The Value of Labor Theme Analysis

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.