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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Rudy Salas, Sr., a sculptor and painter. Salas sits at the dining room table in a captain’s chair. He is a large, warm man who wears hearing aids in both ears. His wife, Margaret, walks around the room and listens to the interview. He fidgets in his chair as he speaks of his grandfather, N. Carnación, who was a “gringo hater” due to a number of bad run-ins he had with them during his time riding with Villa. Salas’s grandfather influenced Salas’s dislike of white people growing up. This dislike grew when, in the first grade, people claimed that he was “inferior / because [he] was a Mexican.” It was then that Salas learned who his enemy was: “those nice white teachers.”
Salas’s early encounters with prejudice instill in him a hatred for the white people who tried to convince him that his race made him “inferior.” He underscores his hatred with his use of the term “gringo,” a derogatory slur used to refer to Caucasian people. As well, his reference to riding with Pancho Villa, a bandit who became a key general in the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century, underscores his pride in his Mexican heritage. Salas’s opening monologue introduces the way systemic racism compels people to adopt an “us versus them” mindset toward different races. Furthermore, the fact that he learned to regard “those nice white teachers” as his enemy shows that systemic racism teaches marginalized communities to distrust figures that people who are accepted by the dominant culture are taught to trust and respect.
Themes
Salas describes how his “insanity” took root after he suffered a police beating in 1942, when he was a teenager “running around as a zoot-suiter.” After he threw a punch in self-defense, four cops took him to a room and began kicking him in the head, fracturing his eardrum and leading to temporary deafness. From that day forth, Salas “had an insane hatred / for white policemen.” He conveys sympathy for his poor wife who has to hear him “rant and rave” about “these goddamned peckerwoods” every time he hears a news story about police brutality.
In describing his internalized hatred for white policemen as an “insanity,” Salas reinforces the notion of systemic racism as a social illness. He continues this extended metaphor, likening his expressions of hatred and frustration as a “rant and rave” of a mentally unwell person. Salas’s account presents racism and prejudice as more than just bad behavior exhibited by a select few. In portraying racism and prejudice as an illness, Salas implies that racism is endemic to U.S. society.
Themes
As a grown man, Salas reminds his boys always to cooperate and put their hands up if they’re ever in an altercation with the police. He recalls how his son, Stephen, came home from Stanford one weekend to sing with a band and had a cop put a gun to his head. Salas can’t believe that the things that happened to him decades ago are still happening to his sons.
That Salas’s sons experience similar instances of racism in their lives half a century later speaks to how little progress society has made to lessen racial tensions.
Themes
