Chronotopes of the City

Combining Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and Sarah Dillon’s notion palimpsest, essay highlights dialogic relationship between narrative time space in Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them (2007). Set East Los Angeles 1960s 1970s—the heyday urban renewal projects rapid spread freeways—the novel registers geographical displacement constrained socio-economic mobility Mexican Americans whose homes are demolished by freeway building bulldozers. The spatial form intersectionality characterizing architectural structure freeways also describes novel. non-linear is structured upon multiple intersecting plotlines, each which portrays social struggles a young woman inhabiting city. Focusing on interplay environmental theme form, paper explores representation as spatially temporally multilayered landscape that palimpsestously overlays interconnects personal memory characters collective history Americans’ socio-political oppression North America. (BR)