean water, all the dwindling animal species? Well, it's us. Us, human beings. Our species. And this is an element of the book which is very important and has been overlooked. There is this population pressure on the world in all the industrial nations, not simply the United States. England, Germany, and France all have huge influxes of immigrants, and I'm wondering, what does this mean and how are people going to deal with it? I think ultimately, as you see in The Tortilla Curtain, it may simply exacerbate racist tendencies.

Q: What research did you do to prepare for the writing of The Tortilla Curtain?

A: It may sound silly, but I've always felt an affection for Mexico and Mexican culture. I grew up in New York, as you may know, and the language I studied from eighth grade on was Spanish. In fact, the only language I can speak besides English is Spanish. I've always been attracted to the culture, and even before I moved to California I had traveled in Mexico and Central America. When I decided to write this book, I knew that I had to see one thing only. And that was the fence at the border. So I went back to Tijuana, where I hadn't been for some years, and spent the day there. I talked to people. I walked along the fence. I saw people waiting to climb over the fence with little plastic bags with everything they owned in them. I saw the border guards eyeing me suspiciously from the other side. I saw the huge fence the U.S. is building out into the water, and so on, just to get a feel for that again and see what it's like. And it's a real war zone, it's a real disaster, Tijuana, let me tell you.

Q: The search for the American dream is a theme that resounds throughout The Tortilla Curtain. Do you think there is such a thing as the American dream?

A: I've addressed this throughout all of my work, our material obsession, all the stuff I've written about eating and how much we have and the surfeit of things; my story "Filthy with Things," for instance. What is the American dream? Well, the American dream is, "you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you make it, you have a house, you live in the suburbs, and you drive a new car." What is that? That is a material dream. If you have nothing, then you have material dreams. Presumably, if you have an education and you have enough to eat, then you can have aesthetic dreams or humanistic dreams. Easy for me to say. I have every material thing I could want. I didn't become a writer to make money. I became a writer because that is my obsession and that's how I view the world. As a novelist, my job is to try to inhabit people of any culture, to be a person of another sex, or another race, or another ethnic group. I think it helps me to understand them, and it helps the reader to understand them, too.

Q: What writers do you admire? Have any of them influenced your work?

A: I admire hundreds of writers of the past and present and many, many of them have influenced my work. A writer who has influenced me with regard to this type of book is Steinbeck because I'm re-examining his ethos, as we said. In terms of satire, people like Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh have been influential on me, writers who are sort of angry about the way things are happening in society, and so they hold up certain behaviors to ridicule.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm working on a historical novel entitled Riven Rock about the psychopathology of love. It's set in my new hometown of Santa Barbara, and it deals with actual historical figures. The story centers around Stanley McCormick, the son of the man who invented the reaper, and his wife, Katherine Dexter. It's quite a wonderful and extraordinary love story.

PRAISE

"Succeeds in stealing the front page news and bringing it home to the great American tradition of the social novel." - The Boston Globe

"Lays on the line our national cult of hypocrisy. Comically and painfully he details the smug wastefulness of the haves and the vile misery of the have-nots." - Barbara Kingsolver, The Nation

"A compelling story of myopic misunderstanding and mutual tragedy. - Chicago Tribune

"Boyle is still America's most imaginative contemporary novelist." - Newsweek

"The Tortilla Curtain qualifies as that rarest of artistic achievements--a truly necessary book." - The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Weaving social commentary into moving entertaining fiction is a job few writers can handle. Boyle does so here, admirably. Readers should not miss this latest work from an impressive talent.... Many generations of great satirists come to mind when reading it--from Swift to Twain to Waugh to Woody Allen." - The Baltimore Sun

"A Grapes of Wrath for the 1990s." -

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. At the beginning of the story, Delaney accidentally hits C·ndido with his car. "For a long moment, they stood there, examining each other, unwitting perpetrator and unwitting victim." How does this encounter set the tone for the events that follow? Does it come full circle in the final scene?
2. The novel is forged on the cultural, social, and financial differences between the Mossbachers and the RincÛns. It alternates between the two couples' points of view, allowing the reader to enter the lives of both families. How does this technique propel the story? Do you feel that you got to know each of the couples equally well? Was the author fair in his portrayal
3. of each of the couples? Is he too harsh in his portrayal of the Mossbachers, as one reviewer suggested?
4. C·ndido and AmÈrica crossed the border in search of a better life for themselves and their unborn child. They do not ask for much and are willing to work hard, yet they are constantly met with resistance and failure. There are numerous references to C·ndido's bad luck. Is he unlucky? Is there anything he could have done to have changed his luck? What does this story say about the American dream?
5. The symbol of the coyote appears throughout the novel and represents illegal Mexican immigrants. In his nature column, Delaney writes, "The coyote is not to blame--he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him." He concludes the same column by writing, "The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable." How do these passages reflect Delaney's mixed feelings about illegal immigrants? Is he a hypocrite? As the novel progresses, Delaney's humanistic beliefs give way to racism and resentment, and he directs his rage at all illegal immigrants onto C·ndido. When confronted with evidence that C·ndido is not the vandal at Arroyo Blanco, he destroys it. Why does Delaney need to believe that the vandal is C·ndido? How does Delaney evolve from being a "liberal humanist" to a racist?
6. Boundaries--both real and imagined--play a large role in the novel, especially the front gate at Arroyo Blanco Estates. In what other instances do boundaries appear and what do they represent? What roles do the different characters play in constructing these boundaries?
7. In a recent interview Boyle stated, "If it's satire, it has to bite somebody, has to have teeth in it, otherwise it's useless." How does satire affect The Tortilla Curtain and the telling of the story? Is it a successful technique?
8. The novel concludes with Delaney confronting C·ndido with a gun, followed by a mud slide. In an almost simultaneous moment, C·ndido realizes his baby is missing and reaches down to offer Delaney a hand. One is a frightening image and the other an act of generosity. How do these contrasting images play off one another? Did the conclusion leave you with a feeling of hope or despair?
9. During an argument with Jack Jardine, Delaney makes the following statement: "Do you realize what you're saying? Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country--and neither of us would be standing here today if it wasn't." In another instance, Jack says to Delaney, "What do you expect, when all you bleeding hearts want to invite the whole world in here to feed at our trough without a thought as to who's going to pay for it, as if the American taxpayer was like Jesus Christ with his loaves and fishes." How do these two sentiments play out in the novel and in the larger issue of immigration?
10. The author stated in the Conversation section of this guide that he feels it is a novelist's job to inhabit people of other races and sexes, for his own understanding of an issue as well as for the reader's. Did The Tortilla Curtain help you to better understand the issue of immigration and the people involved?
11. The author does not offer a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, for which he was praised by several reviewers. Do you think he should have offered a solution?

RELATED TITLES

If you enjoyed The Tortilla Curtain, you'll want to read these other works by T. Coraghessan Boyle, all available from Penguin.

Budding Prospects
0-14-029996-3
Felix's dreams of easy money--from harvesting a marijuana plant--soon get nipped in the bud in "a first-rate picaresque adventure." -- Los Angeles Times

Descent of Man
A Norse poet overcomes bard-block. Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote. In seventeen slices of life, Boyle shows just what the "evolution" of mankind has wrought.
"Madness that hits you where you live." -- Houston Chronicle

East Is East
A young Japanese seaman jumps ship off the Georgia coast and swims into a nest of genteel ladies, rabid rednecks, and the denizens of an artists' colony.
"A hilarious black farce about racial stereotypes." --The New York Times

Greasy Lake and Other Stories
"Satirical fables of contemporary life, so funny and acutely observed that they might have been written by Evelyn Waugh as sketches for... Saturday Night Live." -- The New York Times

If the River Was Whiskey
Boyle tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific in sixteen magical, provocative stories.
"Writing at its very, very best." -- USA Today

The Road to Wellville
0-14-016718-8
This wickedly comic novel looks at the people who first went crazy searching for a magic pill to prolong their lives.
"A marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end." -- The New York Times Book Review

Water Music
Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, explorer, travel from London to Africa.
"A dark and sprawling, ribald, hilarious, cruel, exotic, and...engrossing flight of the literary imagination." -- Los Angeles Times

Without a Hero
In fifteen tales, Boyle depicts a wide range of Americans: a college football player who knows only defeat, a real estate tycoon on safari in Bakersfield, California, and others.
"Sharp, rueful, malevolently funny." -- The New York Times

World's End
A collision with history leads Walter Van Brunt to search for his long-lost father in this PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel.
"Zany, different, and intellectually engaging...a winner." -- Glamour