Del Estado administrativo al Estado estratega

The international and cosmogonist perspective manifests itself in Los Angeles, the global city. Here first world and third world converge. The novel depicts a city that praises itself for its multiculturalism, while at the same time racial disparities make people invisible.

Multiculturalism is encouraged when it can be capitalized, but the people generating the culture are often seen as problematic and as such they are confined too the margins. This kind of view has tangible spatial repercussion in the territory: in the book the urban environment is divided

into different zones, connected or excluded from the freeway system depending on race and social status. Yamashita uses the road system, what Banham defined as the Angelino’s first ecology, to elaborate on social disparities, migrations, and borders. The freeway, symbol of mobility and freedom, a connection to both South (Mexico) and North (the rest of the United States) is depicted as the location of traffic jams and accidents. In the case of the homeless freeway block in particular, in which the Los Angeles homeless population moves into cars abandoned by drivers in the freeway trying to escape a Canyon fire, illustrates both the passage from invisibility to visibility and the contradictions emerging in the coexistence of first and third worlds. Taking possession of Volvos, Mercedes, Porches, Corvettes, Jaguars, and Broncos (121, 122) the homeless are finally making their presence known. This repossession is turned into a spectacle, watched by the same cars’ owners on television:

As the homeless flocked onto he freeway, there were also the usual questions of shelters and jobs, drug rehabilitation, and the closing of mental health facilities. And as car owners watched on TV sets or from the edges of the freeway canyon, there were the usual questions of police protection, insurance coverage, and acts of God. The average citizen viewed these events and felt overwhelmed with the problems, felt sympathy, or anger and impotence. (122)

The irony of this passage, that the owners want their cars back but at the same time they feel for the homeless, is in line with Yamashita’s complex vision of first world and third world’s

problematic reciprocity. Yamashita exposes a number of contradictions with no possible solution. It is impossible in the narrative to come to a situation in which both first and third world, in this particular case homeless and car owners, establish any kind of equilibrium. In a end of the century Los Angeles, where climate change, over-population, racial injustice

culminating in street riots are threatening the life in the city and reshaping social interactions, Yamashita gives voice to seven Angelinos whose stories illustrate the challenges of living at the margins. The traffic jam, symbolizing the unsustainability of the problems at hand, the narrative climax in which all the stories come together, has in fact an unpredictable implication:

Amazing thing was everybody in L.A. was walking. They just had no choice. There wasn’t a transportation artery that a vehicle could pass through. It was a big-time thrombosis. Massive stroke. Heart attack. You name it. The whole system was

coagulating right then and there. Some of the boulevards had turned into one-way alleys. Cars so squeezed together, people had to climb out the sun roofs to escape. Streets’d become unrecognizable from an automotive standpoint. Only way to navigate was to feel the streets with your own two feet. (218-19)

Even though the narration does not provide any solution from the chaos, it hints at possible coping strategies, social aggregations, and alliances that as Rachel Adams says, give rise to “utopian hopes for the future”(268).

The figure that exposes the disparities of Los Angeles is Gabriel Balboa. Character

conceived as a detective à la Philip Marlowe, he is the only first person narrator in the novel. The Chicano journalist is the more apparent connection between the characters, he is Emi’s boyfriend and Rafaela’s landlord, and he also works with Buzzworm to uncover the lives of the homeless in Los Angeles. While gathering material for this project he meets Manzanar Murakami, an encounter that establishes another connection between the different stories. Not only is Gabriel the link between people but he is also the subject who puts different places in relation to each other. When in Los Angeles, he drives his car, moving from one place to the other. The title of this section, “Skirting Downtown” refers precisely to his driving. The implication in the verb

“Skirting” is that Gabriel can move freely and decide what areas to avoid, unlike other characters in the novel who are confined to their neighborhoods without the possibility of getting out. Gabriel seems to be in between different worlds. As a Chicano, he occupies a position of marginality, yet, as explained he is the most mobile of the characters. He is the only one who is able to fly. Through his eyes, Los Angeles embodies the full definition of Global City. The recurrence of the image of the airport is an example of the global network, of a city connected to the rest of the world. While Rafaela’s journey back north is a long bus ride, Gabriel gets to live in a realty where in a few hours you can be in a different nation: “KAL from Seoul ARRIVED. VARING from Rio ARRIVED. QUANTAS from Sidney DELAYED. JAL from Tokyo

LANDING. MEXICANA from Mexico City LANDED” (86). The airport board, summarizing the international mobility Gabriel is exposed to, points out how the perception of time and space is determined by the subject’s position. Works of global literature such as Tropic reinforce the idea that in a connected, global world, time-space compression affects people in different ways. Social disparities are at the base of spatial subjectivity, shaping the way individuals perceive time in relation to their surrounding environment.