There really is, in the city of Ecatepec, part of Greater Mexico City and not too far from the Basilica of our Lady of Guadelupe, a street called Disneylandia. Its cross-streets include California, Washington, New Orleans, Massachussets [sic], New York, Cabo Kennedy, and Arlington, collectively making a strange little subdivision that recreates an imaginary map of the United States, which mixes states with cities and counties, and which combines allusions to technology and the Space Race (Cape Kennedy), the Pentagon (Arlington), and mass entertainment. If this were all you knew of the United States, perhaps it would be enough? (Or perhaps it would once have been: surely today we would substitute Silicon Valley for Cabo Kennedy.) A little knowledge may be dangerous, but it is also the kernel around which we can elaborate an entire imaginary of the world. After all, is not that the way that Disneyland itself works, as a factory that produces fantasy out of caricatured snippets from the real world and its history?

I say that there really is a street called Disneylandia, because after reading Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (2013), I felt I had to check. In the book, this is where the narrator, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, has his home: “I purchased two plots,” he tells us, “side by side, in the lovely Calle Disneylandia” (24), and here he builds a mansion and a warehouse side by side, with the warehouse to store his collection of, among other things, teeth. But Sánchez Sánchez, also known as Highway, is in this novel quite the fabulist. Moreover, this being a novel, we cannot necessarily expect all the placenames and names it contains to have real world referents. Yet the book seems to claim the truth of this particular reference in that, in a chapter devoted to images, it includes a map that shows the street’s location. 

On the facing page to the map, however, is a photograph with the caption “Highway’s House.” The photo appears to show a suburban house (built right up to the road) that has been built in the image of the Disneyland castle, with half a dozen or more spires and turrets, yet on an ordinary street complete with lamppost, sidewalk, and a couple of pedestrians passing by. The photo’s author, we are told, is Valeria Luiselli. But Highway is a fictional character, surely? In which case, whose house is this? And where was the photograph taken. Google Street View shows no such building on Calle Disneylandia. (In an interview elsewhere, Luiselli tells us that it is in Oaxaca.) The images that purport to validate the story told in the novel are not necessarily to be trusted. Hence I felt I had to check whether or not the street itself exists. It does, but perhaps as no more than one of those snippets of the real around which stories are told.

In some ways, this is common practice. No story, no matter how fantastic, conjures up a world out of nothing. When a novel refers to (say) chairs or tables, or even places such New York or Manchester, for the most part we assume, unless told otherwise, that the meaning of “chair” or “table,” or the geography of “New York” and “Manchester,” are more or less the same in the fictional world as they are in the everyday world. Likewise with the names of historical figures: when a novel references (for instance) “Margaret Thatcher” or “the Pope,” we take it that these are the same figures, with the same characteristics, as those with which we are already familiar from history books or radio and TV etc. But this is not true, or not consistently so, of Luiselli’s novel.

Especially when it comes to proper names, Luiselli repurposes signifiers, snippets of the real, often to put them to radically new use. For instance, Highway’s first job is working for a newspaper-stand owner by the name of Rubén Darío (8). Yet Rubén Darío is also the name of perhaps the most famous of Latin American modernista poets. What is the connection, if any, between that Darío and this one? To add to the confusion, Darío the poet’s most famous book was Azul, and Darío the newsagent’s wife is called Azul. Azul is said to having an affair with a “Mr. Unamuno,” described as “a pigeon-chested old codger who had a program on public radio” (9). Are we here to think of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno? If so, in what way is that Unamuno like this one? What point, if any, is being made by this correspondence?

Once alert to this system of references that are not quite references, we see or suspect them everywhere. Some are quite obscure. The man who teaches Highway the “art of auctioneering,” for instance, goes by a variety of names, but his Western name is Carlos Yushimoto. Can this be the same Carlos Yushimoto (whatever the “same” would mean) as the Japanese-Peruvian short story writer? The translator’s chapter, entitled “The Chronologic” (because yes, here the translator has her own chapter) would seem to imply as much. Other allusions are more cryptic: is the “Mr. Cortázar” who bequeaths to Highway’s family a “green velvet armchair” the same Julio Cortázar who, in his short story “The Continuity of Parks” describes a man reading in an “armchair covered in green velvet” who (strangely enough) ends up menaced by a character from the book he is reading? “Reader, beware!” it seems that we are being told. But beware of what? Of missing these references, or of catching them, and so of being caught off guard and possibly misled by a web of apparently arbitrary intertextuality? Does it help to know that Alan Pauls (here, a friend of Highway’s) is the name of an Argentine writer, that Emiliano Monge (here, an altar boy) is a Mexican short-story writer, or that Alvaro Enrigue (here, a bus driver) was Luiselli’s husband? And of course what Valeria Luiselli herself (or at least, her name) doing here, incarnated in the person of a “mediocre high school student” (129) taking elocution lessons?

The more famous and easily recognizable names are often Mexicanized. Hence we have Highway’s uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, presumably some relation to the French novelist Marcel Proust, as well as another uncle, Miguel Sánchez Foucault, who invokes the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, not to mention Highway’s cousin, Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. Is this then an indication that, throughout, Luiselli’s aim is a Mexicanization of a broader set of literary and cultural references, inserted almost at random (it would seem) in the story she is telling.

One way to understand all this would be to say that these names add value. After all, that is Highway’s own approach, in auctioning off his collection of teeth: to attach a name (and therefore a story) to each item, to give it provenance, history, and worth, even if in the end what is being sold off is just another chunk of enamel. These stories–these stories of his teeth, the teeth he seeks to pawn off on others–drive the price up. They are patter, and perhaps like all patter they do not bear too much examination, but in the moment they dignify and fuel the act of selling.But is this not also then a critique of this mode of valorization, of name-dropping and discursive validation. The Story of My Teeth, we are told, is a novel co-written by factory workers. I am not sure they would have cared much for these allusions, except in so much as they constitute a set of jokes for which the butt is whoever thinks that references and allusions ensure legitimacy and interest. In the end, teeth are just teeth. And a name, infinitely transferable, makes nobody special. You can call a street “Disneyland” all you want, but it is still just a way to get from A to B, a place to put a home.