In Under the Feet of Jesus, a family of Latino migrant workers travels through California in search of work on commercial farms. For Petra, her partner Perfecto, and her daughter Estrella, each day is consumed by backbreaking work, in both the fields and the decrepit bungalow they call home. While constantly emphasizing the grueling nature of their labor, Viramontes also presents it as ennobling, a source of dignity and pride for the family. At the same time, their work is undervalued by their employers and ignored by the society that surrounds them. Especially for Estrella, who is coming to terms with her future as a piscadora, or field laborer, the tragedy of her abysmal working conditions is compounded by the deliberate erasure of her labor by the corporations and consumers who benefit from it.
The family’s determination to do their work well reflects their values and love for each other. In particular, Estrella expresses her admiration for Petra by admiring her ability to work. For example, she observes her mother squatting to cook breakfast as soon as she wakes up and remembers that as a child she used to sleep on Petra’s sack of cotton while her mother dragged her through the fields. The novel’s loving description of Petra’s hands moving over the cooking pit to sustain her family, and Estrella’s tender description of this “gentle and pleasing” childhood moment, emphasize the connection between work and familial love.
Whenever they perceive that someone thinks their work in the fields isn’t worthwhile, Petra and Estrella sharply point out that there’s nothing wrong with “picking the vegetables people’ll be eating for dinner.” Even though their job is a mark of low economic status and social exclusion, they turn it into a badge of honor.
But while the novel’s characters respect the work they do, the author steers clear of romanticizing it. Viramontes constantly references the aches and pains that plague Perfecto, Estrella, and Petra after a day of work. The strain of work in the field makes Petra feel like an old woman, although she’s only thirty-three; as the summer progresses Estrella is disturbed to discover that she’s starting to walk with a stoop, a reflection of the permanent toll the fields are taking on her body.
Moreover, the backbreaking labor of the fields renders the characters too exhausted to do more than eat and sleep after the workday is over. They have no energy to play or even think, much less do anything to improve their circumstances. Agricultural labor thus requires them to sacrifice not just their bodies, but their inner lives.
Although the Herculean effort of physical labor dominates the family’s life, it remains undervalued and largely invisible to the society around them. In one chapter, Estrella describes the exhausting process of harvesting heavy baskets of grapes, dragging them across the field, and arranging them on special frames to dry into raisins. She contrasts this labor, which she performs in the blazing sun, to the advertising graphics on the finished cans of raisins, which show a relaxed and elegant woman holding out a basket of fruit. Estrella resents that the companies selling raisins ignore the effort needed to produce them; her feelings reflect the eagerness of agricultural corporations to minimize their workers’ labor in order to avoid regulation or oversight.
Alejo expresses the same feelings by explaining the phenomenon of tar pits to Estrella. Although the fuel and gas on which everyone relies derives from the condensed bodies of prehistoric animals, they rarely get any acknowledgment of their sacrifice. Much like the animals in the tar pits, the sacrifices that Alejo and Estrella make are ignored by the society around them, which wishes to consume cheap goods without thinking too much about why they’re so cheap.
This phenomenon of erasure is an economic and social issue: if everyone refuses to acknowledge the plight of migrant workers, it’s hard for them to gain rights and improve their circumstances. But to Estrella, it’s also an existential threat. At one point, she compares herself to a prehistoric girl falling into the tar pits, leaving behind “no details of her life…no piece of cloth, no ring.” Especially because work shapes her entire life, the erasure of her labor corresponds to the erasure of her very identity.
The omnipresence of labor in Estrella’s life coincides with the invisibility of that labor in the world around her. Ultimately, this contrast is a stern indictment both of corporations who create these appalling conditions and society at large, which turns a blind eye in order to reap their benefits.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Value of Labor ThemeTracker
The Value of Labor 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.
What impressed her most was the way his thumbnail plowed the peel off the orange in one long spiral, as if her father plowed the sun, as if it meant something to him to peel the orange from stem to naval without breaking the circle.
Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man.
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.
Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips…Her knees did not sink in the hot white soil, and she did not know how to pour the baskets of grapes inside the frame gently and bread the bunches evenly on top of the newsprint paper.
Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them.
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 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 cotton balls in the jar looked too white, like imitation cotton to Petra. She noticed a scale near the desk much like the one used for measuring the weight of picked cotton. The scale reminded her how she’d wet the cotton or hid handsized rocks in the middle of her sack so that the scale tipped in her favor when the cotton was weighed. The scale predicted what she would be able to eat, the measurement of her work…
