In Los Angeles, Japanese American television news executive, Emi, and her lover, Latino journalist Gabriel Balboa, are chasing newsworthy stories of local disaster, including an apocalyptic standstill on the Harbor Freeway and the creation of a new urban social order by homeless population moving into the abandoned cars.

Buzzworm gives Gabriel a few newsworthy tips, such as the mysterious package arriving at the L.A. airport and the presence of Manzanar Murakami, a Sansei and former doctor who conducts freeway traffic from an overpass as if they were symphonies.

And the novel does so by appropriating and redeploying the hegemonic tropes of cartography and geography in ways that map Western colonialism and the buried sites (longitude and latitude figured in the parole of history) of prehistoric rivers, flora, and fauna, and 'native' resistance as well as the ongoing transgressions of African Americans, Asian migrants, Latino/as, just to name a few of the other who have and are inhabiting the geography—in the deep sense—of Los Angeles.

"[3] Scholars of third-world women's writing and Chicana/o studies have written about Tropic of Orange as a text that incorporates elements of Chicanismo as it deals with issues of contested geopolitical borders.

For example, Janet Kaye for the New York Times, writes that the novel is "fiercely satirical" but "disappoints as it heads for the home stretch, when her playful seriousness too often gives way to pedantic polemics.