ABSTRACT

Helena Maria Viramontes's richly metaphorical fictional narratives about Mexican Americans in mid-to-late twentieth century Los Angeles and agricultural California can be usefully taught in a range of courses. Viramontes's attention to the class and race dynamics that shaped the affective and material lives of the people she grew up with is an important element of her fiction. Characterization is one of Viramontes's particular strengths as a writer, discussions and assignments that encourage students' attention to it are especially fruitful. The semantic richness and literary artistry of Viramontes's fiction make it appropriate for almost any literature course that one could imagine teaching. The temporal, and oftentimes cultural, distance between Viramontes's characters and the author's Stanford students means that they rarely have access to the range of interpretive schemas they need to appreciate Viramontes's work. Finally, the author makes his students to understand how Viramontes's character-system represents a narrative innovation on the realist novel.