Tortilla MVP - Hotel California

In English 1A, Mr. Lewenstein asked us to vote for our Tortilla MVP.  This means we get to choose the most valuable part.  We write about the part of the book we connected with most.  For me it was the mention of the Eagles song "Hotel California."   A beautiful song about broken dreams.  It's perfect. You can almost hear it in the background of the entire novel.  

Eagles Guitarist Don Felder has said he came up with the idea for the song “Hotel California” on late

night drive along an L.A. freeway: “You can just see this glow on the horizon of lights and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have."  Most of my classmates will know this song.  So will  their parents.  Most immigrants come to America in search of opportunity or freedom represented in the lyrics.  The Hotel California becomes a symbol of an escape and/or a better life… but things are not always as they seem. The student narratives I read often refer to the constant struggle of immigrant life: the toil in the fields,  the financial woes,  the family separations.  Many newcomers find life in California to be an illusion.   

In our reading of T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, I mean, you can almost hear it in the background.  Soon-to-be first-time father Candido crosses the border with his teen-age wife in pursuit of the American Dream.  He’s promised her a better life.  Not a rich one, but a comfortable one where some day they will have a house with chickens in the yard.

I bring up the part of the novel  when Candido’s wife America was in the rich white guy’s car listening to “Hotel California”.  Right here, this song is so significant because it was written to reflect the excess of luxury in this country. Something for everybody, right: Any time of the year..You can find it here.. Everybody, I suppose, unless you are a Mexican immigrant. In this scene, America gets sucked into the dream of Hotel California. She’s sitting up front in a Cadillac sedan and can’t believe her good fortune. On the first day she looks for work, she was going to be earning more money than she has ever before.  This is the passage that stands out: “If someone had told her when she was a girl at school she wouldn’t have believed them – it would have been a fairy tale like the one about the chambermaid and the glass slipper” (Boyle 97).  I think her mindset here might explain a lot about the novel. We as Americans often have no idea of the thoughts immigrants may have. It’s so easy to complain about them when we see them waiting on a street corner, but it’s difficult to imagine their dreams and desperation.

I mean, America is basically working for minimum wage, and she feels that she has hit the lottery on her first day of work. Sadly, she got something more than she bargained for out of the deal. Yes, she got paid, but she also felt a strange man’s hand on her thigh. Here she learns a hard lesson about the American Dream. It’s not for everybody.