Their Dogs Came with Them by Helena Maria Viramontes is this week’s Latino Book Club Pick. That the book would be about immigrants is all too obvious to anyone who knows anything about writers’ tendencies to put sarcasm and irony in their titles.

Their Dogs Came with Them chronicles the life of immigrants living in the eastern Los Angeles Area in the unrest-filled 1960s.

Within its pages we become acquainted with Luis Lil Lizard, a despicable gang member whose sister is so desperate to get his brotherly stamp to help out her self-esteem that she resorts to adhering to his bawdy lifestyle. But the turbulent 1960s doesn’t have much to offer a Latina, so Turtle, said sister, becomes a street worker, upon his deployment to Vietnam.

The author names almost all her characters after reptiles and amphibians, perhaps hinting not so subtly at the characters’ dysfunction. Even someone like the college-bound Ben is troubled, and emerges as nothing more than a slight depressive, while Ermilia, a progressive-minded chica who manages to escape the tough streets, but can’t pull away from militancy.