Under the Feet of Jesus Quotes

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.

The women in the camps had advised the mother, To run away from your husband would be a mistake. He would stalk her and the children, not because he wanted them back, they proposed, but because it was a slap in the face, and he would swear over the seventh beer that he would find her and kill them all. Estrella’s godmother said the same thing and more. You’ll be a forever alone woman, she said to Estrella’s mother, nobody wants a woman with a bunch of orphans, nobody.

He had the nerve, damn him, the spine to do it. She was almost jealous.

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.

You think ‘cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or something? Estrella asked, pushing up her sleeves. She lay on her stomach and dipped her bandana into the water. The cool water ran over her fingers and over the gravel like velvet.

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…

But the tire resisted, Alejo’s body resisted, and she did not want to think what she was thinking now: God was mean and did not care and she was alone to fend for herself…All she wanted was to find a deep, dark quiet space like the barn to cry. That was due her. She deserved it.

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Even the many things on the nurse’s desk implied fakery; the pictures of her smiling boys (Who did they think they were, smiling so boldly at the camera?), the porcelain statue of a calico kitten with a little stethoscope, wearing a folded white cap with a red cross between its too cute perky little ears…

The clinic visit is the family’s only interaction with middle-class America in the book; the nurse is the only character who isn’t a laborer, and the clinic is one of the few real buildings that the family enters. In this context, Petra’s unease represents her total alienation from that society; the fact that ordinary accessories of middle-class life, like desk ornaments and grinning photos, are so upsetting to her emphasizes the extent to which she lives outside this society. However, it’s important that rather than accepting her exclusion, Petra pushes back. The reality of field work is often erased and ignored by the larger society, but Petra insists that her grim reality is just as important – even more real – than this seemingly normal scene. Even though this moment underlines her poverty, it’s also an important reclamation of her own narrative.

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— The clinic visit is fifteen dollars, but I’ll charge you only ten because…she paused and glanced at Estrella, then added, because I know times are hard these days. She removed her black patent leather purse from the bottom drawer and placed it on the desk beside the phone. Estrella stared at the nurse an extra second. How easily she put herself in a position to judge.

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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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She did not feel like herself holding the money. She felt like two Estrellas. One was a silent phantom who obediently marked a circle with a stick around the bungalow as the mother had requested, while the other held the crowbar and the money.

After the disastrous clinic visit, Estrella stands in the parking lot wondering what to do next. Throughout the visit Perfecto and Petra have become more and more passive, and their complete absence from her deliberations now shows that she’s truly become the head of the family. Ultimately she threatens the nurse with Perfecto’s crowbar in order to get the money back, taking responsibility for her family even when she has to act in ways she finds morally distasteful. This moment is perhaps the most representative of Estrella’s coming of age, but it presents that process not as a positive development of adult character but a traumatic fracturing of identity. In order to care for her family, Estrella has to sacrifice her sense of her own goodness. This passage builds off earlier moments in which Estrella remarks that caring for her family erodes her sense of self – for example, when she envisioned herself sinking into the tar pits while digging the car out of the mud. Ultimately, it completes the novel’s argument that labor conditions and social exclusion warp the process of growing up for many Latino young people, rendering it an experience of profound loss.

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He had given this country his all, and in this land that had used his bones for kindling, in this land that had never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude…

After confronting the nurse and leaving the clinic, Estrella and her family drive to the nearest hospital, where Estrella lifts Alejo out of the car and prepares to shepherd her in. Looking back, she thanks Perfecto sincerely, acknowledging the effort and risk he’s incurred in order to get here. Perfecto’s comment that America has “never once said thank you” in all the time he’s worked here echoes Estrella’s epiphany outside the clinic, when she recognized both how essential her work is to keeping American society afloat and how unlikely her society is to acknowledge that fact. Here, Perfecto simultaneously enjoys a moment of sincere connection in a relationship that is often prickly and contrasts that connection to the callousness with which he’s treated by the outside world. For both Perfecto and Estrella, realizing one’s own worth goes hand in hand with renewed sadness at the experience of social indifference.

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The twins nuzzled under her arms. Soon, they were on the main boulevard again and the twins slowly fell into the snowlike quiet, shielded and warm and amazed that their big sister had the magic and the power in her hands to split glass in two.

After leaving Alejo in the hospital waiting room, Estrella sadly returns to the station wagon, but when she reaches the automatic doors, she makes a show of walking through them in order to amuse Cookie and Perla. Both girls are deeply impressed and fight to sit next to her on the way home. On a basic level, the fact that the girls have never seen an automatic door (a fairly ubiquitous item) underscores the family’s poverty and exclusion from basic aspects of public life. It’s also interesting that the twins derive so much security from Estrella’s trick and invest their sister with such sweeping powers. The safety they feel underscores Estrella’s actual powerlessness and the danger the family faces more than ever before. By leaving Alejo in the hospital, Estrella has finally acknowledged that she lacks the power to save him or devise a better solution; moreover, by threatening the nurse in order to get Perfecto’s money back, she’s potentially exposed herself to criminal prosecution. While the twins’ behavior creates a touching picture of family unity, it’s disturbingly clear that the safety they feel is entirely imaginary.

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The head of Jesucristo broke from His neck and when His eyes stared up at her like pools of dark ominous water, she felt a wave of anger swelling against her chest.

Estrella remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed.