"The silence and the
barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a
question of work, and work
depended on the harvest, the car running, their
health, the conditions of
the road, how long the money held out, and the
weather, which meant they
could depend on nothing" (4).
As I mentioned, the book
has little dialog and lots of interior
monologue, which makes it
interesting to observe an almost obsessive
repetition of images
involving mouths. In some of the images, the mouth
seems to represent its
function as source of sustenance--air, food, drink,
and love's kisses. When
Estrella's real father leaves the family destitute
the mother's panic is
described in terms of "her mouth desperate,
desperate for air"
(l7) and "Petra broke, her mouth a cut jagged line" (l9).
The farmworkers' fear of
physical deformity as a result of pesticide
exposure is represented
repeatedly by references to missing mouths: "--You
think 'cause of the water
our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or
something? Estrella
asked" (33). And later: "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?" (69). And yet
again: "Petra thought
of the lima bean in her, the bean floating in the night
of her belly . . . Would
the child be born without a mouth, would the poisons
of the fields harden in
its tiny little veins?" (125) Alejo, the adolescent boy
who becomes Estrella's
friend, manages to connect with a mysterious hare-
lipped child: "It
seemed to Alejo that he was crying, though all he heard
were the wind-tossed
trees. Even the gaping hole of his own shirt hung like
a speechless mouth on his
belly" (22). This last image is one of several that
see the mouth as origin of
the voice, which makes possible expressions of
protest, anger and
therefore is a source of power and self determination if
present and a sign of
powerlessness when absent. "Perfect Flores was not
her papa. In the last
labor camp, near the water spigot where the farm
workers got their drinking
water, Estrella used her knuckles to rip Maxine
Devridge's mouth into a
torn pocket to prove it" (28). During Estrella's visit
to the barn that ends the
novel: " . . .the swallows flew out from under
eaves
of the cedar shakes like
angry words spewing out of a mouth" (l75). When
Perfecto asks her to help
him tear down the old barn to earn some extra
money, Estrella thinks:
"Is that what happens? . . . people just use you until
you're all used up, then
rip you into pieces when they're finished using you?"
"The nails would
screech and the wood would moan and she would pull the
veins out and the
woodsheet wall would collapse like a toothless mouth" (75).
The personifying simile
emphasizes Estrella's identification with the old
barn and the metonymical
function of the mouth image.
This last mouth image is
also part of another series of images: images
of people and things
stretched to the limit, on the edge, feeling impending
disaster or collapse,
images that echo and mirror the situation of the
migrant workers, always
just getting by, barely. The old barn with the
cratered roof is the first
visual image of the book, and is in the background
throughout. Its precarious
situation is referred to repeatedly. One of the
first flashbacks of the
novel is Estrella's memories (recounted by a limited
omniscient narrator with
her perspective) of the time when her father
abandoned the family,
"just as they settled in a city apartment with the
hope of never seeing
another labor camp again" (l3). The view out the
apartment window provides
an image that reflects the family's "on edge"
existence: "A car
wreck waiting to happen, Petra had said . . . The freeway
interchange . . . looped
like knots of asphalt and cement and the cars
swerved into unexpected
steep turns with squeals of braking tires. Sunlight
glistened off the bending
steel guardrails of the ramps. Just you wait and
see, Petra said in a puff
of breath on the window glass, a car will flip over
the edge" (16). This
image is expanded in intermittent fragments of
narration that emphasize
the family's precarious economic situation as the
story of the man's leaving
and its aftermath for his wife and children is
told. "The traffic
swelled and cars lined up on the curving on-ramp of the
freeway until the cars yanked
loose like a broken necklace and the beads
scattered across the
asphalt rolling, rolling, and she waited, her breath gone
until the rubber treads of
the tires connected with the pavement again" (l7).
On a day when the money
has run out and the children are hungry, Petra
"loses it" and
runs out of the apartment. "Petra . . . stalled on the boulevard
intersection divide and
waited for the cars to stop, waited for him, for
anyone, to guide her
across the wide pavement; but the beads rolled on, fast
howling shrieks of sharp
silver pins just inches away from her (l9).
A variation of the
"on edge" image string is the "stretched to the
limit" image.
Estrella is in the fields on the verge of weeping from sheer
exhaustion: . . .her eyes
fell on the flatbeds of grapes she had lined
carefully, sheet after
sheet of grapes down as far as she could see . . .
Morning, noon, or night,
four or fourteen or forty it was all the same. She
stepped forward, her body
never knowing how tired it was until she moved
once again. Don't
cry" (53). Another example comes from Petra's thoughts:
"Love, Petra knew,
came and went. But it was loyalty that kept them on the
tightrope together when it
was gone, kept them from seeing the void
beneath their feet . . . Just keep your balance, tiptoe across the
tightrope,
one foot up one foot down
. . ." (118).
Viramontes' world is
reminiscent of García Lorca's poetic universe, a
world in which everything
is itself and something else as well, for example,
" . . . her words
netted in the rustle of the trees" (9) (words are birds, the
sounds of the wind in the
trees are nets, vibrations become concrete).
Images are repeated and
linked, as in the following example:
"Estrella
would ask over and over, So what is this, and point to the
diagonal lines written in
chalk on the blackboard with a dirty
fingernail. The script
A's had the curlicue of a pry bar, a
hammerhead split like a
V. The small i's resembled nails. So tell me,
But some of the teachers
were more concerned about the dirt under
her fingernails . . . She
remembered how one teacher . . .asked how
come her mama never gave
her a bath. . .. And for the first time,
Estrella realized words
could become as excruciating as rusted nails
piercing the heels of her
bare feet.
The curves and tails of
the tools made no sense and the shapes
were as foreign and
meaningless to her as chalky lines on the
blackboard. But Perfecto
Flores was a man who came with his tool
chest and stayed . . .
Perfecto Flores taught her the names that went
with the tools: a claw
hammer, he said with authority, miming its
function . . . 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. That was when she began to
read" (24).
The novel's
repetitions and linkages are a way of representing every human
being's search for
meaning: things are like other things because of the
human urge to find
connections in order to make it all make sense. God is
tried but is found
ineffective: "There was something unsettling about this
whole affair to Estrella,
but she couldn't stop long enough to figure out what
it was . . . She did not
want to think what she was thinking now: God was
mean and did not care and
she was alone to fend for herself" (139) " . . . a
break. If only God could
help" (l47). He doesn't, so when the clinic nurse
charges them their last
nine dollars to tell them Alejo is very ill and needs to
go to the hospital,
Estrella threatens her with a crowbar to get their money
back so they can buy gas
to get him there.
In the novel's last
pages, the mother's statue of Jesus falls over
and
breaks, and the mother
thinks: "That was all she had: papers and sticks and
broken faith . . ."
(168) Characters even tend to blame themselves in order
to find some explanation
for the way things are. "Remembering Perfecto's
withdrawal, she wondered
if he thought she had failed somehow . . . She had
failed, failed the
test" (124). While Alejo is being sprayed with pesticides
he thinks, "Was this
punishment for his thievery? He was sorry, Lord, so
sorry" (77).
The final image of the
novel is Estrella standing on the edge of the old
barn's roof:
"Estrella remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge
of faith" (176).
Contrasted throughout with the adults' feelings of being
worn out, her strength is
also shown to be fragile, fleeting. She is powerful,
but mortal. Her
precarious position at the end of the novel emphasizes the
for-this-moment-ness of
her power. As she stands at the roof's edge, it is
unclear what she is
doing. Is she contemplating suicide, so as not to be
beaten down eventually?
Or is she pausing to concentrate her strength,
which she will exercise
for as long as she can before the next generation
must take over? The
reader must draw his or her own conclusions from the
novel's final paragraph:
"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
. . . No longer did she
stumble blindly. She had
to trust the soles of her feet, her hands,
the shovel of her back,
and the pounding bells of her heart. . . .Like
the chiming bells of the
great cathedrals, she believed her heart
powerful enough to summon
home all those who strayed" (176).
Not only is the
novel a riddle of the world, as García Márquez would
contend. Life itself is a
riddle and is portrayed as such in Under the feet of
Jesus.
It is interesting to note that the other great Chicano novel about
migrant farm workers,
Tomás Rivera's "...y no se lo tragó la tierra, also
refers in its title to a
loss of faith in traditional religious explanations that
traditionally have given
life coherence. As religion is found to be lacking,
characters (like some of
the rest of us) must create their own meaning from
the materials at hand, just
as Viramontes' readers struggle to tease out the
meaning of her novel.
I
believe that a novel is an encoded representation of reality, a type
of riddle of the world.
The reality that one deals with in a novel is
different than the reality
of life, although the novel's reality is based
on life's reality, as is
the case with dreams"
--Gabriel García Márquez,
Olor de la guayaba, 36
A few semesters ago,
I asked my students on their final exam to
write about how different
authors we had studied conceived of "reality" and
how each portrayed it in his
or her work. My assumption was that they
would talk about how the
definition of "what is real" has changed over time,
from the realist idea of
describing in detail (as if the eye were a camera)
and including as many
sordid details of life as possible, to the ideas of a
Borges that reality is not
so easy to pin down given our mental capacities. To
give another example, they
would need to explain that José María Arguedas
was trying to portray the
reality of indigenous people in the Andes, and did
so by creating a
fictitious language to communicate that Quechua-speaking
reality to
Spanish-speaking readers. So, I decided to give myself the same
assignment with regard to
UFJ. How does Viramontes conceive of reality in
her novel, and how does
she choose to portray it?
In this novel, the harsh
reality of the daily existence of migrant farm
workers, their poverty, is
presented in constant contrast with the incredible
natural beauty and wealth
of California. Viramontes portrays this world with
a highly metaphorical
language, a language that dignifies her characters and
reveals the complexity of
the inner lives of these "simple" working class
people. In addition, the
author problematizes the presentation of reality by
narrating her story from
multiple points of view.
The central characters of
the novel are members of a Mexican-
American family of migrant
farm workers. The mother, Petra, and her five
children have been
abandoned by the children's father. The man who
becomes Petra's lover,
Perfecto Flores, is 30 years her senior; he is longing
to return to his native
Mexico. Estrella, the oldest daughter, is l3, and the
novel's protagonist. She
has her first love experience with Alejo, a young
migrant worker who is
taken in by the family after he suffers pesticide
poisoning.
The novel opens with the
family arriving at yet another temporary
home in their old station
wagon. From the present of the narration
established by the opening
scene, the events previous to that moment are
told via a series of
flashbacks, using a third person omniscient narrative
voice that takes on the
viewpoint of one or another of the characters in
turn. The handling of
space and simultaneity often owes a debt to film, with
the equivalent of
wide-angle camera sweeps from one scene to another. Two
examples come from the
novel's first few pages. The novel begins with the