The symbol of the coyote in Tortilla Curtain appears many times throughout the novel and offers the reader’s multiple interpretations. The initial first time the coyote is presented in T.C. Boyle’s book, The Tortilla Curtain occurs right when Delaney Mossbacher has his car taken into the dealership for renovation soon after there was a little bit of a collision in hitting the Candido Rincon which was the Mexican. The salesman that worked at the dealership, attempts to make chat with Delaney and then requests if he hit a coyote or a deer. Delaney chooses to take the second choice and decides that it was a coyote or perhaps eve a dog. It is the job of the reader to identify the different symbols as they progress through the story and, most importantly, to interpret their significance to the author’s literary agenda. T.C. Boyle, author of the novel, offers his reader’s many different types of symbolism throughout this story, including that of a wild coyote. He uses this undomesticated animal as a stereotypical parallel to the growing Hispanic population in the greater Los Angeles area. Boyle carefully unifies the coyote with the illegal immigrants because he portrays them both as being dangerous trespassers, scavengers and predators.
Throughout the novel, Boyle continually overwhelms his reader’s with the theme of stereotypes and how they affect the on wrongly accused. The story begins when one character, a wealthy Caucasian man named Delaney Mossbacher, hitting a pedestrian with his car while running errands. The reader is told that the pedestrian is an illegal Mexican immigrant named Candido Rincon, who is homeless and living with his wife in the brush that fills Topanga Canyon. Delaney immediately rushes to see if his car has suffered any damage, without showing the slightest concern for the victim who flew into the bush along the road. This is the first time
Boyle communicates the idea of illegal’s being dangerous trespassers. When Delany begins to think about his victim and wonders if he is dead or alive. This sparks fear inside him and the narrator says, “What startled him to alertness was the sudden certainty that the whole thing had been staged — he’d read about this sort of operation in the Metro section, gangs of illegal immigrants faking accidents and then preying on the unsuspecting, law-abiding, compliant and fully insured motorist” (pg. 4). It is amazing how Delany’s instincts immediately jump to this conclusion because the man looked like a homeless trespassing Mexican. Throughout this story, simple stereotypes like this are displayed, and they only get more tense. The small community that Delany and his wife resides in decide to build a wall around the entire community of homes to keep some of the homeless illegal’s at distance in order to deflate the escalating crime that had been going on. We also see this “wall” being used to keep the coyote’s off their property to protect their small dogs. This is another parallel that Boyle illustrates throughout the story. The Mossbacher’s do not want coyote’s on their property because of the possible harm against their small dogs, while the neighborhood decides that the local Mexican’s are not welcome because of the possible harm towards themselves. Boyle uses the coyote as a direct example of what is taking place in the community; the idea of trespassing. This stems even deeper then just in their gated community, but also in all of California. This “wall” also is a mirror of the wall along the Mexican-American boarder, which was made to keep a certain kind of people out. The coyote scaling the gate to attack Delany’s dog and the Mexican’s trespassing into the gated community to steal both represent the struggle for Mexican’s to illegally cross the border into America to chase their American dream.
Boyle also portrays the illegal immigrants and the wild coyotes as being dangerous scavengers. The coyote’s perspective is that of “survival of the fittest” and we see the same attitude in Candido and his wife as a string of unfortunate events takes place. Candido becomes forced to go “dumpster-diving” behind a restaurant for food while America, his spouse, is forced to disobey her husband in order to find work so that necessities can be purchased. This is a disturbing reality and it is something that Boyle makes as unpleasant as possible. Candido and his wife are also labeled scavengers because they are homeless, lurking in the backyards of this peaceful community, just like the dangerous coyote’s. The only option for the community is to build walls and gates to keep out these “intruders.”
Lastly, the coyote is labeled as a predator throughout the book because of its reckless and untamable personality, which becomes a danger to Kyra’s small dogs. This also is a parallel to the illegal Mexican immigrants being called predators because of the robberies that have been performed in their gated community. Also, there is a character by the name of Jose Navidad, who throughout the novel becomes notorious for dangerous unpredictability. Like Candido and his wife, Jose is a homeless illegal immigrant living in the canyon. Every time Jose is mentioned in the novel, Boyle describes him as having evil in his eyes. There is a scene where Jose and his companion encounter Candido’s wife at their fortress in the canyon, where he steals what little possessions they had and then rapped the helpless woman. Jose’s actions label him as a predator, which becomes a stereotype, and leads to this idea of all illegal’s acting like the animals in the wild preying on their victims.
Tortorici 4
The will always be racism between cultures and people, but why do people choose to allow these raciest stereotypes, especially after they have understand the consequences. After reading this novel, I had to examine my own heart because I am guilty of the same negativity that Boyle displayed for us in this story. It is plain to see that the coyote represents the illegal Mexican immigrants because they are both labeled as dangerous trespassers, scavengers and predators. This is the most significant meaning of this symbolic representation in my opinion.
Furthermore, it appears that Boyle carries on the idea of the way Americans loathe illegal immigrants, and to go in even more specific such as the Mexicans, for being in their “American” nation, with “American” standards, and merely an “American” existence. For example, in the essay that was On Whiteness in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, the author of it manages to bring some things to the surface that involve the significance of the coyote in the novel. “However inside the setting of the novel’s emphasis on immigration, the coyote’s wrongdoings of domestic borders likewise will have to be read symbolically for immigrants’ misdemeanors of national borders. It is obvious that the coyote functions as an especially influential symbol of Mexican migrants, for the reason that ‘coyote’ are the word Mexicans and Americans similar use to refer to those who unlawfully shepherd Mexicans all over the border.” (47). the symbolism of the coyote is considered to be critical to the plot of the story. First it is observed right when Delany mentions to the man at the car license he think that there is some possibility that he could have possibly have hit a ‘coyote,’ which is a bold face lie, nonetheless it likewise likens the Mexican to some kind of savage beast that is untamed.
A coyote is supposed to be some kind of wild animal which lies somewhere out in the wild, it is a creature, yet again it comes into assessment another time when it starts doing things such as trespassing the gate that was inside Delany’s backyard, it intrudes on his property and then starts doing things such as attacking one of the cherished family pet animals. Now this animal has managed to actually injure Delany and then has done things like bring harm to his family. Up till now this could possibly been read for a lot more than face worth. The coyote or Mexican, are looked at by some that were racist as being all rolled in one. They have troubled his harmony, his assessment of the peaceful attractive mountain side. Whether making it hazardous, like the Mexican that is wearing some kind of baseball gear, or completely rubbishing it with a whole bunch of beer cans.
Kyra and Delany are the ones that have managed to settle down in a beautiful home where they are both begin to feel very connected to the wild, at the same time protected in their own public. Eric Woolof provides a big section of his paper called The Tortilla Curtain: A Case Study in the Genesis of Racism, to the theme of ironic limits and the usage of Mexican affect in a life these upper-middle class Americans guide. “This untruthfully frank narrative is filled of caustic implications, in the meantime even though the ‘white’ (Blanco) Anglo public is deeply protected in contradiction of Mexican intruders, its actual name deceives that it is created on land that had belonged to the Spanish and then it was turned over to the Mexicans. Furthermore, the Anglo masters have not merely constructed their households in the “Spanish Assignment bravura” of their servants of dark skin, and with “Navajo trim” in which they were called coyotes (30) to boot, nevertheless the individuals to whom they envoy their physical work, like creating new barriers are of course the coyotes because they are beast and a lot of Mexicans act like the wild” (223). Workers for instance Candido and America each discover that the word coyote was related to the Mexican community as a way of insulting all of the people.
When it comes to identifying coyotes with Mexicans, the novel does a very good job with showing that symbolism. For instance, depressed and alone, America Rincon happens to observe a coyote “She gazed at the coyote with a very long and hard stare that she started to fantasize, to envisage herself within those eyes looking out, to recognize that men were her opponents—men that wore uniforms, men that wore their hats backwards, men that had hands that were bloated and fat with necks that were bloated necks, men with guns and traps and disillusioned bait—and she was able to look at the den which was full of pups and the hills contracted to nothing under the scorching rapid quadrupedal walk.” (Howard)
Delaney’s second article challenges the subjects of the close nearness of coyotes to civilization. At the start of the article, Delaney defines how one coyote was able to learn how to chew through a PVC irrigation piping for a drink of water. Delaney’s account of the coyote’s ingenuity in gaining water is copied by Candido near the end of the novel (Howard).
In conclusion it is clear that the coyotes played a huge significance in the novel. It was also obvious that they were symbolic in many ways. However, one of the most symbolic meanings that have the most importance is its racial ideal behind it. Many whites viewed the Coyote as something that was worthless and better yet looked at them as being Mexican. The Coyotes were seen as beast that were wild and could not be tamed, much like the Mexican was looked at as being.
Works Cited
Boyle, T. Coraghessan. The Tortilla Curtain. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Print.
Howard, Melissa. The Symbolism of the Coyote. 6 July 2005. http://suite101.com/article/the-symbolism-of-the-coyote-a149558. 3 June 2003.
