In both the Plague of Doves and The Devil’s Highway there is a problem of the omnipresent past distorting the present. Ethnic groups, family ties, land and the institutions characters are associated to, defines the construction of a grouping as well as a character’s conception according to their construction of that associated grouping’s past. Within the
Plague of Doves relationships between the people of Pluto and the people of the Native
American reservation are often formulated or even absent as a result of their grouping’s history distorting their conception of each other on the basis of their family, ethnicity, and backgrounds which remind their assessor of their groupings past, its associative tragedy, or their conceptualized general…show more content… The ‘Mexicans’ from Veracruz concentrate more on the differences between them and the northern city dwellers than the similarities, noticing that they were “Mexican towns full of Mexicans, so like them, yet so different from
Veracruz” (93). It is later the reader encounters the desert between both countries, that
‘desolation’ is the one place where neither White nor Mexicans have been able to shape the land in their image that “[they] are all illegal aliens”(120). Another issue of the past it is manipulated to suit the needs of the person telling it.
Because it is for the larger part fluid due to the unreliable narrators of both stories, the interpretation of the past brings it back to the present to reveal new information from it such as in the case of POD or reconstructed in Devil’s Highway by interpretive body. For the media can use the dead and commemorate them as heroes who risked their lives in civil disobedience, or the same story can be transfigured by la migra to bolster apartheid against the coyotes. Thus,
Mendez instead of being just a regular Mexican walker automatically becomes “the ur-Coyote shitheel we’d been hunting for thirty years, the killer of walkers, the smuggler punk, in the
