Helena María Viramontes’s lyrically compact novel Under the Feet of Jesus depicts the lives of migrant farmworkers not in overtly political terms but in finely honed personal and natural detail, with language that blurs the line between prose and poetry. These characters have vast interior lives—regrets and passions and keen observations of their often punishing surroundings. The sweltering California fields where they labor leave room for a burgeoning teenage romance, between Estrella, working alongside her younger siblings, mother, and the older, enigmatic handyman Perfecto, and the ever-curious Alejo, whose plans to leave the fields and go to school are dealt a blow when a blast of pesticide sprayed from the sky makes him deathly ill.

Migrant work is a fact of life around the globe, as numerous cinematic portrayals have shown. These stories unfold in countries including England (God’s Own Country), China (Last Train Home), and Qatar (The Workers Cup). But the North American imagination may drift more readily to Mexican and Mexican American workers picking fruit in California, people like Estrella, Alejo, and Perfecto. It’s backbreaking work, itinerant by definition, fraught with danger from the elements and from exploitative bosses and landowners. Perseverance here requires a kind of everyday heroism.

It’s little wonder Alejo longs to trade the fields in for a classroom. If he could, he might get a chance to follow in the footsteps of someone like José Hernández, the hero of the biopic A Million Miles Away (2023). As a child (played by Juan Pablo Monterrubio), José toils in the fields of San Joaquin Valley, picking fruit alongside his family. He doesn’t like it, though his father (Julio Cesar Cedillo) initially has little sympathy. The fields are a steady source of income for the family. But in the offseason, when José is able to attend school, he proves himself to be a math whiz. When his teacher strongly suggests to his family that they let him concentrate on his studies, they eventually consent, spurred along when a rapacious landowner cheats the family out of money they’re owed. José’s dreams, it turns out, go beyond solving calculus problems. He wants to be an astronaut.

A Million Miles Away doesn’t go into great detail on how the Hernández family navigates life with José in school; this is, after all, a feel-good movie about a kid who grows up to be an astronaut. But it argues clearly that migrant farming is not something to spend one’s life doing if there are other options available. “This is your future,” José’s father tells the family as he points to sweating farmworkers, before realizing that, no, this doesn’t have to be their future. José is all too happy to make it his past. But neither is he ashamed of his roots. As an adult (played by Michael Peña) in his first engineering job, José spots his future wife, the car dealer Adela (Rosa Salazar), in the fields, helping out her father. José is doing the same with his own father. His cousin, Beto (Bobby Soto), still working the rows, expresses his pride at José’s new path: “You’re outta here!” Then José helps Beto finish the last couple of rows. The engineer is not above getting his hands a little dirty.

As the global range of migrant movies shows, the circumstances of these workers comes down to social class at least as much as it does to race or ethnicity. The gold standard for such movies came out in 1940, and it’s about a family of white Oklahomans driving a beat-up truck to what they hope will be the promised land of California. But the Joad family of The Grapes of Wrath soon discover they’ve jumped from the frying pan of the Dust Bowl and eviction from their own farm into the fire of labor exploitation and violent, lawless authority in the California work camps.

Based on John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, directed by John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath is remarkably progressive for a classic studio-system movie. The banks are presented as the embodiment of pure greed. Labor exploitation is rampant, and union-organizing is quietly depicted as a moral corollary of religious faith (a preacher who has lost his faith, played by John Carradine, seems to rediscover it by standing up for the working man). The climactic soliloquy from Tom Joad (Henry Fonda in one of his purest, most affecting performances) serves as a call to collective action: “A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody.”

Watching The Grapes of Wrath today is a bracing experience: One of the handsomest, most stirring classic American movies is also a paean to labor rights. Scorn and shame are heaped upon the Joads, but so, in some moments, is kindness. As in Viramontes’s novel, gnawing hunger is a constant presence in Grapes. Stopping at a roadside diner en route to California, Pa Joad can afford only a dime’s worth of bread from a 15-cent loaf. In the first camp where they stop, which they soon have to flee when word arrives that law officials will be burning it down, Ma Joad offers a group of hungry children as much stew as they can put on the end of a stick. Ravenous, they assent.

The hope in these stories usually comes from people helping one another (in the face of still other people’s hostility or indifference). You can’t eat hope, but it can still give you a little fuel. Perhaps enough to get up the next day and do it all again or, if things break right, start a different kind of existence.•

Join us on August 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Viramontes will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Manuel Muñoz to discuss Under the Feet of Jesus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.