Helena María Viramontes’s powerful 1995 debut novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, takes place in the Central Valley and follows a family of seven migrant farmworkers, including a 13-year-old girl, Estrella. The family drive past a barn in their old Chevy Capri, hoping for work in a labor camp during the harvest—“the barn had burst through a clearing of trees and the cratered roof reminded her of the full moon.” Meanwhile, two boys are stealing ripe peaches from the nearby orchard in hopes of selling them. Estrella develops feelings for one of the boys, Alejo. He is sprayed by a crop duster and becomes gravely ill. As the novel progresses, we see that even as farmworkers endure harrowing conditions to pick food for prosperous others to eat, they are victimized by racism and xenophobia that keep them under the boot of California. Viramontes meaningfully indicts capitalist cruelty, yet her work feels as if it’s in the orbit of a dream, full of sensuousness and lyrical prose and intelligence. What a gift to be in these pages, inside literature of enlarged vision and the morally difficult awareness that reverence and beauty can emerge still.
‘Under the Feet of Jesus’
Helena María Viramontes’s debut novel is the California Book Club’s August 2024 selection.
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