Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Under the Feet of Jesus I
We asked many questions of Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus as we first delved into the novel. Is this a coming-of-age novel? Is this a religious text? Is this a political novel? Is it all three - and more? At the outset, we meet Estrella, and we discover the status of her "family" - her relationship with her mother ("the mother"), her role to her several siblings, and her feelings about Perfecto ("not her father"). The family have moved into an abandoned building adjacent to a barn, close to the fields in which they will be working.
We know from the outset that the family is struggling to survive and that they are subject to difficulties for reasons associated with family structure, working conditions, money, and, simply, life changes. We know that Estrella has taken on a mother-role for her younger siblings and we see this dramatically demonstrated in her attempt to comfort and distract her siblings during their mother's distress/madness at the departure of the children's father. In this instance, Petra holds an empty container of Quaker Oats under her arm, drumming on the top, dancing . . . she holds the Quaker Oats man in a "headlock" and "slaps" his round face on the canister. This moment demonstrates many things to the reader, as we discussed. She asserts her role as comforter, as a mature agent of control in the family, as a counter-colonial avenger. She also, in this action, indicates that the Quakers, who too came to this nation out of a sense of need and hope, are the ancestors to her people and their plight as immigrants/migrants. She offers then a tense duality: one side is her domination over a "type," the Quaker Oats man, whose white descendents have persisted in both maintaining a distance from her and her fellow migrants and continually perpetuating the conditions of migrant life as consumers, citizen, and employers. The other side of this duality is the relationship she creates between herself and the Quaker Oats man; she uses him and the kinship of the common plight to help her in a moment of crisis, of need, and thereby forms, as I said above, a relationship with him.
So as to not belabor the Quaker Oats man any further . . . we can transition by recognizing that Under the Feet of Jesus is a novel of symbols and the transformation of these symbols. Viramontes uses religious symbols (such as the Jesus statuette) and natural symbols (the birds that fly throughout the novel) to signify timeless struggles, faith, movement, access, freedom, moral conviction . . . any many other things.
In keeping with the themes of our course, how is this an "American novel," thematically? How is this a novel of borders (that one should be pretty obvious)? How is this a love story, and what kind of love story is it? What effects do border have on families? These are just some of the ideas who pursued in our first class on Under the Feet of Jesus. Take a look at our Tumblr image for that day to see more!
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