Under the Feet of Jesus

Migrant Mexicans shackled to a life of itinerant farm labor form the backdrop for a summer in the life of young Estrella and her family. Seemingly a prescription for sorrow, in Viramontes' hands the canvas instead teems with color and builds toward hope for a liberating future--at least for Estrella. Her mother, Petra, and stepfather, Perfecto, remain confined to their tattered possessions and dusty poverty, and much of Viramontes' imagery--imaginative and allusive descriptions of land, orchards, and worn-out clothes--fix in readers' minds that they will not escape. Estrella, too, partakes of this despair of the migrant's world, but being young she is not resign to her seeming fate. Her feelings culminate when she smashes up a nurse's office, goaded by the nurse's insensitivity to the family's privation and shortage of cash. That shock quickly abates, but the anger elides into an ethereal mood as Perfecto weighs abandoning the family while Estrella wanders through a barn to scatter then reattract a flock of symbolic birds. A chromatically impressionistic novella that should hit home in Latin literature collections.