Cars frequently appear as symbols in 20th-century American literature. Endowing their owners with mobility and agency, they allow people to make their individual way in the world and fulfill the “American Dream” of success and prosperity. The beautiful green car that Petra encounters during one trip to the grocery store is a perfect example of this symbolism; seeing it, she immediately envisions its owner as prosperous and satisfied, prominent in his community and friendly with his neighbors. By contrast, her lack of a car means that even a simple trip to the store is an all-day event, during which her young children must cross highways on foot and expose themselves to danger. Just as she does with her depiction of consumer goods, Viramontes shifts the symbolism of the car, turning it into a representation of Petra’s lack of social mobility and inability to fulfill the American Dream.
Of course, the most prominent car in the novel is Perfecto’s battered station wagon. At the beginning of the novel the entire family is crammed into this car, searching for another temporary home; for them, the car represents a negative kind of mobility, the transitory and unsettled nature of their life as migrants. What limited agency the family has depends on their ability to drive in this car, but it also fails them at crucial moments, for example getting stuck in the mud when they try to drive Alejo to the clinic. Estrella remarks that “the car running” is one of the factors that determines their ability to work, and thus eat. In this sense the car emblematizes the uncertainty and instability that prevent her family from climbing out of poverty.
Cars Quotes in Under the Feet of Jesus
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.
She envied the car, then envied the landlord of the car who could travel from one splat dot to another. She thought him a man who knew his neighbors well, who returned to the same bed, who could tell where the schools and where the stores were, and where the Nescafé jars in the stores were located…
She thought of the young girl that Alejo had told her about, the one girl they found in the La Brea Tar Pits. They found her in a few bones. No details of her life were left behind, no piece of cloth, no ring, no doll. A few bits of bone displayed somewhere under a glass case and nothing else.
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 cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map.
In this passage, Estrella is standing outside the clinic, wondering what to do next. Despite the nurse’s “generosity” in undercharging them, the fee has completely eaten up their limited funds, and they have no money to take Alejo to the hospital or get home. Interacting with the nurse has also made Estrella feel needy and indebted, but when she reframes the issue in terms of the contributions to society that she and her family have made their entire lives, it seems that it’s really the nurse (and the middle-class society she represents) who is indebted to Estrella. Here, Estrella emphatically acknowledges the value of her own work while realizing that her society will not voluntarily do the same; this is thus a moment of profound empowerment and disillusion. In a few minutes Estrella will use violence to make the nurse acknowledge her, ending her dream of achieving recognition and agency in society through meaningful and “legitimate” labor.
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