Under The Feet Of Jesus

“Petra lied to Estrella because she shouldn’t know her father evicted all of them from the vacancy of his heart and so she lied right to her daughter’s face, right through the cage of her very teeth and then she realized that truth was only a lesser degree of lies. Was it he who had the nerve to disappear as if his life belonged to no one but him?”

The absence of Estrella’s father hangs over much of Viramontes’s novel: it robbed the family of what little security they once had and has shaped Petra’s views on womanhood and romance, making her fearful of both. What’s more, it foreshadows Perfecto’s unreliability and, more specifically, the revelation that he, too, is considering deserting Petra. The above passage is also significant in light of Petra’s sense that Estrella takes after her father in temperament, because while Estrella does seem to share his “nerve,” her boldest actions (for instance, threatening the nurse with the crowbar) are typically taken in defense of others. By contrast, her father’s actions are selfish and perhaps even unnatural; the idea that his departure itself was a “lie” implies that “truth” exists in his relationships with and responsibilities to his family.

“Perfecto Flores taught [Estrella] the names that went with the tools […] Tools to build, bury, tear down, rearrange and repair, a box of reasons his hands took pride in. She lifted the pry bar in her hand, felt the coolness of iron and power of function, weighed the significance it awarded her, and soon she came to understand how essential it was to know these things.” 

Estrella initially resents Perfecto’s presence in her life and fiercely denies any suggestion that he’s her father. With that said, it’s Perfecto who initially sets Estrella on the path to self-confidence by teaching her about the tools he uses in his work as a handyman. For Estrella, simply holding the tools gives her “significance,” allowing her to interact with and impact the world around her in various ways (“building, burying, tearing down,”). In fact, it is ultimately Estrella, rather than Perfecto, who wields tools in the novel to the greatest effect, because it is Estrella who uses the crowbar to get the family’s money back from the nurse. This passage lays the groundwork for that moment, as well as the other ways in which Estrella will adopt traditionally-male symbols of power only to use them for her own ends.

“Of all the people who migrated to the fields, Maxine was the only one Estrella knew by last name. Last names were plentiful and easily forgotten because they changed with the crops and the seasons and the state lines.”

The idea that piscadores’ last names “change with the crops and the seasons and the state lines” is, literally speaking, a reference to the fact that these workers are migrant: as a result, a family that is in a labor camp one year may be replaced by a different family the next. Figuratively, however, the anonymity of the workers is just one more example of their invisibility to society as a whole, and illustrates the harmful effect that such a lack of identity has on their own self-worth; no one, including the workers themselves, thinks it’s necessary to learn their names. Part of what Estrella learns to resist over the course of the novel is this kind of psychological dehumanization; as she will tell Alejo later, it’s important not to let society strip them of their “hearts” (153).

“—You think ‘cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or something? Estrella asked, pushing up her sleeves. She lay on her stomach and dipped her bandana into the water. The cool water ran over her fingers and over the gravel like velvet.

“—Looky you. Thinkin’ about babies ‘ready, Maxine said, retying her shoe. All I know is that my ma’s been drinking this water for forty some-odd years, and if you askin’ me, she has too many mouths to feed. Maxine bent over the weeds and washed her face, moistened her lips, but this time neither of them took a drink.”

The above passage touches on two major forms of exploitation in the novel: class-based and gender-based. Estrella’s question refers to the possible effects of pesticides in the labor camp’s water supply; these chemicals are shown throughout the novel to have toxic effects ranging from cancer to birth defects. However, the image of a baby being born without a mouth is also a symbolic statement about the voicelessness of migrant workers in American society, which doesn’t acknowledge either the people themselves or the work they do. Finally, Maxine’s response foreshadows the central role that pregnancy will play in the novel. The migrant workers Viramontes depicts generally can’t afford more “mouths to feed,” so pregnancy is a constant danger for the female characters; these women often rely partly on men (like Perfecto) for support, only to be blamed when they become pregnant as a result of the relationship.

“—Don’t let them see you take the fruit, Estrella warned, licking a finger that dripped with sweet juice. The skin between her thick eyebrows gathered into a thunderbolt when she bit again.

“—For the pay we get, they’re lucky we don’t burn the orchards down. This came from the mother.

“—No sense talking tough unless you do it, replied Estrella, which gave Alejo the idea that this is the way they always talked with one another.”

The exchange that Alejo witnesses between Estrella and Petra says a lot about each woman, as well as the ways in which they differ. Although both Petra and Estrella agree that their working conditions are unfair, and that they’re in some sense owed the fruit they steal, Estrella seems far more inclined to act on her frustration; as she puts it, there’s no point in “talking tough” without also doing something about it. The description of Estrella eating a peach underscores her willingness to take decisive action; the comparison of her eyebrows to a “thunderbolt” associates her with powerful forces of nature, while the image of her licking the juice from her finger suggests her physicality, and the joy she takes in simple sensory pleasures. The moment also plays a pivotal role in Estrella and Alejo’s relationship, since meeting her in person seals the interest seeing her swimming had sparked earlier.

“[Alejo] planned to major in geology after graduating. He loved stones and the history of stones because he believed himself to be a solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space. With a simple touch of a hand and a hungry wonder of his connection to it all, he not only became a part of the earth’s history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity.”

Given the symbolism of oil in Under the Feet of Jesus, Alejo’s desire to become a geologist can be seen as an attempt to gain control over the forces that have victimized him. As a geologist, he would be studying the bones and minerals that are eventually converted into gasoline, which makes the migrant economy possible to a large extent. These hopes prove to be naive when he is poisoned by pesticides, which he imagines to be tarry “black bubbles” engulfing him (78). Afterwards, images of rocks and bones reappear, but in a far less optimistic way: “[Alejo] felt like splintered and chipped sea shells embedded in layers of the desert rock” (81). In other words, whereas Alejo initially identifies with relatively permanent geological features (the “solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth”), he ultimately proves to have more in common with the tar pits, which, like the migrant workers themselves, are treated as resources to be exploited.

“Estrella turned to the long stretch of railroad ties. They looked like the stitches of the mother’s caesarean scar as far as her eyes could see. To the north lay the ties and to the south of her, the same, and in between she stood, not knowing where they ended or began.”

The image of Estrella standing in the middle of the railroad tracks captures much of the uncertainty and impermanence that defines migrant workers’ lives. Because these laborers are always on the move, they are constantly in between different places, rather than in a definite place themselves. What’s more, the passage depicts the points they are journeying to and from as equally uncertain; Estrella doesn’t know where the railroad ends or begins. Finally, the passage ties this uncertainty to the particular experiences of migrant women through its reference to Petra’s caesarean scar; female laborers’ bodies are marked not only by the work they do in the fields, but also by the experiences of carrying and raising children.

“Estrella should have been safely tucked away like the other women of the camp because the moon and earth and sun’s alignment was a powerful thing. Unborn children lurking in their bodies were in danger of having their lips bitten just like the hare on the moon if nothing was done to protect them. Is that what you want, the mother yelled, a child born sin labios? Without a mouth?”

For Petra, sexuality is a dangerous thing, particularly where her daughter is concerned. Although Estrella is only 13 and hasn’t even begun menstruating yet, Petra realizes that she may be viewed as a sexual object and could theoretically become pregnant. In addition to the usual concerns this poses (for example, how to feed another child), pregnancies that begin during an eclipse are, according to Petra, particularly likely to result in birth defects, and, specifically, cleft palates. Of course, Viramontes elsewhere implies that these kinds of deformities are actually the result of contaminated water, so Petra’s belief is an indication of the extent to which she has absorbed society’s prejudices (in this case, misogynistic ideas about female sexual transgression). Regardless, Estrella’s willingness to disobey her mother speaks to her own, less fearful relationship to her body; the scene in which she shares a bottle of soda with Alejo has sexual overtones, but it’s a positive encounter, as well as one that Estrella herself initiates.

“Estrella pointed to the bottle because she wanted to tell [Alejo] how good she felt but didn’t know how to build the house of words she could invite him into. That was real good, she said, and they looked at one another and waited. Build rooms as big as barns. […] Wide-open windows where she could put candlelights and people from across the way would point at the glow and not feel so alone in the night.”

Estrella’s tentativeness in this passage is partly a function of her age and innocence. Her relationship with Alejo is implied to be her first romantic experience, and she isn’t sure how to draw closer to him. Beyond that, however, the circumstances of their lives as migrant workers also make forming stable relationships a challenge. In this passage, Estrella is grappling with this problem and trying to find a way to create a sense of home and companionship even in the absence of external stability.

“Is that what happens? Estrella thought, people just use you until you’re all used up, then rip you into pieces when they’re finished using you?"

When Perfecto asks Estrella to help him tear down the dilapidated barn for money, Estrella is reluctant. From the moment the family arrived at the bungalow, Estrella had felt an affinity with the barn, in part simply because its coolness and quiet contrasted with the heat of the fields. While working, she takes comfort in memories of the barn, creating a moment of private enjoyment even in the midst of difficult and exploitative labor. In this passage, however, it becomes clear that Estrella not only enjoys the atmosphere of the barn but also identifies with it, drawing a parallel between Perfecto’s plans to tear down the barn and the way in which society treats migrant laborers as disposable. Estrella’s identification with the barn reaches its climax in the final pages of the novel, with her emergence onto its roof echoing the personal transformation she has undergone over the course of the story.

“He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waist and torso, the pressure of tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs. Engulfing his skin up to his chin, his mouth, his nose, bubbled air. Black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness. Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone.”

Alejo’s run-in with the crop-duster is significant for several reasons. For one, it provides the novel with its central conflict: Alejo’s illness and the problem of trying to access medical treatment. Even more importantly, however, it illustrates just how exploitative and cruel the migrant labor system truly is, since the workers who harvest America’s crops are literally being poisoned by the job they perform. Viramontes underscores this point by likening the pesticides Alejo is sprayed with to oil. As Alejo himself will later explain, the oil America relies on for gasoline originates from fossilized bones. By referencing it in this passage, then, the novel suggests that America’s agricultural system is similarly founded on suffering and death. What’s more, this suffering goes entirely unnoticed by society as a whole; as Alejo loses consciousness, he imagines himself being stripped entirely of his identity (i.e. his fingerprints, family relationships, and “story”) and forgotten.

“[Perfecto] kept forgetting his hat, stumbling over his memories like a child learning to walk; as if in seventy-three years he had traveled too long a distance to keep himself steady and able and willing. What would happen if he forgot his way home?”

The above passage occurs just at the point in the novel when Viramontes reveals that Perfecto is considering leaving Petra and her children. For Perfecto, the fact that he is constantly forgetting his hat is a sign that he ought to leave while he still can. As he puts it, it suggests that he might also forget how to return home, either literally or metaphorically (i.e. by becoming too fearful of leaving, or too enmeshed in his adoptive family). For the reader, however, the fact that Perfecto keeps forgetting his hat is a sign of his increasing unreliability; not only is he thinking about leaving, but he is already losing the ability to function as the head of the family by thinking clearly and acting decisively. Eventually, it is Estrella who steps into this traditionally-male role.

“Perfecto lived a travesty of laws. He knew nothing of their source but it seemed his very existence contradicted the laws of others, so that everything he did like eat and sleep and work and love was prohibited.”

Regardless of whether Perfecto is technically allowed to work in the United States, he and his fellow migrant workers are treated as though they were undocumented; they are viewed with suspicion by immigration authorities, and they are invisible to society at-large. As Perfecto puts it, society makes no provision for his “very existence.” As a result, he is not only forced to scrape by through a variety of ambiguously-legal means, but also internalizes a sense of himself as “prohibited.” This is one of the many ways in which the migrant labor system dehumanizes workers in Viramontes’s novel.

“—If we don’t take care of each other, who would take care of us? Petra asked. We have to look out for our own.”

As Alejo grows sicker, questions arise about what should be done with him; he’s too ill to take the buses carrying migrant workers back to Texas, where his grandmother lives, but he has no family except for his young cousin in California. Eventually, Petra offers to take care of him, less because of the relationship he has with her daughter than because she realizes that as a community, the piscadores have no one to rely on but each other. Even then, however, Petra doesn’t take Alejo in purely out of the goodness of her heart, but rather because she hopes that someone else will do the same for her children if they ever need it. In other words, even a selfless gesture like this one is inseparable from the bargaining and compromising that characterizes so much of the migrants’ lives, and when caring for Alejo becomes too costly, Petra begins to rethink her decision.

“Trust me, [Perfecto] had said when she entered the store, and by chance, she would.” 

The above passage takes place near the end of the flashback detailing Petra’s first encounter with Perfecto, while buying garlic. Perfecto had been in the store as well, working to fix the freezer, and had responded with “trust me” when the shop-owner asked if was sure he could do the job. The passage therefore underscores just how desperate for support Petra truly is; although Perfecto hadn’t even been talking to her, she decides to rely on him regardless. What’s more, the entire meeting is based on “chance,” once again emphasizing the unpredictability of the migrants’ lives; even the things they look to for stability are ultimately governed by coincidence.

“Each morning she held nothing back. But the day bloomed and time became a tight squeeze of a belt upon a belly. Petra forced herself down the steps. Hadn’t she learned anything in her thirty-five years? That her two hands couldn’t hold anything back, including time?”

Petra’ s unplanned pregnancy is yet another reminder of how little control she has over her own life, and so it isn’t surprising that Viramontes uses it figuratively in this passage to describe the “tight squeeze” of time passing and events unfolding. In particular, the image evokes Petra’s sense of being controlled by her own body, and her fears that her daughter will experience the same fate; her thoughts about the inevitable course her pregnancy will take segue into thoughts about Estrella approaching puberty, and how nothing Petra does can protect her daughter from the heartbreak that could follow.

“—Alejo needs a doctor. [Estrella] said, hoping he would understand and accept the barter.

“—I thought it was your mama…I thought she’d be the one, Perfecto replied, taken aback.

[…]

“—Why are you making me choose?

“—Because it comes down to that.” 

Even more than scenes like the one with Petra buying groceries, the above passage illustrates how tight money is for the family and how painful the choices they have to make truly are. Even though Alejo’s life is on the line, Estrella realizes she will have to approach Perfecto with a “barter,” agreeing to help demolish the barn in exchange for medical treatment. When she does, however, she’s immediately confronted with another choice, this time between help for her mother and Alejo. All in all, the scene is a critique of an economic system where everything, including people’s basic welfare, has to be bargained and sacrificed for.

“[Estrella] became aware of her own appearance. Dirty face, fingernails lined with mud, her tennis shoes soiled, brown smears like coffee stains on her dress where she had cleaned her hands. The nurse’s white uniform and red lipstick and flood of carnations made her even more self-conscious. It amazed Estrella that some people never seemed to perspire while others like herself sweated gallons.

“—Some people have all the luck, the nurse said, going to her desk. She checked her watch once more and paused for a moment. She took hold of the key and unlocked a bottom drawer and she slipped her purse in and closed it and opened a top drawer.”

From the moment the nurse appears, it’s clear that the family’s interactions with her aren’t going to go well. The nurse’s polished appearance, complete with lipstick and perfume, is a sign both of her relative wealth and of her artificiality—especially the artificiality of her concern for Alejo’s well-being. Similarly, while Estrella might feel “self-conscious” standing beside the nurse, the spotlessness of the nurse’s uniform is actually a critique where the novel is concerned; there is something inhuman about the fact that the nurse doesn’t seem to sweat, particularly given how much attention the novel has paid to the ways in which the migrants’ labor marks their bodies. The nurse’s response is also a red flag. Just as Estrella is thinking about how lucky the nurse is, the nurse herself remarks that “some people have all the luck,” an apparently sarcastic reference to the fact that she was just about to close the clinic when the family arrived. In other words, the nurse is unaware of how truly lucky she is, though the fact that she places her purse in a drawer suggests that she vaguely understands how poor the family is; presumably, she’s worried they might steal from her.

“She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the car humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map. Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that? Estrella had figured it out: the nurse owed them as much as they owed her.”

The above passage is one of the clearest articulations in the novel of the relationship between the piscadores and the tar pits. As Estrella notes, it’s the labor of migrant workers—and in many cases the physical toll it takes on those workers’ bodies—that keeps society running smoothly. In particular, the work they do harvesting crops benefits middle-class Americans like the nurse, who go about their lives without having to worry about how to obtain food or where their food comes from. Taking into account all of this unacknowledged and unappreciated labor, Estrella believes that the nurse is actually in her debt, rather than the other way around. In this sense, Estrella is simply claiming what the family is due when she forces the nurse to give them their money back.

“Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Perhaps the nurse simply reapplied her blood-red lipstick, then drove off just in time to pick up her sons and her sons were probably asleep in their beds right now. Perhaps the nurse was stirring cream into her decaffeinated coffee, the spoon clinking on the cup while her husband watched the late night news. ‘You won’t believe what happened to me today…,’ she would probably say to him while he lay on the couch, because that is how Perfecto imagined people who had couches and living rooms and television sets and who drank coffee even at night.”

Perfecto’s attempts to convince himself that the situation with the nurse isn’t so dire after all shed light on just how different the two characters’ worlds are. Although there’s no way for readers to know whether the idyllic home life Perfecto imagines is accurate, that in and of itself is part of Viramontes’s point; the two worlds are so far removed from one another that they can hardly understand one another. This becomes especially clear as Perfecto imagines what the nurse might say to her husband. To the nurse (at least in Perfecto’s mind), the existence led by the migrant workers is so different from her own that it inspires disbelief. This is in part because of the invisibility of the piscadores’ suffering; what for them is a lifelong struggle is nothing more than a minor anecdote in the nurse’s otherwise comfortable life.

“What was happening to his instincts? If he were sinking into quicksand, would he not want to save himself? If there was an arrow shot into his belly, would he not think to pull it out? Why had God given him these instincts if they were not intended to be used? Lord, he thought, how tired he was. He wanted to rest, to lay down and never get up, and he pressed his hands to his face.”

After the incident with the nurse, Perfecto debates leaving Petra and her children that very night. As he sees it (and frames it in this passage), doing so would be a matter of self-preservation, since the nurse may decide to call the police. Nevertheless, he finds himself unable to take even that basic action to save himself, and not out of a sense of loyalty or love; Perfecto is simply paralyzed, and unable to act on his “instincts.” This is why, even setting to one side the morality of abandoning the family, Perfecto is no longer a figure Petra and the children can rely on; in moments of crisis, he seems increasingly unable to take action one way or another.

“She had walked fourteen blocks to get to the DMV, and her picture looked flat and dull and pale as concrete, but the ID was a great relief. Petra often feared that she would die and no one would know who she was.”

Given the earlier references to immigration enforcement, it’s noteworthy that Petra’s main concern in obtaining an ID has nothing to do with her legal status. To some extent, Viramontes suggests that the legality of the workers’ presence in the United States is beside the point, in part because their ethnicity, language, etc. leave them vulnerable to being seen and treated as undocumented regardless. Petra, however, hopes that having an ID will provide her with a kind of security that’s independent of the law, simply by attesting to her identity. Ultimately, however, this sense of security proves just as illusory as her religious faith, or her faith in Perfecto; no matter how much documentation they have, the piscadores remain invisible to most of society.

“She was stunned by the diamonds. The sparkle of stars cut the night—almost violently sharp. Estrella braced her fingers over the rim of the door frame, then heaved herself up into the panorama of the skies as if she were climbing out of a box […] Over the eucalyptus and behind the moon the stars like silver pomegranates glimmered before an infinity of darkness. No wonder the angels had picked a place like this to exist.

“The roof tilted downward and she felt gravity pulling but did not lose her footing. The termite-softened shakes crunched beneath her bare feet like the serpent under the feet of Jesus, and a few pieces tumbled down and over the edge of the barn.” 

Estrella’s climb to the top of the barn completes the character arc she has undergone over the course of the novel; passionate and courageous from the start, Estrella finally gives herself free rein to act on her convictions in her confrontation with the nurse. It’s significant, then, that Viramontes likens her actions to “climbing out of a box”; at least for the moment, Estrella is liberated from the invisibility and exploitation that characterize the lives of migrant workers. The moment also marks the culmination of the novel’s examination of faith, particularly since it closely follows the breaking of the Jesucristo. Now, it is Estrella rather than the statue who is pictured trampling the serpent (an image that traditionally refers to Jesus’s victory over sin). The implication is that Estrella’s faith in herself and her own abilities have taken the place of traditional and perhaps oppressive forms of faith—for instance, in patriarchal religions or in men themselves.