When I was shopping for a Mini Cooper last year, I headed to Mini of Downtown Los Angeles, figuring it would be 15 or 20 minutes from my Silver Lake home. Forty-five minutes later, I passed a sign that read, “City of Vernon, California. Exclusively industrial.
Founded 1905.” Five minutes after that, I arrived at the dealership and asked why its name included DTLA, when it was clearly in Vernon. “Because nobody’s ever heard of Vernon,” the salesman told me.
More people will soon have heard of Vernon, thanks to the wildly imaginative new novel from Lilliam Rivera, former entertainment editor at Latina Magazine and the author of seven children’s and YA books. In her first adult novel, “Tiny Threads,” the city of Vernon is as much a player as its human — and ghostly — characters. Not the Vernon of misleadingly named car dealerships, mind you, but the Vernon that literally stinks of capitalism’s crimes.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Rivera summarizes the novel’s twin themes: the brutality of for-profit mass production — specifically of meat and fashion — and the brutality of misogyny. “Although the Vernon I write about in this book is purely fictional,” Rivera writes, “factories have been poisoning brown communities for decades, while powerful men believe that their sexual predations are a right.” In real life, the Farmer John slaughterhouse — covered with murals depicting pink pigs frolicking on bright green farmland — stank up Vernon’.