When Helena María Viramontes’s first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, appeared in 1995, some compared her to John Steinbeck. That nearly three decades later such an assessment seems both apt and not tells us a lot about how California as a literary landscape has changed. I mean no disrespect to Steinbeck, yet in books such as In Dubious Battle, Their Blood Is Strong, and (of course) The Grapes of Wrath, he portrayed the lives of California farmworkers from the outside looking in.
For Viramontes, this has never been an option. Born in East Los Angeles in 1954, she attended Garfield Senior High School, where she participated in the 1968 Chicano Blowouts, a series of student walkouts to protest educational inequities. It’s no coincidence that Under the Feet of Jesus is dedicated to the author’s parents, “who met in Buttonwillow picking cotton,” or that the page bears a second citation: “In Memory of César Chávez.” What Viramontes is saying is that this is the real deal, art breathed into being from the stuff of life. In that sense, the novel is a precursor to a lot that has come after, including the work of Reyna Grande and Jaime Cortez, both also featured by the California Book Club.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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Under the Feet of Jesus unfolds in the Central Valley, where a 13-year-old named Estrella and her family have come to pick grapes. Viramontes establishes the circumstance from the opening paragraph: “Had they been heading for the barn all along?” she begins. “Estrella didn’t know. The barn had burst through a clearing of trees and the cratered roof reminded her of the full moon. They were seven altogether—their belongings weighed down an old Chevy Capri station wagon, the clouds above them ready to burst like cotton plants. Then the barn disappeared into a hillside of brittle brush and opuntia cactus as the man who was not her father maneuvered the wagon through a laborious curve.”
Let’s stay with those sentences to consider how they throw us directly into the mix. No prelude or preamble, no preparation, just the necessities of the situation, which is how the characters must live. A related sharpness runs throughout the novel, which never pulls a punch. The result is a story of love and loss, fear and longing, both in the relationship between Estrella’s mother, Petra, and the much older Perfecto (not her father, as the author pointedly introduces him) and in the bond between Estrella and Alejo, her 15-year-old love interest who works the fields.
If this seems a parallel, that’s part of the idea, a way to look through both ends of the telescope. The past may not predict the future, but it lingers as an immovable force.
“What she remembered most,” Viramontes writes of Estrella, “was the mother kneeling in prayer or the pacing, door slamming, locked bathroom, the mother rummaging through shoe boxes of papers, bills, addressed correspondence, documents, loose dollars hidden for occasions like this; the late-night calls, money sent for his return, screaming arguments long distance, bad connections, trouble at the border, more money sent, a sickness somewhere in between. Each call was connected by a longer silence, each request for money more painful. She remembered every job was not enough wage, every uncertainty rested on one certainty: food.”•
