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Under the Feet of Jesus (Novel)
Under the Feet of Jesus (Plume, 1994), a novel by Mexican-American author Helena Maria Viramontes, follows the lives of Estrella, her brothers and sisters, her mother Petra, Petra’s partner Perfecto, and the cousins Alejo and Gumecindo, all Hispanic migrant workers living and working in the California grape fields (See the entry on Cesar Chavez). The story reflects the hardships of the migrants’ lives set against the beauty of the landscape and of the young love unfolding between Estrella and Alejo.

Plot Summary
Chapter 1 begins with the family driving to the fields to harvest the fruit. Chapter 1 draws the personalities of the main characters on emotional, spiritual, and physical levels; we learn of the hardships that they endure as migrant workers. Petra, the mother, abandoned by her husband and raising five children alone, has endured bouts of insanity and self-mutilation. She meets Perfecto, who fixes things with his toolbox so well that, after he finishes, customers exclaim, Perfecto! A hare-lipped child cuts himself and is entertained by shadow-puppetry until he forgets his injuries. Gumecindo and Alejo pick peaches, not to eat, but to sell. In a darkened, derelict barn, a mysterious chain dangles from the ceiling, and the sounds of birds fill the darkness.

Working back and forth between Estrella’s and Alejo’s puppy-love and Perfecto’s memories, Chapter 2 develops several conflicts. Perfecto, now age 73, recalls falling in love with his first wife, Mercedes, and the loss of an infant, his first child. He hides his hope to return to the scenes of his early love from Petra. He asks Estrella to help him tear down the derelict barn for a payment that will fund his trip. Meanwhile, Estrella meets Alejo at a dance, where they begin to fall in love. These events are set against the backbreaking grape harvest, and the buzz of a cropduster. On one of its passes across a peach orchard, the cropduster sprays Alejo, bringing on life-threatening illness. Chapter 2 mentions the title of the book when Petra, exasperated, says of La Migra (the Immigration and Naturalization authorities), if they ask for proof of citizenship, let them find it under the feet of Jesus.

In Chapter 3, Alejo is sick with the daño (pesticide poisoning) of the fields. He is sicker, according to Perfecto, than any yerba (herb) or prayer can heal. The family decides to take Alejo to a clinic but is halted when their station wagon is stuck in deep mud. Everyone helps except Alejo, who can barely pick his chin up. In Chapter 4, Estrella and her family finally arrive at a remote, worn-down clinic. The only staff member, a nurse, seems distant from Alejo and unwilling to give him any but the most clinical of attentions. She suggests that the family take the boy to a hospital; however, she does not recognize how very little money the family has to pay the clinic’s fee, to buy gasoline, or to pay a doctor’s bill. Estrella repeatedly recommends Perfecto to the nurse as a repairman, so that the migrants can barter his work for medical services rather than pay money for them; the nurse repeatedly cannot read the vast gulf between even her small earning power and her patients’. At last, Estrella threatens the nurse with a crow bar, takes back the meager fee she had paid the clinic, and uses the money to buy gasoline to take Alejo to a hospital, where the family leaves him to the doctors’ care.

In Chapter 5, the family arrives at their shack without Alejo. The dirty dishes are where they left them. The younger children fall asleep. Although Petra has not yet told Perfecto that she is pregnant with his child, he is aware of the developing infant and recoils from the responsibility an infant will bring. Leaning against the decrepit car, he mourns for the places he left in memory and the money he does not have to return. Petra is awake and restless. Estrella rushes off, lantern in hand, to the only place she feels temporarily free, the old barn. As the novel ends, she is standing on the roof, silhouetted against a starry sky.

Imagery
The novel’s meaning develops partly through plot and partly through imagery evoked through the novel’s lush language. The plot lets readers know how delicate is the balance between having enough to eat and not, between sanity and insanity, between health and incapacitating illness. Exasperatingly, the loveliness of natural scenery and of acts of human decency almost mock the workers’ frailty and hardship. The mountains and stars, frequently described, endure beyond human carelessness, ignorance, and cruelty. Peaches evoke the deliciousness of food and eating, and food’s unavailability to many. Rotting fruit evoke preciousness, such as human talent, that is daily wasted. Blood, aching backs, feet, hands, eyes, all mentioned frequently, remind readers how much human life is housed in a body which must stay safe and healthy in order to live.