http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw070816helena_maria_viramon

In this interview with KCRW’s Book Worm host Michael Silverblatt, Helena Maria Viramontes notes that Their Dogs Came With Them was a project spanning a 12 year period, even antedating her debut novel Under the Feet of Jesus. Viramontes discusses the influence of alternating generations between the late 90’s and the early 2000’s, wherein the political implications of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts influenced her revival of the 1960’s and 70’s setting in her novel, Their Dogs Came With Them. 

The characters and neighborhoods seem to unfold in Their Dogs Came With Them. Viramontes explains how the intercultural connections of overlapping ethnic neighborhoods are symbolized by her books use of the freeway’s of Los Angeles’ interchanges. “We were amputated and isolated,” Viramontes says. The lives of the characters are interrupted by the freeway construction, characters and their neighborhoods become segregated geographically, and in alternating the points of view in the narration, the freeways themselves are representative of the boundaries between characters. In regards to the title of Their Dogs Came With Them, Viramontes explicates firstly the literal implication of the dog quarantine and secondly relates the title to the passage which begins the work. In the passage, Spanish conquistadors brought dogs in triumph, and now, in Viramontes’ setting, the dogs force the general population–those which the Spanish came to conquer–indoors as they are killed for being less than triumphant in that they are rabid.