“Sad Flower in the Sand”: Camilla Lopez and Los Angeles' Mexican Past in John Fante's Ask the Dust

“SAD FLOWER IN THE SAND”: CAMILLA LOPEZ AND LOS ANGELES’ MEXICAN PAST IN JOHN FANTE’S ASK THE DUST A THESIS Presented to the University Honors Program California State University, Long Beach In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the University Honors Program Certificate Meagan Meylor Spring 2016 WE, THE UNDERSIGNED MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE, HAVE APPROVED THIS THESIS “SAD FLOWER IN THE SAND”: CAMILLA LOPEZ AND LOS ANGELES’ MEXICAN PAST IN JOHN FANTE’S ASK THE DUST BY Meagan Meylor _____________________________________________________________ Sarah Schrank, Ph.D. (Thesis Advisor) History Department _____________________________________________________________ Stephen Cooper, Ph.D. (Thesis Advisor) English Department California State University, Long Beach Spring 2016 ABSTRACT “SAD FLOWER IN THE SAND”: CAMILLA LOPEZ AND LOS ANGELES’ MEXICAN PAST IN JOHN FANTE’S ASK THE DUST By Meagan R. Meylor April 2016 While scholars of John Fante’s Ask the Dust have given considerable attention to the novel’s protagonist Arturo Bandini, his Mexican American love-interest Camilla Lopez has not been adequately analyzed. Scholarship concerning Camilla has been limited to her destructive relationship with Arturo, as well as her adoption of Hollywood stereotypes. By foregrounding the figure of Camilla through the socio-historical lens of the marginalization and deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the 1930s, we can discover important insights into Fante’s novel, most notably in his treatment of marginalized ethnic identities within Los Angeles. Through the novel’s complementary motifs of absence and presence regarding Camilla, Fante draws attention to the Mexican past of Los Angeles, a historical moment that is often erased, both implicitly and explicitly, by the collective memory of the city. By giving Camilla a voice and a story, Fante sheds light on these social realities and offers the reader a counter narrative about the Mexican past of Los Angeles during the years of the Great Depression. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Dr. Sarah Schrank for her encouragement, editorial assistance, and fascinating research on Los Angeles, the place I call home. Thank you for expanding my knowledge of the city’s history and motivating my confidence as a student and scholar. I am endlessly grateful to Dr. Stephen Cooper for his insight, guidance, and mentorship. By sustaining the memory of the “patron saint of Los Angles literature,” he has given students and scholars the opportunity to understand the city through Fante’s vibrant perspective. Thank you for not allowing this voice to be forgotten. I owe much gratitude to the President’s Scholars Program for funding my undergraduate education at California State University, Long Beach. Thank you for recognizing my potential and making this all possible. Special thanks to my parents for their unending support and validation. To Calvin Diego Adams, for your patience and love. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1. WHO IS JOHN FANTE’S “SAD FLOWER IN THE SAND”? ............... 1 2. HISTORICIZING ASK THE DUST: MEXICAN REPATRIATION IN THE 1930S .......................................................................................... 14 3. RACE, SEXUALITY, AND THE BODY: A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF CAMILLA LOPEZ ........................................................................ 17 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 30 v Who Is John Fante’s “Sad Flower in the Sand”? In the prologue to Ask the Dust, composed in 1938 as a letter to his editor at Stackpole Sons Publishers, John Fante offers a vividly impressionistic précis that suggests the mystery at the thematic core of the as-yet unpublished novel: “Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.”1 By Ask the Dust’s somber close, Camilla has vanished into the desert surrounding Los Angeles, her body presumably covered over by dust that erases the “secret of [her] death.”2 If Camilla does indeed return to dust, readers should consider the following question when trying to fully understand the novel: in what way does Fante challenge dominant discourse about 1930s Los Angeles and Mexican identity by focusing his prose on the disappearing figure of Camilla? After decades of obscurity, Fante’s 1939 novel Ask the Dust is now considered perhaps the most seminal work in the literary history of Los Angeles, appreciated by generations of readers for its treatment of desire and cultural identity set against the backdrop of an ethnically diverse neighborhood, Bunker Hill, in Depression-era Los Angeles. While Fante scholars have given considerable attention to the novel’s protagonist Arturo Bandini, his Mexican American love-interest Camilla Lopez has not been adequately analyzed. Scholarship concerning Camilla has tended to limit itself to her role in Arturo’s projection of his “own sense of ethnic alienation” onto her, even as she acquiesces to mainstream Anglo mythologies and values.3 In the essay to follow, I aim to help fill this gap in the critical literature by examining the importance of Camilla 1 John Fante, Prologue to “Ask the Dust” (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), 1. 2 John Fante, Ask the Dust (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 164. 3 Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 172. 1 through the lens of Los Angeles’s social history, most notably in the city’s treatment of marginalized ethnic identities during the 1930s. I will argue that through the novel’s motifs of absence and presence regarding the figure of Camilla, Ask the Dust offers a counter narrative about the Mexican past of Los Angeles, a historical moment that is often erased, both explicitly and implicitly, by the collective memory of the city. Regarded as “Fante’s most compelling creation” by David Wyatt, the figure of Camilla has received a significant amount of critical attention since Fante’s literary revival in the 1990s.4 Following Stephen Cooper, many scholars have recognized Camilla’s importance as an ethnic mirror for Arturo, a “reflection of his own insecurity as an Italian American.”5 As a young woman of Mexican heritage living in Los Angeles during the year 1933, Camilla “represents the Other, the supposed foreigner upon whom [Arturo] projects his fantasies,” a reading that other critics of the novel corroborate.6 For these scholars, Camilla embodies the “alienated Eden” and “pre-conquest landscape” of the region itself,7 even as she represents “the New World in its pristine state, before the Spanish conquest and the racism of Anglo Americans.”8 Various 4 David Wyatt, “LA Fiction Through Mid-Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40. 5 Charles Scruggs, “‘Oh For a Mexican Girl!’: The Limits of Literature in John Fante’s Ask the Dust,” Western American Literature 38 (2003), 235. 6 Mark Laurila, “The Los Angeles Booster Myth, the Anti-Myth and John Fante’s Ask the Dust,” in John Fante: A Critical Gathering, ed. Stephen Cooper and David Fine (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1999), 115. 7 Melissa Ryan, “At Home in America: John Fante and the Imaginative American Self,” Studies in American Fiction 32 (2004): 205. 8 George Guida, “In Imagination of the Past: Fante’s Ask the Dust as Italian-American Modernism,” in John Fante: A Critical Gathering, ed. Stephen Cooper and David Fine (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1999), 136. 2 readings highlight Camilla’s “romanticized ethnicity,” and scholars such as Catherine Kordich argue that her “adoption of Anglo [and Hollywood] preferences” reflects her “cultural resonance, identity, and pride” as a border character in Los Angeles.9 A more recent interpretation counters the established view that Arturo rediscovers “his own status as an alien and an outsider” through his interactions with Camilla,10 asserting instead that Arturo “perceives her as the embodiment of a racial otherness that helps him to imagine his own whiteness.”11 While Wyatt, Kordich, and others have established a critical conversation about the meaning of Camilla, additional close readings and analyses are needed to address the complexity of Fante’s character. In this essay, I will challenge these interpretations and expand on others by placing Fante’s novel within the socio-historical context of 1930s Los Angeles, thereby enriching our understanding of Camilla’s motivations, the development of her identity, and the mystery of her poignant fate. In Chapter 1 of Ask the Dust, before the reader is introduced to Camilla, Arturo fantasizes about the Mexican women living in downtown Los Angeles, the “Aztec princesses and Mayan princesses” that he desires to possess to reinforce his grandiose illusions of literary prowess.12 Through his alter-ego protagonist, Fante presents a romanticized portrait of the Mexican women in the Grand Central Market and the Church of Our Lady, where Arturo “[goes] to Mass to look 9 Catherine Kordich, John Fante: His Novels and Novellas (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000), 80. 10 Richard Collins, John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Toronto: Guernica Editions Inc., 2000), 137. 11 Matthew Elliott, “John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Fictions of Whiteness,” Twentieth Century Literature 56 (2010),

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