The "Heart" of LA: Looking for a Transplant

Yamashita spends a good deal of Tropic of Orange focused on the metaphor of the heart.  Manzanar recognizes that the overpass on which he conducts is “the great heartbeat” of Los Angeles, where the “great flow of humanity…pump[s] and pulsat[es]” (Yamashita 35).  He calls the interlocking highway system the “blood connection” of the city, and likens the cars to “cholesterol in the blood stream” (Yamashita 35-36).  Thus, when the massive semi accident happens on the freeway, it is, symbolically, as if the city of Los Angeles has a “heart attack” (Yamashita 219).   However, as Buzzworm notes, “can’t nobody live without a heart” (Yamashita 215), so the second half of the novel is devoted to finding some kind of figurative transplant to save the freeway heart of Los Angeles. 

In the freeway disaster, the usual traffic of Los Angeles is blocked and the symbols of the upper class LA culture – “Porches, Corvettes, Jaguars, and Miatas” (Yamashita 121) – are obstructed with it.  The immediate “life support” system that occurs directly after the accident is that the “dense hidden community” (Yamashita 120) of homeless living nearby flood to the scene to inhabit the cars left behind.  They keep a thread of life in the abandoned cars, not allowing the accident scene to become neglected while they wait for someone to clear up the mess.   One man arranges “California poppies and… [a] decorative hanky” (Yamashita 217) in the car he inhabits to keep it feeling lived in; another plants baby tomatoes in a sidewalk crack (Yamashita 217) to literally create life at the desolate accident site.  This solution of having the homeless inhabit the cars is “understandably impermanent and immediate” (Yamashita 121), though, and will only last until the people of LA can find some kind of “transplant” for the freeway. 

However, the “transplant” for the heart of the freeway never eventually comes.  In the same way that the infant hearts that Rafaela and Buzzworm work so hard to protect never actually get to the hospital to get transplanted into babies who need them, by the end of the novel, no “transplant” or solution is offered that will fix the disaster on the Harbor Freeway.  While the lack of resolution for this issue is frustrating, it is also representative of the way that many of the real issues of the novel – such as the conflict between Global North and Global South, and the race and class tensions in diverse Los Angeles – often do not have a clear solution, a “transplant” of thought or law that makes the conflict go away.  Indeed, at the end of the novel, the dying SUPERNAFTA manages to sting the hero, El Gran Mojado, with a “missile…into Arcangel’s human heart” (Yamashita 262), and even as timeless a character as El Gran Mojado is unable to find a transplant in time to save his life.  The lack of resolution to the dramatically set up “heart” metaphor on the freeway functions as an authentic representation of the lack of resolution of the real issues of globalization.