Under the Feet of Jesus

Published in 1995, Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, a coming-of-age story about a young girl in a family of migrant laborers, is a classic novel of Chicano/a Literature. Critics have compared the book, which centers on the struggle of Mexican and Mexican-American farmworkers in California, to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for its illumination of the lives of the people who grow America’s food. Viramontes, a Chicana from a working-class family in East Los Angeles, is the recipient of numerous honors, including the John Don Passos Prize for Literature.