Novel Chronicles A California Dream Divided

Oct 3, 2011
Originally published on October 4, 2011 11:41 am


Some of them, anyway.














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NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates visited with Tobar recently, to talk about the landscape and people who inspired him.


UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: This train's final destination is...

KAREN GRISBY BATES: Tobar has a pleasant face, with sparkling brown eyes that widen with pleasure when he talks about Los Angeles history. He's doing that now, as we enter a Metro lobby with murals of L.A.'s evolution.

HECTOR TOBAR: So the first Spanish settlers who arrived in Los Angeles crossed the L.A. River at the point where it meets the Arroyo Seco, and they come to this spot of land. They find an Indian village of what will later be known as the Gabrelino Indians. And so we're standing, really, in the oldest corner of Los Angeles. This is the tip of our Manhattan Island. This is our Plymouth Rock.

GRISBY BATES: This, Tobar says, is a city that was built by successive waves of immigrants, which is why he was taken aback when Proposition 187 passed in 1994. The voter initiative, often seen as anti-Latino, denied services to undocumented immigrants. Tobar says 187 showed a mean-spirited side of the state he loves.

TOBAR: And to me, that was really shocking to live in that California because I had grown up in a California that was a really optimistic place. And it was really accepting of outsiders. It was a place founded by outsiders; almost everybody here is from someplace else.

GRISBY BATES: Araceli is a live-in housekeeper; Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Yet, he says, they have a lot in common.

TOBAR: She became my alter ego. She's an intellectual in the body of someone who doesn't look like an intellectual, in the position of someone who doesn't look like an intellectual. I'm Guatemalan, my family is Guatemalan, and in the Los Angeles of today, Guatemalan is, for many people, synonymous with servant.

GRISBY BATES: "The Barbarian Nurseries" has been described as a novel that will redefine Los Angeles; that shows how class affects nearly every aspect of life here. In it, we see the city and its suburbs through Araceli's astute eyes. She works for Maureen and Scott Torres-Thompson, an affluent Orange County couple whose upper middle-class life implodes when California's economy crashes. The economic meltdown sloshes over into the Torres-Thompsons' marriage, as this excerpt shows.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Their fighting was part of a natural rhythm, a kind of release. They could fight and a day or two later, Araceli would see Scott rubbing his wife's back, or Maureen clasping his hand as they watched their children play in the backyard.

GRISBY BATES: So, Tobar says, Araceli gets on a train that takes the three of them to Union Station. It's a place she visited when she first slipped into the U.S.

TOBAR: It's one of the first places that she sees in Los Angeles, and this is a little bit what she expects Los Angeles to be like.

GRISBY BATES: The station's great waiting room, with its coffered ceilings, Moorish chandeliers and shining floors, was an elegant welcome to Araceli's new city. But as Tobar points out, his heroine soon discovered this isn't all there is to L.A.

TOBAR: And later she'll, of course, be disappointed because one only has to travel a mile or so from here to be in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Western United States - which is where she eventually will also take Brandon and Keenan, in search of their grandfather.

GRISBY BATES: With the boys' parents still AWOL, Araceli shepherds them onto a bus that takes them a few miles away from Union Station. Hector Tobar stands on 35th Street, the same one that's in his book. Down the block, the big factories on the edge of the Garment District loom over small, ragged houses. In the distance, downtown skyscrapers shimmer.

TOBAR: These were rooming houses, apartments that were built in the 1920s and '30s, when this was a place where people from Italy, people from the Ottoman Empire, people from Missouri came to live.

GRISBY BATES: And now, it houses the newest wave of immigrants. Like many of their European predecessors, many are undocumented, and they're making a living however they can.


GRISBY BATES: Tobar spies a lady walking toward us, tooting her horn as she pushes a loaded shopping cart.


WOMAN: Tamales.

TOBAR: Tamales. (Foreign language spoken)

GRISBY BATES: Now, having courteously thanked the vendor for her spicy lunch, he waves goodbye and starts back to his workplace near the gleaming towers.



GRISBY BATES: Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.


NEARY: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary.

