TEARS OF THE TRUFFLE PIG

Response Paper #1: Tears of the Truffle Pig;

 The Real World Implications of Tears of the Truffle Pig’s Dystopian Society

In modern society, it seems like more and more of our livelihood is defined by currency, economics, and profit, every passing decade. While art and historic culture fade steadily into obscurity as it's replaced by technological advancements and the ever-pressing questions of how long we have left, it is hard to picture American society as anything but. Tears of the Truffle Pig’s narrative uproots that. What would society be like if that was flipped on its head? If everything is significant it seems like people are more willing to ignore by the year, becoming everything society centered around. Tears of the Truffle Pig by Fernando A. Flores acts as a time capsule for what Americans value and tells a story that addresses almost every fear the American government hides.

I would be remiss if I did not address the most substantial, and most evident comparison Flores makes to modern-day culture: the wall. Released in 2019, Tears of the Truffle Pig focuses almost entirely on Mexican-American culture, and, most pressing at the time of its release, the dialogue surrounding immigration on the Southern border of the United States. As the narrative takes place almost entirely in Southern Texas, it's hard to ignore the blatant message being sent by depicting such a dramatized interpretation of a Southern border wall, in a dystopian fiction. Flores seems to want to capture a realistic, and also previously unexplored, version of what our society would look like upon collapse, and uses the wall, as well as other elements, to make such a point. What's more, the bigger elements of this story prove the same point, possibly to a more impactful degree. 

The entire story surrounds the idea that, after all drugs are made legal, crime rings become obsolete without anything illegal to sell to make them money, however, said crime rings would not simply disappear, only find other subjects to focus on that would continue bringing in money, trading drugs for cultural art and artifacts. This is how Flores begins to die in culturally significant elements of global culture, allowing the reader to feel that much more enveloped in a dystopian landscape that would admittedly not be quite as impactful without the real-world tie-ins. However, it’s the manner in which these elements are used that feels the most impactful. The subplot revolves around how, considering what is now illegal and what isn't, the elite maneuver themselves within this world. One of the most jarring elements, and the namesake of the novel, is the Truffle Pig, and what's more, a multitude of other extinct and sometimes mythical creatures brought to life by advanced sciences. The elite upper class plays an interesting and relevant role throughout the text. As the story develops, we find that more and more of the questionable moments in previous sections of the novel are explained easily by the underbelly of the elite society. This is a clear representation of discourse occurring at the time of the book's making, a time when many political leaders were being called out and into questioning for abuse of power and tied together with the border walls, It becomes clear what message is being sent.

As protagonist Bellacosa carries on within the 10 days that this story takes place, we get glimpses of what Flores is trying to represent our future to be. Unlike other dystopian fiction novels, in which the changes from dystopia to the real world and drastic and clearly definable, there are many changes between the real and the fictive society represented in the text. The elite are the elite, and as we've seen time and time again, there is much we don't know to be discovered about what they do in the shadows, and how they, in the text, are similar to those in the real world, are not so separate from the overt evil-doing taking place.