Helena María Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus, the August California Book Club selection, is dedicated to the author’s parents and also to Cesar Chavez. Host John Freeman began the evening’s CBC gathering by asking about the significance of that dedication. Viramontes commented that her parents had met in the cotton fields, and before that, her maternal grandparents had met in the fields, and she thought it was important to acknowledge that. She said of her family, “They may not have the most wonderful marriage, but they were dedicated to each other, and it began in the fields.”

With regard to the Chavez dedication, Viramontes explained that halfway through writing the first draft of Under the Feet of Jesus, she realized he’d just died. “And I really wanted to write about his death, because how could you write about the farmworking community and not include Cesar Chavez?” But each time she began a chapter, thinking about the imagery of people returning home after working in the fields and the dust shining or settling on their backs, she realized that this desire to write about his death was about her—and that the novel should be the story of its 13-year-old protagonist, Estrella. “I actually put a tag on my computer that says, ‘Helena, keep yourself out of the narrative.’”

Freeman remarked that one of the things he loved so much about the novel was that it proceeded not by the difficulty of the characters’ lives, despite the fact that the characters are poor and struggling, but by how the characters care for one another and love one another. “A very key decision that you’ve made,” Freeman said, “is not to beat your characters up and make us empathize with them through their suffering, but rather to show us that they’re human by showing us how they love.”

Viramontes responded that she made this choice because her own family had grown up very poor, but her older sisters had been incredibly generous in taking care of the younger ones. She said, “It was always about taking care of each other. Even though I had experiences outside of the house that were horrible or awful or mean or cruel, I knew as soon as I stepped into the house that I was loved.... That sense always stayed with me.” She said that her philosophy is “all about finding the sacred in the everyday practices that we do.” She elaborated, “It’s not that the world becomes beautiful, but the power to live it, the power to go through it in some kind of sacred importance, gives it a force.”

Manuel Muñoz, Viramontes’s former student—and, as Freeman put it, “one of the best short story writers alive in the world, full stop,” as well as a novelist—joined the conversation. Muñoz noted that while rereading passages from the book in which Estrella and her love interest, Alejo, are doing an initial dance around each other, he realized that “they make what they can when they’re sharing a bottle of Coke.” He said that both he and Viramontes grew up in places where they didn’t have the privacy to be their intimate selves and asked her if she could speak to what that means, since so much “comes into play when we think about the limited spaces that we have.”

Viramontes said that she hadn’t put those details about privacy into the book consciously but that he was right. She spoke about the way the family in the book divides the room into separate spaces for them to sleep by using a blanket and shared that she’d grown up in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house with 11 family members in all, including cousins. Muñoz said that growing up, he’d lived in an 800-square-foot house that he was ashamed to talk about. He said to his former professor, “You flipped that right around and said, ‘Actually, you’ve got to describe down to the little bits of dust and crud and mildew to make it as visible and essential to someone who has never experienced something like that.’”

Muñoz, who is now a professor in his own right, said he sees that his own students experience a sense of shame in thinking that their experiences or their circumstances can’t belong in a story, and it is an incorrect belief. Viramontes agreed, saying that this is where stories should begin.

Viramontes mentioned that she’d found a note to herself asking how a writer could reconcile “the corporal activism, the bodily activism, with the invocations of reading and writing.” She asked Muñoz how he does this with his process. Muñoz said he didn’t know if he’d ever reconciled the question, since it had to keep evolving.

During the Trump years and during the pandemic, Viramontes said, she came to realize how important the action and activism of writing are—writing was her activism. She realized “that that was the most important thing that I could do at that time, to simply offer my torturous sentences, my hours of solitude, to try to see if I could make a good sentence to give to you, to give to the world, to give to someone, anybody who was, who had the time and the grace to want to read it.” Muñoz added, “And [the] generosity of spirit.”

Later, building on how valuable books are, Viramontes commented that when she would walk into the Los Angeles Public Library, it was a “cathedral” in which she felt that all the books were hers. Use of the card catalog was “like you were running through the fields to find a little book…pulling it out, and there it is! Go on the adventure of the search. How beautiful is that?”•

Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Danzy Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here, and preorder the novel, which will be released on September 3.