Tropic of Orange

“He realized you could just skip out over his house, his streets, his part of town. You never had to see it ever. Only thing you could see that anybody might take notice of were the palm trees. That was what the palm trees were for. To make out the place where he lived. To make sure that people noticed. And the palm trees were like the eyes of his neighborhood, watching the rest of the city, watching it sleep and eat and play and die. There was a beauty about those palm trees, a beauty neither he nor anybody down there next to them could appreciate, a beauty you could only notice if you were far away.”

Buzzworm’s childhood fascination with palm trees mirrors his adulthood occupation as the unofficial social worker of his neighborhood. Palm trees are not just a physical marker of his neighborhood, but also the metaphorical guardians watching over it.

“The Japanese American community had apologized profusely for this blight on their image as the Model Minority. They had attempted time after time to remove him from his overpass, from his eccentric activities, to no avail. They had even tried to placate him with a small lacquer bridge in the Japanese gardens in Little Tokyo. But Manzanar was destined for greater vistas. He could not confine his musical talents to the silky flow of koi in a pond, the constant tap of bamboo on rock, or manicured bonsai.”

This passage demonstrates how Manzanar Murakami fits in better with Los Angeles as a whole, rather than with his prescribed community. The Japanese community in Los Angeles does not approve of Manzanar Murakami “tarnishing” their image as a “model minority” and tries to hide him from public view. Murakami is more at home on the chaotic streets and the freeway system of Los Angeles, rather than orderly Little Tokyo.

“Buzzworm had a stake in my stories, deeper and hungrier than that of the most competitive reporter. He wanted desperately to see in print the stories of the life surrounding him, to see the wretched truth, the dignity despite the indignity. When I first met him, I had no idea that I was making a pact with a taskmaster more demanding than any editor. He was ruthless in his criticism, his disdain for my soft educated style.”

Buzzworm sees Gabriel as a means for broadcasting the plight of the downtrodden people of Los Angeles: the unhoused, the poor, and the vulnerable. Gabriel is somewhat intimidated by Buzzworm, in part because he is so beholden to the stories that Buzzworm tells him. Buzzworm uses Gabriel’s dream of winning the Pulitzer Prize to help motivate him.

“And yet his voice was often a jumble of unknown dialects, guttural and whining, Latin mixed with every aboriginal, colonial, slave, or immigrant tongue, a great confusion discernible to all and to none at all.”

Arcangel is an enigmatic figure who claims to embody the entire continent of South America. While this claim seems dubious, his dialect (which is comprised of both Latin and indigenous languages), seems to support his claim. This dialect represents the development of postcolonial Spanish dialects throughout South America.

“The homeless were the insects and scavengers of society, feeding on leftovers, living in residue, collecting refuse, carting it this way and that for pennies. In the same manner, who would use the residue of sounds in the city if Manzanar did not?”

The unhoused people of Los Angeles form another overlay on the social map of the city. Yamashita shows that their role is almost necessary: They are the “recyclers” of the social ecosystem. Manzanar Murakami collects “scrap” sounds and “recycles” them into music only he can hear; however, later on in the novel, as the social order of the city begins to collapse, others begin to hear the music as well, and even join in conducting.

“She just left. Didn’t even lock the security door. Left. She didn’t want any of this. She wanted more. It’s like his kid brother in college. He keeps sending him money. Paying for tuition. Paying for books. He’s so proud of the bro. But when they get together, there’s nothing to say. Bobby’s too busy working. The kid brother wants something more. Rafaela wanted something more. Maybe she was right.”

Ever since he arrived in Los Angeles, Bobby worked his hardest to provide a solid material foundation, first for his brother, then for Rafaela and Sol. While this foundation is important to Bobby, Rafaela’s values are different—something that Bobby is slow to understand. This passage also shows the characteristic short, choppy sentence structure Yamashita employs in Bobby’s chapters.

“Buzzworm had a plan. Called it gentrification. Not the sort brings in poor artists. Sort where people living there become their own gentry. Self-gentrification by a self-made set of standards and respectability. Do-it-yourself gentrification. Latinos had this word, gente. Something translated like us. Like folks. That sort of gente-fication. Restore the neighborhood. Clean up the streets. Take care of the people. Trim and water the palm trees. Some laughed at Buzzworm’s plan. Called his plan This Old Hood. They could laugh, but he was still trying to go to heaven.”

Buzzworm’s plan to combat the gentrification of Central and South-Central Los Angeles is for the occupants to “gentrify” it themselves. By investing in their own communities, they can become self-sufficient, an upper-class of their own making. Though Buzzworm might seem overly eccentric and idealistic to his neighbors, all of his efforts are directed at uplifting the Black and Hispanic communities of Los Angeles.

“‘Naranjas,’ He nodded, but he thought he’d better set Margarita straight. ‘If it’s Florida, it’s not imported. Same country, see. If it’s México, it’s imported.’

‘Por qué? Florida’s more far away than México.’

‘You got a point, Margarita.’”

Margarita’s point shows one absurd aspect of international borders: There is often more in common with cultures on either side of a border than there is between distant parts of a large country. This mention of oranges (naranjas) foreshadows the many deaths that will result from poisoned oranges, including Margarita’s.

“Rafaela thought about her argument with Bobby, about how she and Bobby did all the work without benefits, about exploitation. Now she had crossed the border and forgotten her anger. Lupe did all the work. Someone was always at the bottom. As long as she was not, did it matter?”

Living in America has altered Rafaela’s perception of society. In Mexico, there is less chance for social advancement for people like Lupe and Rodriguez. She begins to question her ideas about exploitation based on this fact; after all, Bobby provided them a good life, even without benefits.

“Rafaela stared at him for a moment and noticed that he seemed strangely tangled in the wisp of a thread. It was indeed the same thread, the same line that she had noticed before running tautly across Gabriel’s property and through the only ripening orange in the grove. Perhaps the line was so thin, so transparent, he did not notice it. He did not seem encumbered by the fact. The strands wound about him gracefully, tenderly, like strands of silk hair. Rafaela peered into the man’s open palms and gasped slightly at the length of his life line. He stirred in his dreaming.”

Rafaela is one of the only people who can see the line of the Tropic of Cancer, and she can see that it is linked to both the orange and Arcangel. While other characters, such as the driver of the black Jaguar and Rodriguez, lose sense of direction when coming into contact with the line, Arcangel is unencumbered by it; this represents that he can travel through the South with ease. Rafaela briefly reads his palm; his long lifeline seems to corroborate his claim that he is over 500 years old.

“Didn’t he read her papers? Bobby been reading them at night. Taking the Miraculous Stop Smoking and reading. Pile of them left on a shelf. Titles like Maquiladoras & Migrants. Undocumented, Illegal & Alien: Immigrants vs. Immigration. Talks about globalization of capital. Capitalization of poverty. Internationalization of the labor force. Exploitation and political expediency. Devaluation of currency and foreign economic policy. Economic intervention. Big words like that.”

The fear of losing Sol makes Rafaela realize the nature of what Bobby fears and what he does to care for his family; similarly, losing Rafaela motivates Bobby to investigate her view of the world by reading the papers that she wrote in community college. Rafaela is concerned with the exploitation of Mexican labor brought about by NAFTA. Her research is concerned with the growth of poverty in Mexico and the role that the United States plays in it. While Bobby is unconcerned about being exploited, hustling as much as he can to make as much money as he can, Rafaela is concerned with the rights of immigrants and exploited laborers.

“Of course, with continental drift, the changing crust of Earth’s surface had over billions of years come to this, cracked into continents, spread apart by large bodies of water. Now human civilization covered everything in layers, generations of building upon building upon building the residue, burial sites, and garbage that defined people after people for centuries. Manzanar saw it, but darkly, before it would shift irrevocably, crush itself into every pocket and crevice, filling a northern vacuum with its cultural conflicts, political disruption, romantic language, with its one hundred years of solitude and its tropical sadness.”

Manzanar Murakami sees the city in terms of intersecting maps, grids, and social overlays. Yamashita depicts Los Angeles as a palimpsest, a “text” where past inscriptions and histories bleed into the present. This passage also foreshadows the Tropic of Cancer dragging the South into the North as Arcangel brings the orange toward the border.

“Have you noticed that the scenery has not changed after all these hours of travel? That wall for example,” she pointed at Rodriguez’s unfinished work, “is the same wall, the very wall that encloses the house where we live. But we should have passed it hours ago.”

As Rafaela, Sol, and Arcangel travel North, the geography begins to become surreal as the orange containing the Tropic of Cancer collapses the geography into itself, distorting space and time. Though they have been traveling for hours, it appears that they have gone nowhere.

“Can’t you see it? Where we are. Harbor Freeway. It’s growing. Stretched this way and that. In fact, this whole business from Pico-Union on one side to East L.A. this side and South Central over here, it’s pushing out. Damn if it’s not growing into everything! If it don’t stop, it could be the whole enchilada.”

Just as the geography in Mexico is distorting, so too is the geography of Los Angeles as the Tropic of Cancer moves North. Buzzworm notices that the Harbor Freeway encampment is threatening to overtake the rest of the city. This reflects both the magnitude of the problem and the hold that it has on the public’s attention.

“Bobby takes the little cuz to a T.J. beauty shop. Get rid of the pigtails. Get rid of the Chinagirl look. Get a cut looking like Rafaela. That’s it. Now get her a T-shirt and some jeans and some tennis shoes. Jeans say Levi’s. Shoes say Nike. T-shirt says Malibu. That’s it.”

When Bobby meets his cousin Xiayue for the first time, he attempts to help her assimilate into American culture. Bobby’s view of culture is materialistic, and so he buys her products that are associated with materialistic American culture. To Bobby, the most important thing is that his cousin looks American.

“By the time Arcangel reached San Ysidro, he no longer really had to pull the bus. The great multitude behind pushed it for him. Pushed it and its passengers and the little boy sitting on his suitcase with the orange. Pushed the Tropic ever northward. Still attached by hooks and cables to the bus, however, Arcangel—naked to the waist—continued to press forward toward his destination: The Village of Our Lady Queen of Angels on the River Porciúncula, the second largest city of México, also known as Los Angeles.”

In this passage, Yamashita highlights that Arcangel is moving the Tropic of Cancer and the entire geography of Mexico and the United States along with it. This passage also highlights an instance of historical erasure: Los Angeles’s full name, The Village of Our Lady Queen of Angels on the River Porciúncula, has been covered up by the geographic overlay put upon it following American colonization.

“And damn if it wasn’t the last orange to appear in the entire city. People went crazy, grown adults chasing a two-year-old who grabbed the fruit and ran around in circles. They were gonna trample the poor kid. Buzzworm pushed his way in and scooped up the child. Now they run with Buzzworm’s advantage of longer legs, but he began to notice that no matter how fast or slow his pace, something kept the crowd at the same distance. Still, there had to be a way to lose them. He tucked the orange under the boy’s shirt, handed him back to the old juggler, and nodded. No one could see the orange but the old juggler threw his trick voice into the air. ‘There it is! Under that man’s arm!’ And everyone chased Buzzworm with his baby heart tucked like a football against his ribs.”

This passage is the one instance in the novel where Buzzworm and Arcangel’s paths intersect. The crowd of customs agents, FBI, border patrol, and other people eager to get their hands on the last orange in the city chase after Buzzworm instead. Arcangel gets the crowd to mistake the baby heart in the cooler in Buzzworm’s arms for the orange, effectively transferring the fantastical properties of the orange to the heart. Buzzworm throws the heart into the crowd, solving his need to get rid of it, while also protecting Sol and the orange.

“Two tremendous beasts wailed and groaned, momentarily stunned by their transformations, yet poised for war. Battles passed as memories: massacred men and women, their bloated and twisted bodies black with blood, stacked in ruined buildings and floating in canals; one million more decaying with smallpox; kings and revolutionaries betrayed, hacked to pieces in a Plaza of Tears, ambushed and shot on lonesome roads, executed in stadiums, in presidential palaces, discarded in ditches, tossed into the sea.”

Rafaela and her attacker’s struggle takes on mythical proportions as they are transformed into two beasts: a serpent and a wild cat. As they tear into each other, they resurrect the violence and rape that defined the Spanish colonization of the New World, as well as the violence experienced in Central and South America at the hands of dictators, coups, and cartel violence.

“If half of the homeless were veterans of war, then half of the current occupants of the valley suddenly returned to familiar scenes of fear and bloodshed, jumping into the foliage, cowering behind jeeps, lugging knives and rifles, carefully surveying the fray from that big ditch. A single shot heralded the ugly possibility of war.”

Behind the scenes, the military and LAPD have been grouping in preparation to invade the Harbor Freeway encampment. All it takes is one shot—the drive-by shooting that kills Emi—to set off the military’s retaliatory assault on mostly unarmed unhoused people.

“I no longer looked for a resolution to the loose threads hanging off my storylines. If I had begun to understand anything, I now knew they were simply the warp and woof of a fraying net of conspiracies in an expanding universe where the holes only seemed to get larger and larger. It was like Emi with her multiple monitors, channel surfing, or reading a slew of books simultaneously. The picture got larger and larger. I could follow a story or I could abandon it, but I could not stop.”

Gabriel’s storyline, like his investigation into the human trafficking conspiracy and the orange poisoning scandal, has no resolution: Each lead he discovers only brings him more stories. Gabriel begins to acclimate to Emi’s worldview; investigating this many things at once is akin to how Emi consumes media. Ironically, Gabriel has no idea that Emi has been shot and is dying in Los Angeles.

“The live monitor didn’t show this. It was too busy repeating the beginning of the end, ad nauseam. Being the hero of this footage, he looked to her as the heroine. Finally, her death would be unforgivable. Emi’s enraged media would see to that. A thousand homeless could die, but no one would forget her ultimate sacrifice.”

Because she is a member of the news media, Buzzworm knows that Emi’s death will mean more to the media than the deaths of countless unhoused people at the hands of the military. Ironically, though Buzzworm has dedicated his life to helping the unfortunate, this moment might cause more change than the rest of his life’s work.

“SUPERNAFTA never smiled. Humorless, he pointed his finger at the camera and intoned his cold bluster. ‘Today, my fight represents a challenge, not only to that Big Wetback,’ he spit, ‘in the other corner, but to all the children of the world. To that multicultural rainbow of kids out there.’ Upon saying children his eyes became slightly droopy like a puppy dog’s. ‘Kids, this is your challenge, too. And the challenge is this: It’s the future. And what’s the future? Well, isn’t it what everyone really wants? It’s a piece of the action! And that’s what progress is all about. A piece of the action.’”

SUPERNAFTA represents the progress that the US promised Mexico by ratifying NAFTA. As a “supervillain,” SUPERNAFTA promises the crowd a cut of the profits, which initially seems to be a lot of money, but which is reduced to next to nothing once divided up between the millions of citizens who would receive it. SUPERNAFTA might be covered in titanium armor, but he is vulnerable on the inside, signifying a weakness inherent in NAFTA.

“What can this progress my challenger speaks of really be? You who live in the declining and abandoned places of great cities called barrios, ghettos, and favelas: What is archaic? What is modern? We are both. The myth of the first world is that development is wealth and technology progress. It is all rubbish. It means that you are no longer human beings but only labor. It means that the land you live on is not earth but only property. It means that what you produce with your own hands is not yours to eat or wear or shelter you if you cannot buy it.”

Arcangel’s rebuttal to SUPERNAFTA’s argument is a scathing rejection of NAFTA. Critics of the trade agreement show how NAFTA brought wealth into America at the cost of the people of Mexico. Arcangel breaks the spell that SUPERNAFTA’s words placed on the crowd by showing them the harsh truth of what his promise implies.