Tortilla Curtain Analysis

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Recommended: Immigrants facing discrimination in the 1920s

At the beginning of the Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle uses the car accident to set the tone between Americans and immigrants to show that unnecessary fear can lead to division and people committing malicious acts which is shown all throughout history. T.C. Boyle uses this book to make the reader connect with people like Candido and America as well as some of the social issues that confront some Americans. This couple came to America to have a better life but were denied that chance for one reason, the fact that they were illegal immigrants. Candido and America spent half of their time hiding from the immigration police. They couldn't stick up for themselves because if anyone found out that they were causing trouble they would be deported. …show more content…

One example is the first red scare, in which members of the U. S. congress accused individuals, mainly screenwriters, of including communist party members. This led to hundreds of people being blacklisted and ruining their careers. This relates to the situation in The Tortilla Curtain in which people didn’t like who they were, mainly due to being immigrants, so they refused to give people jobs... Another example of this behavior is after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 1941. Many in the U.S. believed that all the legal Japanese Americans would be more loyal to their home country and posed a serious threat to the safety of America. Rumors began to spread “fueled by race prejudice, of a plot among Japanese-Americans to sabotage the war efforts” (Foner). To prevent the potential of sabotage, the United States decided to put the Japanese citizens in America in internment camps, releasing them after the war was over. At the end of The Tortilla Curtain, the fire that was started by accident was viewed by most people as an act of terrorism by the Mexicans, and it Drove Delaney to try to kill Candido. Just like previous acts in history, the American people developed racist views, which developed into an irrational fear that immigrants, Japanese, communist, or Mexican would hurt them. This fear of things or people that are not like us isn’t restricted to Americans, one of the most prolific examples of this behavior is the Holocaust. “ They were primarily ethnic poles, captured soviet civilians and prisoners of war, other Slavs, Romani’s, communist, Jehovah’s witnesses and the mental and physically disabled”

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