Under the Feet of Jesus Chapter Two Summary & Analysis

Summary: Chapter Two

Estrella and Alejo pick grapes in the middle of the day, a few rows apart, but unaware of each other’s presence. Alejo accidentally cuts himself. He thinks of his grandmother back in Texas, who encourages him to make something of himself. He dreams of starting high school soon, and meanwhile he sends his grandmother money out of his earnings. Ricky joins Estrella. She coaches him on how to pace himself while working under the hot sun. As a train goes by, the workers pause from their work and straighten up to listen. Alejo notices Estrella. At the end of the day, he seeks her out but sees her leave the field by walking along the train tracks, instead of getting on the truck along with everyone else. Estrella walks to a baseball field and sits to watch a Little League game, but when the bright field lights come on, she is frightened. They remind her of the lights used by immigration police. Estrella runs back to the bungalow and grabs a crowbar out of Perfecto’s tool chest, for protection. Petra scolds her for acting scared and frightening the twins.

In the morning, Alejo and Gumecindo, Estrella and her two brothers, and Perfecto ride out to fields in the back of a truck. Alejo tries to make conversation with Estrella. Her replies are friendly at first, but she grows annoyed when he starts asking about her absent father, and about Perfecto and the rest of her family. The conversation ends when the truck begins to drop workers off to start their day. That evening, however, Estrella and Alejo share a bottle of cola. Afterward, back at the house, Petra is angry. She has been warning Estrella that being with a man by the light of a full moon can cause a woman to give birth to a child without lips. Estrella thinks of the boy in the barn.

Right after work the next day, on Petra’s instructions, Estrella goes to meet Perfecto by the barn. He has been hired (by the work crew foreman) to tear the barn down, and now Perfecto asks Estrella for help with the job. Their conversation is interrupted by the noise of a crop dusting plane. Estrella does not want to see the barn torn down. Perfecto insists that it needs to be done. Someone died in the barn, he informs her. She objects that the harelip boy is in there often. She refuses to help tear down the barn.

Alejo and Gumecindo are back in the peach orchard, stealing peaches, when they are surprised by the crop-dusting airplane flying overhead. Gumecindo, down on the ground, is able to run out of the plan’s path, but Alejo is caught up in a tree. He is drenched with pesticide and immediately begins to feel sick. He imagines sinking into tar and being trapped. He falls and bruises his face. The next morning, Alejo feels unwell but goes to work anyway. The other workers on the truck edge away from him superstitiously. Estrella asks about his injury and tells him to be careful. Too late, Alejo replies.

Some time after the plane has sprayed the orchard, Perfecto is out among the trees. The night before, he dreamt of his earlier life. He and the woman he was with, Mercedes, had a child that did not live. In Perfecto’s mind, the child died because Perfecto and Mercedes had had sex without being married. Perfecto and Mercedes had other children, but he never stopped grieving for the first one. Mercedes died of cancer. Perfecto badly wants to go home, back to Mexico. The money from the barn demolition would make that possible. As Perfecto recalls his earlier life in a haze of guilt and sadness, dead insects drop from the trees. Later, the feeling of wanting to go home becomes so strong in Perfecto, it is like a tumor lodged in his heart. He has noticed that at age seventy-three, he is becoming increasingly forgetful. He wants to go home while he still remembers the way.

During a work break on a brutally hot day, Estrella lies down in the shade beneath a truck. Alejo joins her there. As they look up at the truck’s oily underside, he explains that oil comes from tar formed of the bones of dead creatures. They kiss. In the evening, back at the bungalow, Estrella goes into the barn. She stands silently, beneath the sunlight coming down through the open roof. She now sees that a chain leads up to a trapdoor in the roof. When she pulls at the chain, it leaves rust stains on her hands.

Analysis: Chapter Two

As Estrella works to harvest grapes and lay them to be dried into raisins, she thinks about the woman pictured on the cover of raisin boxes in the store, whose image contrasts with the Viramontes’s description of the actual labor of making raisins, an example of irony in the novel. The woman on the box is smiling, relaxed, an image representing an easy relationship with the bountiful earth. In contrast, Viramontes’s depiction of Estrella and the other workers doing the real work of preparing the grapes to be dried emphasizes difficulty and discomfort. The sun itself is “mighty” and said to “work hard,” and even the birds, symbols of freedom elsewhere in the story, are made to waver by its heat. While the sun in the picture on the box is a mellow orange color, in the real world it is white and makes Estrella’s eyes sting. The woman in the picture is both happier and less capable than Estrella. Viramontes stresses that the smiling woman does not know the strain of Estrella’s muscles, or how to do the task of laying the grapes to dry, spreading them evenly, resetting the frame on the next sheet of drying paper. In this way, Viramontes demonstrates both the difficulty of agricultural labor and also the specialized knowledge of the laborers, underscoring the theme of their value and expertise, invisible to the outside world but crucial to the system’s success.

The barn reappears as both a challenge and a symbol of hope in Chapter Two. As Estrella harvests the grapes in the hot sun and takes stock of the aches and pains she suffers with every movement, she prevents herself from crying by conjuring an image of the cool, breezy barn, with its swallows fluttering below the roof. When she begins to fall in love with Alejo, Estrella wishes she could “build the house of words she could invite him into […] rooms as big as barns,” showing the symbolism of the barn’s open space as possibility and hope for the future. Perfecto later asks Estrella to help him tear down the barn for extra money. His request is an indication that she is reaching adulthood, but she wavers in her decision to help him, even though it is a chance to improve the family’s dire financial state. She also challenges his earlier insistence that she had no business being there. When Estrella imagines tearing down the barn, she compares the structure to herself, thinking “people just use you until you’re all used up, then rip you into pieces,” representing the workers’ challenge to overcome their fate of consumption by the agricultural and economic system.

This chapter introduces one of the most important symbols in the book, the La Brea tar pits. Viramontes first introduces this image while Alejo is being sprayed by the pesticide crop duster, which has come ahead of schedule without any alert to the workers. As he falls from the tree, he imagines his body being consumed by the tar pits, crushing the breath out of him as he sinks. This represents the physical reality of his fall from the tree and his loss of consciousness. It also refers to the way the American agricultural system sucks away the bodies and lives of the farmworkers, as if pulling them slowly but surely into the depths of an inescapable swamp. The bones of the bodies pulled into the tar pits, he later tells Estrella, became the oil used in the truck, a symbol of the resources that the United States depends on consuming. This is an example of the theme throughout the book of the workers being used up in order to create a prosperous America. The morning after the pesticide plane sprays him, Alejo, feeling sick already, notices the tar under his fingernails and feels frightened, as if he really is being pulled into the tar pits. Although he is of course not literally sinking in tar, this is the beginning of the illness that leaves him near death. The tar under his nails is a symbol of the agricultural and capitalist systems of the United States taking his life to feed their growth.

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