A geological phenomenon, tar pits are naturally-occurring pools of asphalt that form from the remains of plant and animal matter. Alejo, who aspires to go to college and study geology, explains the tar pits to Estrella during one of their lunch breaks in the fields, telling her how animals’ remains eventually transform into the oil that currently powers the world. While his fascination signals his intellectual curiosity and potential, both he and Estrella reference tar pits at moments when they feel their labor is being exploited and ignored. After Alejo gets sprayed by pesticides, he imagines himself “sinking into the tar pits” and being completely erased, leaving behind “no story or family, or bone.” Similarly, when Estrella is trying without success to dig the station wagon out of the mud and take Alejo to the clinic, she imagines herself as a prehistoric girl falling into the tar pits, leaving behind “no details of her life” no matter how hard she may have worked. Later, she makes a direct comparison between her family and the tar pits, saying that “the oil was made from their bones” – in other words, that people like her produce the goods on which American society relies. All these moments demonstrate how the grueling physical labor Estrella and Alejo are forced to perform erodes their sense of personal identity. Moreover, it represents their sense that their work is invisible to those around them: like the anonymous prehistoric animals, they are providing essential services to society without enjoying meaningful rights or compensation. Ultimately, tar pits symbolize the contrast between the harsh conditions of migrant labor and the refusal of society to acknowledge that labor.
Tar Pits Quotes in Under the Feet of Jesus
He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints…black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blackness. 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.
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.
