Fundamentally, Susan Straight's Mecca is a novel about the immigrant experience. Although Johnny Frías was born in the United States and is a U.S. citizen, his skin is brown, and his ancestors were immigrants. Frías' ancestors, in fact (both Mexican and Native American) were among the first to settle in California. And Frías is proud of his ancestry, something which he has also integrated into his soul. As such, he had to deal with many of the things immigrants had to deal with, like discrimination, racism, and other bad behavior directed towards them. Even though Frías isn't an immigrant, he lived an isolated, lonely immigrant-like experience in which he had to be a master of two worlds: the world of white people and the world of immigrants (the world and culture he came from).
Thematically, Straight's novel also explores themes of being different and standing out from a crowd, racial inequity and racism, community, the feeling of connection to the place in which a person works and lives, and the power and importance of language. Straight's novel also explores themes of prejudice, grief, regret, and how society is structured around racism.
Frías works by day as a California highway patrolman. He works alone and doesn't have much support in his role. Every day, he pulls people over for speeding or committing some other sort of crime. Often, the people he pulls over hurl racist insults at him or treat him poorly otherwise. Frías is in the position he is because of an incident that occurred when he was a rookie on the force: he killed someone named Bunny after he was insulting a woman over her race.
Bunny's death has haunted Frías for his whole life. And one day while working, Bunny's death comes back to haunt Frías in a very real way. The people who he has dealt with over the course of his life come back and haunt him, forcing him to contend with and confront his grief and past in a real way. In other words, his past comes back in a live and very tangible way. At the same time, Frías must also deal with the very real consequences of structural racism on his life and the life of his family.
