One of the most powerful things Cesar Chavez is credited with saying wasn’t authored by him alone but alongside playwright Luis Valdez. It comes from “El Plan de Delano,” the manifesto written and read on the occasion of the United Farm Workers peregrinación from Delano some 300 miles up to Sacramento. The goal was to get California grape growers to recognize their union. “Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich,” Chavez and Valdez wrote. “This Pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations.”
How anguished and loving is that possessive pronoun—our. It honors work, it says, implicitly. Our bodies. Our spirits. Our faith. It claims those who have perished in the doing of such work. But it isn’t exclusionary. In March 1966, to raise money for the peregrinación, for things as humble as “shoes for the marchers, sleeping bags, raincoats, cars, medicines and food,” Chavez wrote a letter to friends and added, “This will be a pilgrimage by members of all races and religions…. Although this is primarily a march of farmworkers, it is important that all we who have a concern for social justice and human dignity demonstrate their unity with us.”
It is impossible to use the word our expansively without touching questions of faith. Of who and what we are—and so it’s not a surprise that so many of the great leaders of protest movements, from King to Chavez to Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog), deal in questions of faith. But how about novelists? Surely the best of them deal sensitively in what our spirits contest with—but can novels born out of anguished ground deal in questions of the spirit, and if so, how can they do so? How can they possibly let us all in?
Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus is one answer. First published in 1995, it follows the fate of a family of grape pickers in search of work in California’s Central Valley. The book reads less like a novel than a long lyrical poem, one that moves in sequences of astonishing clarity into a predicament any precarious worker fears: What happens when you get sick? Who will tend to you?
Drawing in both form and value after the Gospels, which proceed in episodic fashion and tell the story of Christ, Under the Feet of Jesus imagines, What if Christ was not a parable-spinning prophet? What if he was a 15-year-old boy who got sick working in a farm field, or what if he was a 13-year-old girl, moved to take care of the boy? What would we know of them? What would the values of how they survive tell us?
For such a small novel, Under the Feet of Jesus has a large cast, one Viramontes introduces us to quickly with swift, painterly brushstrokes. Estrella is dreamy, and we know this because the first time she sees the barn she and her family arrive to stay in, she notices it “through a clearing of trees and the cratered roof reminded her of the full moon.”
There is Petra, Estrella’s single mother, who keeps her children’s birth certificates under the feet of a statue of Jesus that she moves from one temporary housing arrangement to another. She is responsible, careful, a provider, someone who can enter a room and smell “the fragrance of toasted corn tortillas, of garlic and chile bubbling over,” and it’s hard to blame her, since most places she stays stink of Raid and the Quaker Oats boxes left behind.
This is, like the story of Jesus Christ, a tale about poverty, not so much the structures that create it but the way people survive it. Estrella’s father has long since left the family, and in his place is a quiet, dependable man in his 70s who watches over her, who teaches Estrella language by instructing her how to use the tools in his tool kit, and who takes care to do jobs so that, from time to time, the family can go to the store and buy Spam. He has also probably, in a moment of late-night comfort, gotten Petra pregnant. The barn might become a manger, or it might just be a barn.
Two cousins travel in the wake of this makeshift family, picking peaches and grapes until one of them, Alejo, who has been mooning after Estrella from afar, gets sick from pesticide spray. Alejo had not guessed “the biplane was so close until its gray shadow crossed over him like a crucifix, and he ducked into the leaves,” Viramontes writes. It then banks steeply over the trees and releases a shower of white pesticide. “The lingering smell was a scent of ocean salt and beached kelp until he inhaled again and could detect under the innocence the heavy chemical choke of poison.”
Viramontes is an especially fine writer of the senses. The colors that saturate this book are vivid and rich and work in mysterious ways, just as colors do in the real world. The sounds of voices at work, and joyfully done, give it an enthralling music. The book also knows tremendously well how important it can be to touch and be touched when your body is being worked to exhaustion. “Sleeping in a room full of children was different than sleeping in a room full of men,” Alejo muses, after he becomes sick and is adopted by Petra and her family. “The smells and noises and dreams were different.”
Mostly, however, this book knows that we are defined by what we do to help other people. In this fashion, Under the Feet of Jesus becomes a pilgrimage of sorts, as Petra, Estrella, and their family try, desperately, with very little money at all, to get Alejo the medical treatment he needs. Doing so awakens in each of them a deeper form of caritas: one that slips among them and binds them together. Moving among this band of workers, of travelers, Under the Feet of Jesus also powerfully evokes the spirit of Chavez’s movement for dignity, justice, and fairness for all workers. It conjures tenderness, adventure, and wonder and asks, Who among us would deny anyone such joys?•
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.
