![]() ![]() They weave places together ” (de Certeau 97). In other words, “ intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. According to de Certeau, “pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ They are not localized it is rather they that spatialize” (de Certeau 97). Viramontes instructs readers to read LA against the grain by devoting significant narrative space to scenes of characters walking through the city. Through rendering an intricate web of social relations, Viramontes demonstrates that each voice matters, particularly the “nobodies” who do in fact walk in LA and who have been disregarded in the city’s plans for modernization. Viramontes rejects the bird’s eye view of the city, critiqued by scholars such as Michel de Certeau and María Lugones as a top-down, power-laden perspective deployed by urban planners to create a “readable city.” Instead, I argue that Viramontes enacts Lugones’ “streetwalker theorizing,” a “pedestrian view-the perspective from inside the midst of people, from inside the layers of relations and institutions and practices” in her work (Lugones 5). Rather than further amplifying the dominant view of those who orchestrated the descent of the “earthmovers” in the Eastside or the suburban Angelenos the freeway system was put in place to serve, the novel centers primarily around marginalized characters and places, those that did not reap the benefits of Los Angeles’ car-centric urban planning approach. The novel operates at a street-level view, documenting, over a ten-year period, the impact of freeway construction and the targeted effort to raze the long-standing Mexican-American communities that stood in the way of this massive infrastructure project. The lives of both groups were transformed by shifting sociopolitical conditions. ![]() The story takes place in East Los Angeles during the 1960s and ’70s, a time period that encompasses the building of many of the city’s major freeways and the aftermath for the residents who were uprooted and those who remained. This stark divide comes into view in the 2007 novel Their Dogs Came with Them by Helena María Viramontes. Yet, this tongue-in-cheek saying illustrates the real social divide between the urban poor-who for a variety of reasons walk and move across the city using public transportation-and the upper classes in LA. Popularized by the song “Walking in LA” by the 1980s American rock band Missing Persons, the idea that nobody walks in Los Angeles because of the population’s dependence on automobiles has become a well-known adage about the city. ![]()
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