The memory is as vague as it is magical: I’m a toddler under a blistering sun that’s surrounded by a blue sky streaked with cirrus clouds. It’s lunchtime. I’m with my dad as we watch my mom and her coworkers-cum-friends emerge from strawberry fields like Aphrodites rising from the sea.
Ten or so mujeres wrapped not in their own hair—like a Botticelli goddess—but in baseball hats. Long-sleeved flannels. Layers of T-shirts. Gloves, bandannas across their faces, worn jeans, mud-caked work boots. All I can see are their eyes, and they’re smiling. It’s time for an hour of respite from la pisca—the harvest.
They are a group of women from my mom’s birthplace of El Cargadero, in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Friends since childhood, they are raising their families in el Norte, working to their literal bones, and hoping that their children will never have to do the same.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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This must’ve been during the early 1980s, in Orange County, where I was born and raised. Perhaps Oxnard, the strawberry capital of the Southland, where Mami—Maria de la Luz Arellano Miranda—went to pick when my family needed extra cash. Or perhaps this image is from two decades earlier, coming to me through some sort of Mexican wormhole. Mami and her teenage pals working in the fields of Southern California, a land that saw them as little more than expendable labor.
Wherever it was, whether it happened or not, I can recall that scene on demand. It’s been with me most of my life. And I can’t shut it off when I read Under the Feet of Jesus, the debut novel by Helena María Viramontes. This account of a teenage girl in 1960s California working la pisca is the story of my Mami, my aunts, their friends—the experience of so many people of their generation, as well as the ones before, and the too many that have followed.
Viramontes’s pointillistic style paints fetid living conditions with the same vivid colors as rows of ripe, colorful vegetables waiting for brown, cracked hands to pick them. She worked in the fields as a child, and Under the Feet of Jesus is a bildungsroman of sorts thanks to its protagonist, 13-year-old Estrella. She’s like every girl of my Mami’s generation—they had to grow up fast. They worked and helped care for the children around them, as well as the adults whose minds and bodies were often breaking down. The huge sacks of crops on their backs that made others rich, to say nothing of the weight of their own expectations for better lives, were just too much.
“Is this what happens?” Estrella wearily wonders to herself. “People just use you until you’re all used up, then rip you into pieces when they’re finished using you?”
Viramontes understands that fieldwork is the profession that sums up the California story better than any other. Exploitation. Hardship. Resilience. Beauty. Necessity. Her depiction of migrant lives and the uncaring gringos who dot the book like clueless ghosts isn’t a sob story, a novela of radicalization, labor organizing, or any of the tired tropes of farmworker literature. It’s a statement of fact: how it was, is, and always will be, for better or worse. Usually worse.
I read Under the Feet of Jesus in college and enjoyed it, but the book never quite called to me the way John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which it is frequently compared to, did. The Grapes of Wrath remains my favorite novel, but Under the Feet of Jesus offers the bolder lesson. Steinbeck implies that only rebels like Tom Joad and Jim Casy can bring about change. But for Viramontes, it’s women who will save us, because—to borrow what Ma Joad said of the workers—they’re the people who live.
The sad conclusion to the novel—Estrella’s about-to-be boyfriend, still suffering from the effects of being caked in pesticide, is dumped in a hospital—has gained more personal relevance since my mother passed away from ovarian cancer in 2019 at just 67. She died too young, and yet she was the last survivor of that group of friends who lorded over the strawberry fields of my memory. Their shirts and hats and bandannas were supposed to protect them from the pesticides that farmers sprayed recklessly. Yet one by one, Mami and her friends succumbed to cancer—brain, bladder, breast, leukemia.
Viramontes, who has family roots in the same part of Mexico as my Mami and is just three years younger, was able to stop working the fields. Thank God she survived and went on to document the heartbreaking agricultural work that most Californians never think of and that some of us can never forget.•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
