Dispossessed by Desiree Zamorano | Running Wild Press | 320 pages | September 2024 | ISBN: 978-1960018434
I have never loved a historical novel as much as I love Dispossessed by Désirée Zamorano. From the first pages, the book makes the reader feel as if watching a movie about Los Angeles. Released this past October by Running Wild Press, Zamorano’s second novel demonstrates her mastery of the genre, love for her characters, and a deep understanding of the struggle of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. Through various storylines, Dispossessed explores all the ways Latino communities were dispossessed in 20th century Los Angeles.
Dispossessed tells the heartbreaking yet hopeful story of Manuel Galvan. At four years old, Manuel loses his parents, who were forced out of the country overnight, along with thousands of individuals, including American citizens, in the aggressive deportation program of Mexican-Americans carried out by the US government during the early 1930s. Traumatized by the experience, Manuel is unable to communicate his thoughts and feelings while he is bounced around in the foster care system until adopted by a Mexican woman, Amparo, who lives in the Chavez Ravine, the now extinct Mexican-American enclave in a canyon just north of downtown Los Angeles.
The title Dispossessed calls attention to the displacement of the Chavez Ravine neighborhood in exchange for the construction of the Dodgers Stadium. In the late 1920s, the long established community began disappearing in the rumors of buy-outs. This Mexican-American neighborhood had been identified as prime real estate. This humble neighborhood had little to no resources to fight against government condoned displacement. In less than a decade, homeowners accepted below-market offers for their property. Tenants were evicted overnight. "And here it was, the neighborhood thinning, selling out, and, finally, their eviction notice.” The last bastion of resistance, Amparo, the woman who had sheltered the homeless and given a home to Manuel, finally accepted defeat and moved with her grown son to Whittier. At this point, the Chavez-Ravine storyline and Manuel Galvan’s life diverged, showing the reader other aspects of the Latino and minorities struggle in Los Angeles.
The tragedy of Manuel Galvan’s story is his alienation, a result from family separation policies in which no government organization assumed any responsibility for the children involved in the inhumane treatment of Mexicans in the US during the height of the Great Depression. “Lose your parents. Lose your family. Lose your home.” Manuel lives with a hole in his heart, feeling that something is always missing and has strong emotional reactions to the possibility of abandonment. Now a grown man, when his wife, Lizette, seems to need a break, he clings harder to her, in fear of being abandoned again.
Lizette faces a horrific forced sterilization performed by a USC doctor when she sought medical care, signaling the systemic use of eugenics to prevent population growth among Mexican-Americans. Another instance of systemic racism occurs when Manuel witnesses the dehumanization of stevedores and dock workers at the Los Angeles Port in San Pedro, where non-unionized day laborers had slightly more rights than a mule. Disenfranchised, they were worked to death, exploited, extorted, and physically and emotionally abused by dock mafias.
In Manuel’s interaction with his parents’ former neighbors, a Japanese couple who survived the internment camp Manzanar, Zamorano shows the solidarity between the Latino community and other minorities in the city, a connection built on a shared history of dispossession and displacement. Zamorano expands on these community connections as Manuel becomes close friends with Colins, his African American supervisor, turned mentor.
As the novel follows Manuel’s life for 55 years, we see him evolve from being a silent little boy to finding his voice, standing up for the disenfranchised. Manuel develops into a hardworking, resilient, loving, loyal, determined man, always hopeful for family reunification. He stands up against the exploitative dock mafia, finds employment stability, and with his wife, creates a comfortable middle class life for his family in a nice neighborhood providing serenity and peace.
With meticulous research and master fiction writing, Désirée Zamorano has given us a comprehensive and insightful view of the evolution of a Latino man growing up in 20th Century Los Angeles. Zamorano shows love for the Latino community by creating an exquisite picture of Los Angeles between the 1930s to the 1980s. Cinematic in her scene development based on a strong sense of place, the reader can visualize the humble houses and the dirt roads in the Chavez Ravine, how women and men dressed, the cars they drove, the public transportation and their means of communication. Zamorano is well researched in all aspects, not only in how the city looked at the time but also the cost of living, wages, union practices, courting costumes, and what state violence looked like. Zamorano’s scenes are so vivid, the reader feels like they are inside a Scorsese movie, no detail is left behind. The cinematic nature of Zamorano’s craft fits the motion picture industry of the city it portrays.
In Dispossessed, Zamorano builds a gripping story based on historical events without ever losing the flow of the narrative. When we are not following Manuel Galvan’s extraordinary life, we have the city’s history to keep the reader hooked. Zamorano’s brilliant novel portrays each underlying meaning of the word dispossessed through the evolution of Latino Los Angeles. In her characterization of Manuel Galvan, Zamorano has poured her love for this resilient community with family and hope at the center of it.
Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author and an avid reader. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Coiman's poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021) raises awareness of the humanitarian crisis in her homeland. Her book reviews have been published in the New York Journal of Books, in Citron Review, The Compulsive Reader, and Cultural Daily to name a few. She live in Los Angeles, where she works and hike.