Examples Of Racism In The Tortilla Curtain

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists” (Franklin D. Roosevelt). In The Tortilla Curtain by T.C.

Boyle, Delaney and other characters of the book introduce the racism of most communities by bringing up the topics of coyotes, borders, physically and mentally, and illegal Mexican immigrants. Each topic ties one another together. To most, there shows a problem with the immigrants coming to America, just because they didn’t come legally. T.C. Boyle showed the reaction of people to new people coming to America to try and live the American dream that we are all supposed to be allowed to do.

“He flung open the door and shot through the courtyard, head down, rounding the

There wasn’t just real borders in the novel but there were borders in people’s minds. They didn’t want to think differently than what they already thought. Their racist ways made it to where the immigrants were always the ones to be blamed. This caused for several different types of borders to be depicted throughout the novel.

“I told you – he was Mexican” (Boyle 15). Delaney says this to Kyra when he hit

Candido with his car. This quote shows the prejudice Delaney has against the immigrants.

Throughout the novel, Delaney and others continue to accuse the Mexican immigrants of things that were happening around the community. When the graffiti happened on the gate of the community, Delaney would set up watch because he just knew it had to be those Mexicans. “The ones coming in through the Tortilla Curtain down there, those are the one that are killing us.

They’re peasants, my friend. No education, no resources, no skills – all they’ve got to offer is a strong back, and the irony is we need fewer and fewer strong backs every day because we’ve got robotics and computers and farm machinery that can do the labor of a hundred men at a

Every one blamed the immigrants as if everything that went wrong was their fault. The irony is that when this is said, Jack Jardine claims he isn’t racist. You find out early in the novel that the story to be told was racism. In the beginning, the way Delaney describes Candido was not polite. He described his eyes as almost the same as a coyote. The people that lived in the community were very racist towards the immigrants.

Throughout The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle shows the signs of racism using coyotes, borders, and illegal Mexican immigrants. He connects these three topics together throughout the novel. They each play a role when speaking of the others. T.C. Boyle uses the borders as several different things in the novel, such as fences and the racism border the white people use. The coyotes play the role as being the predator in the novel and connecting to the illegal immigrants.

The immigrants were the main topic of the whole novel. The novel spoke of how the hardships were when the illegal immigrants came over to just have that American dream everyone here already has. T.C. Boyle does a great job in portraying the life of the illegal immigrants as they try to make their way in