falsely claim that Ben tried to save the boy, and thus Ben leads a life of guilt. Together, these characters, their environments, and their families, emotionally depict the struggles of being low-class section in Los Angeles during the 1960s. Reception Their Dogs Came With Them was published in 2007 and has been receiving growing popularity. Kate Soto writes that Viramontes looks to critique colonist abuses, exposing in particular the problems with highway construction. The title and the story work to expose how the Quarantine Authority controlled Latinos in Los Angeles, using their ownership of dogs as an excuse. Representing the power and abuse of government, the story illustrates how the people were mistreated and used. Viramontes writes about a place and a cultural construct that no longer exists in East LA, but only in her memory, which allows her to write fiction as she pleases (Rokitka). Social Connections “I do remember a time when there weren’t any freeways, and then I do remember the neighborhood, whole city blocks abandoned, then chewed up, our neighbors disappeared. It devastated, amputated East LA. from the rest of the city. The bulldozers resembled the conqueror’s ships coming to colonize a second time and I felt a real desire to portray the lives of those who disappeared.” Helena Maria Viramontes in an interview with La Bloga. As evident by the excerpt from Viramontes' interview, her writing is motivated by her love for the people she writes about. She wanted to tell the story of every Mexican American living in East Los Angeles during the political and social upheaval of the 1960s-1970s. The novel uses her own childhood experiences and events such as the Vietnam War, the Chicano Moratorium, poverty and Chicano gangs, and the construction of the freeways as a backdrop to an intricately woven story of four different female protagonists. The freeway construction is an important theme in the novel and to the social climate in East Los Angeles at that time. Having no political voice, Chicano communities could not stop the destruction of neighborhoods, displacement of homes, and the isolation of divided East L.A. which followed the freeway construction. Within the context of the novel, each of the four female protagonists directly experience this isolation and attempt to accommodate for it in their own ways such as joining gangs or returning to religion. Each must find a way to survive in the aftermath