Veins of Oppression in Under the Feet of Jesus

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VEINS OF OPPRESSION IN UNDER THE FEET OF JESUS

Cynthia Wedding

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

December 2019

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With sincere thanks to the Department of English at FAU, including, but not limited to, Dr. Eric Berlatsky, department chair, and Tiffany Frost, graduate advisor, who carved out a safe space for me to ask hard questions about toxic bodies, both within and beyond the page. To my thesis chair, Dr. Stacey Balkan, who introduced me to new materialist scholarship and helped me find footing on a bridge towards environmental justice. And to my thesis committee, Dr. Ashvin R. Kini, who challenged me to develop a more thorough understanding of the text and the characters within it, and Dr. Juliann

Ulin, who guided the first leg of this project, exposed me to ecocritical theory, and coached and encouraged me throughout the process. If I have created anything here to be proud of, anything that adds to the conversation surrounding these issues, it is because I was seeded and tended to in a space where I had access to your wisdom. You have my eternal gratitude.

Everything I have accomplished or will accomplish is possible because of the patience and support of my parents, Jerry and Linda Butcher – who always say, “we’ll figure it out,” and then do – and my sister Patricia Helman who is a force for environmental justice, and an inspiration in her tireless pursuit of progressive change towards systems of protection that enable healthy living. Because of you I understand family, and I am empowered and encouraged to be a unique voice, not an echo.

iv DEDICATION

This work is for Aedan, Cady, Jack, Lorelei, and Logan.

If I could use my pen to create a fresh new world just for you, I would do that instead.

ABSTRACT

Author: Cynthia Wedding

Title: Veins of Oppression in Under the Feet of Jesus

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Stacey Balkan

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2019

“Veins of Oppression” takes an interdisciplinary approach towards unearthing the layers of subjugation piled on Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers in the fields of

California, visible in Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus. While critics such as Christa Grewe-Volpp, Anne Shea, and Sarah Wald have produced progressive work about this text that adds to their respective disciplinary fields, unique to this collection, the interdisciplinary framework visible in “Veins of Oppression” forces readers to bear witness to the many ways Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers are kept from accessing the privileges implicit in U.S. citizenship through longstanding and current agricultural practices. Drawing on the work of Stacy Alaimo, Donna Haraway,

Lisa Lowe, Jason Moore, Mai Ngai, Rob Nixon, Sylvia Wynter, and more, “Veins of

Oppression” explores the ways humanist scholarship can be intentionally written as interdisciplinary to be more clearly positioned to function as a more kinetic base for actual change.

vi VEINS OF OPPRESSION IN UNDER THE FEET OF JESUS

ORGANIC GROWTH WITHIN CRITICAL ANALYSIS ...... 1!

THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE ...... 12!

COLONIZING OCCUPIED SPACE: HOW RACIAL COMPLEXITIES

UNSETTLE THE BINARY ...... 17!

CONSCRIPTED BODIES: NEGLECTING THE MIGRANT FARM WORKER ...... 23!

VIRAMONTES’ PISCADORES: UNEARTHING EVIDENCE OF

RACIALIZATION IN THE TEXT ...... 29!

INTERRUPTIONS OF AGENCY ...... 33!

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY: CHEAP NATURE AND THE PRIVILEGE

OF HEALTHCARE ...... 39!

THE IMPLICATIONS OF AN ECOSYSTEM: CONSIDERING THE

MORE-THAN-HUMAN ...... 45!

HOW CRITICAL LANDSCAPE CAN AFFECT THE POLITICAL SPHERE ...... 56!

WORKS CITED ...... 58!

vii ORGANIC GROWTH WITHIN CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus uses its unique positioning, deep inside the agricultural space of California, to offer readers an uncomfortable and poignant view of the lives of a family of piscadores, Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers who spend their days pulling grapes from its vines. Several factors make the initial reading of this text uncomfortable, but nothing more notably so than the ways in which

Viramontes opts into a simultaneous kaleidoscope of perspectives and permeates the text with agri-metaphors, fiercely fusing her characters to produce and explicating their experiences as commodified agents inside of an agricultural conglomerate. As

Viramontes’ characters experience the inequities of U.S. farm worker existence, oppressed by both their closeness to the land and the results of class built on the historical separation of people through systems of racialization, critical readings of Under the Feet of Jesus cannot help but acknowledge what seems to be an environmental and social justice sway in her writing. “Veins of Oppression” acknowledges this sway and reimagines the purpose of literary criticism inside of contemporary U.S. culture, as a culture in need of intentionally positioned, intellectually accessible humanist insight that investigates the systems of exclusion that have created the ongoing immigration reform efforts.

Inside the United States, there has historically been an inlaid system of socio- economic division, derived from its Anglo-European roots, that keeps invisible, to the elite, systemic violence that has long occurred inside the neighborhoods that house

1 migrant farm workers, one of the disenfranchised inheritors of political inequity. Canons of postcolonial and Chicano/a/x literature, and the criticisms that accompany them, produce representations and analyses of these marginalized communities written largely from a perspective earned through both temporal and circumstantial distances. The novels included therein act as fictionalized representations of true circumstances. As stated by

Anne Shea in “Don’t Let Them Make You Feel You Did a Crime,” her immigration law and labor rights article, “The words of migrant workers rarely make it into public discourse because they threaten to transform not only images of the workers themselves but also the image that the United States cultivates” (133). For this reason it is through the generation of these novels, and their scholarly complements, that writers and scholars are most able to amplify the volume of farm workers’ voices across socio-economic and cultural barriers and to raise awareness about the existence of the circumstances that befall these individuals, who are living in America under layers of oppression.

Studies similar to “Veins of Oppression” have been written by graduate students and faculty connected to higher learning institutions, in departments that are governed by schools of humanities. Scholars from within this school have been termed “humanists” by

Edward Said and “intellectuals” by Julien Benda. As the importance of technological innovation has become more significant in terms of cultivating global economic and political power, the economic, academic, and professional focus of our nation has become more rigidly pointed towards a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) intensive education. Amidst this cultural shift, the ideals of humanists have arguably gotten redistributed to a lower rung inside the curricular priorities. This redistribution has left humanist scholars, who have a tremendous wealth of research-

based cross-cultural awareness, with the task of determining the importance of their research according to priorities that can be calculated using figures that align with this economic growth and technological advancement. The value of humanist research, however, cannot be quantified on the same scale as science and engineering models, as its inclusion in, or exclusion from, the system of education changes the ways upcoming academics will embrace or dismiss new technology, which always has both a human cost and a human benefit attached to its development. Being exposed to humanist research changes our ability to anticipate the potential ramifications of invention before they are introduced to the market – potentially before negative or positive consequences are visible. Being versed in humanist research increases our ability to think critically in anticipation of how upcoming research might affect our economy, health, and political position. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said asserts:

There is some very compelling truth to Julien Benda’s contention that in one way

or the other it has often been the intellectual, the clerc, who has stood for values,

ideas, and activities that transcend and deliberately interfere with the collective

weight imposed by the nation-state and the nation culture. (1983 14)

When the findings of humanists are devalued, the potential for a growth in empathy and cross-spatial and temporal understanding diminishes, and economic growth is allowed to determine the cultural, and ethical, underpinnings of its citizens. The politics required for persistent growth inside a global sprint for power, power that is garnished through technological imperialism, fixes its attention on acquiring position through invention, keenness, and stealth, with a diminishing focus on ethics. From positions like this, political choices are made to construct walls between America and its closest neighbors,

and edicts are signed that result in Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers being torn from their lives and their children; each individual numbered and housed in a camp separate from their loved ones.

Generations of farm workers have been brought into the United States through legally sanctioned programs that promise them access to wealth and “the American dream,” all promises that were largely withheld once the laborers arrived. Scholarly work that is housed within colleges of humanities explicates the intricacies of this complicated history and elucidates the complexities of citizenship for this cultural group. A higher education system that mimics a separation of humanist thought, environmental circumstances, and scientific ingenuity fosters a cultural binary focused on modern capitalist advancement and strips all art, in any aesthetic form, from its potential to enable globalized thinking through the consumption of its narratives and representations of displaced peoples. As Rob Nixon explains in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,

When literary studies becomes uncoupled from worldly concerns, we frequently

witness, alongside excessive regard for ahistoric philosophy, an accompanying

historically indifferent formalism that treats the study of aesthetics as the literary

scholar’s definitive calling…[T]here is a risk in this if the aesthetic gets walled

off as a specialist domain, severed from the broader sociopolitical environmental

contexts that animate the forms in question. (31-32)

Such an uncoupling cannot hope to prepare the upcoming generation of citizens to critically interpret the immediate and long-term effects of their legislative and social choices, and while national security and competitive status, on a global scale, are

beneficial to the health and welfare of its citizens, the myopic and unyielding ethnocentric focus of the U.S. government has left its people in a politically fractured state. Access to the work that humanists produce is essential in developing fair and humane legislation as it relates to the farm worker population. That being said, it cannot be left to the STEM community to reach into humanist research bins and develop their own understanding. It is, therefore, left to humanists to change the scope of analysis and the language they use to develop critical works and deliver a more thorough examination of the layers of oppression, which would thereby become more accessible to the academy, their STEM-focused peers, and the public at large.

Postcolonial and Chicano/a/x studies’ scholarship already explicitly step outside the realm of art appreciation in their service as illustrative of large groups of people who have been oppressed and objectified since the emergence of modern capitalism. Because of the political stakes inherent in developing an understanding of the circumstances under which migrant farm workers live, scholars must develop carefully directed work with the intention of cultivating productive, politically motivated works of criticism. To do this they must first examine the previously established boundaries of the human as enlightened subject and the nonhuman as races of people stripped of agency in light of the progressive and increasingly interfering modes of capitalism, such as the Chicano/a/x migrant farm worker. This analysis calls on Lisa Lowe’s description of modern liberalism, as explicated in the The Intimacies of Four Continents. She states:

By modern liberalism, I mean broadly the branches of European political

philosophy that include the narration of political emancipation through citizenship

in the state, the promise of economic freedom in the development of wage labor

and exchange markets, and the conferring of civilization to human persons

educated in aesthetic and national culture – in each case unifying particularity,

difference, or locality through universal concepts of reason and community. (3-4)

A productive interrogation of the human/nonhuman binary would be grounded in critical race theory and would develop an understanding about both the motivation behind such widescale oppression and the specific circumstances that allow for the continued interference with equal access to basic human rights for Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers. As environmental literature scholar Sarah Wald explains “too often literature…portrays immigrant laborers as undesirable byproducts of an industrial food system” (569), a consequence of capitalism rather than an exploited labor force. For farm workers in particular, a legal system of exclusions has been periodically curated to limit the number of Mexican immigrants the United States would welcome. These limitations have come through immigration legislation and a system of ever-changing and multi- layered guest worker programs. A productive analysis of this text should keep a mindful eye towards the ways the placement of these rights, always just outside the reach of migrant farm workers while maintaining the illusion that they are accessible to all, has worked towards creating a rhetoric of citizenship that makes human rights protection increasingly unavailable and has limited fair and complete critical analyses of these textual representations in the past.

It is not enough, however, to conduct an analysis that explores the kind of oppression enacted on the nonhuman by the human. Criticism like this does not hope to create a complete understanding of the various, often increasing, degrees of economic, emotional, and physical violence that are present. Analysis that focuses exclusively on

this binary would only serve to reinforce the limitations placed on subjugated races of people within established historical narratives of the sort that privilege a particular conception of life. In order for literary studies to accomplish its goal of affecting the larger fabric of cross-cultural empathy and awareness, it must also bring us to a greater understanding of the ways ideology and established systems of separation serve to create more visible binaries and, by extension, oppression. This study posits that the perpetual existence of a planet-wide ecosystem is the inevitable future and, as such, the connections between the human, the nonhuman, and what Donna Haraway calls the “more-than- human,” namely animals and environmental elements visible within landscape, are infinite and unbreakable. The material connectivity of the biological human to its environment and the animals that exist therein does not serve to dethrone the biological human from its status as uniquely being human, nor does it act to free the politically procured human from its realm of responsibility. “Veins of Oppression” does not posit that difference, of any sort, should be ignored nor does it fall in line with what posthumanist critics have argued is a collapsing of minority and animal identities and struggles (Weheliye). There is a clear biological and historical difference between the categories of the human, the nonhuman, and the more-than-human. In order to develop a more robust critique of the structures of power that separate the human, nonhuman, and more-than-human, critical inquiry into the violence asserted on the more-than-human must be imbedded into textual analysis through a critical lens that places the text at the axis of the schools of postcolonial and ecocritical. When these two schools of thought are placed inside the same context, evidence of abuse and consequent toxicity of both bodies and the landscape become visible in converging places.

In order to understand where this interference stems from, it is essential to analyze the places agency is wielded. An investigation of this agency cannot be limited to the scope of the biological human; it must transcend all Western cultural definitions of “the actor” and acknowledge that each element in the text is both an entity that is acted upon and one that creates action as well, regardless of how unevenly that agency is distributed.

“Veins of Oppression” posits that the increasingly demanding modes of capitalism are an ever-present interference in the farm worker experience. Capitalism, as stated in Jason

Moore’s “The Capitalocene,” is “premised on the separation of Humanity and Nature.

The whole thrust of capitalist civilization develops the premise that we inhabit something called society, and act upon something called nature” (600). Under the Feet of Jesus, being held consistently in the farm workers’ points of view, allows readers to closely observe the demands of the U.S. agricultural industry in its effects, which manifest in the ways Estrella’s family perceives, affects, and is affected by the environmental elements that surround them. The persistence of her family’s engagement with the landscape and its produce elucidates the porous composition of the boundaries between agricultural spaces and human bodies, which are, as demonstrated in the following excerpt, always open to penetration.

[Estrella and Petra] squatted [to pee] within a circle of trees and the oranges hung

like big ornaments over their heads. The mother didn’t consider it thievery when

she plucked a few, so many were already rotting on the ground. The two were

alone with no foreman to tell them the fruit they picked wasn’t free, no one to

stop her from giving Estrella an orange so big Estrella had to carry it to her father

with two hands. (12)

Although there is a presence here of the human (the ever-invisible yet persistent threat of the foreman’s overseeing), the nonhuman (Estrella’s family), and the more-than-human

(the orange groves), agency can be identified as being asserted from only two places and being infringed upon in two as well. Most pervasively throughout the novel, the foreman and landowner share the kind of power and agency that is invisible but potent, as it affects the choices of Viramontes’ characters much like pesticide would affect the chemical composition of the orange trees long after the biplanes have passed. The power they hold allows them catastrophic influence on the farm workers’ lives, but the physical bodies and voices of the landowners are never present within the story as they only serve to limit the agency of Estrella’s family. The farm workers, in this piece of text, do retain some agency though as they urinate under the tree, introducing their bodily fluids to the ground beneath the tree. The ground beneath the tree absorbs the urine, which would then presumably become part of what feeds the tree and grows the orange. The clearly porous nature of the ground in this section is reminiscent of the skin on our bodies; boundaries that do more to connect us to the landscape then they could ever hope to do to separate us. By acknowledging that the agency of the landscape has been broken by the farm worker, a more full-bodied analysis of the farm worker’s circumstances can be understood. It is not that the farm worker has no personhood or wields no agency, it is that the agency of the farm worker is ignored by the landowners. Productive criticism must include a new materialist approach that would acknowledge that toxic chemicals and bodily fluids intermingle and weave their way in and out of the landscape, seamlessly transmitting foreign elements into bodies as easily as we pour them over the fields, and it

must do, as Donna Haraway suggests, and follow the thread of “trouble” to identify the cause and the effect.

A productive, interdisciplinary work of postcolonial, ecocritical, and new materialist criticism that is grounded in critical race theory would create textual analysis that develops understanding of and considers the implication of the biological, legal, and historical divisions at play, which result in a culturally and economically cheapened labor force. The cheapening of this labor force, the result of inconsistent modes of labor law protection for noncitizen workers in the United States and unreliable enforcement agents to hold landowners, and their representatives, in accordance with the terms of the associated contracts. Moore states, “[t]hese movements of cheapening register practically in low- and non-wage labor and dramatic forms of violence and oppression” (600). In addition to the meager wages that farm workers subsist on, these acts of violence manifest for the characters in Viramontes’ text as an exclusion from healthcare, substandard living quarters, and a depleted selection of food for nutrition.

Contemporary conversations surrounding Chicano/a/x farm workers’ conditions reveal a persistent illusion in U.S. culture that migrant farm workers choose the terms that are explicated as acts of violence in this study, or that they are here illegally and interfering with job placement options for legally documented immigrants. Positions like this come from cultural ignorance stemming from sensationalized headlines rather than the historical, environmental, and cultural context offered inside academic research. New materialist critic Stacy Alaimo defines the space where this type of criticism can be fairly conducted as trans-corporeality. She states,

Bracketing the biological body, and thereby severing its evolutionary, historical,

and ongoing interconnections with the material world, may not be ethically,

politically, or theoretically desirable. Trans-corporeality offers an alternative.

Trans-corporeality as a theoretical site, is where corporeal theories, environmental

theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways. Furthermore,

the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich,

complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material

and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual. (3)

Developing analysis that is rooted in a trans-corporeal perspective acknowledges the ways that the framework of immigration legislation has served to create modes of citizenship and investigates not only human rights’ infringements that are created by the modern liberal system and the landowners, but also the ones that seem implicitly seeded in the landscape, ones that enter the bodies of the farm workers through the porous skin that does less to protect human flesh than it does to connect each element in this planet’s ecosystem with the remainder of creation.

11 THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE

Due to a system of race-based oppression long-seeded inside of modern liberal systems of inclusion, the piscador family in Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of

Jesus is kept from eliciting power over its ability to affect its living circumstances. The development of race as identity and its utility as a political tool are among the most persistent and deliberated elements of postcolonial interrogation inside of Chicano/a/x literary studies. While the consequences of these constructed genres of identity (Wynter) manifest in the current experiences of every adult resident in America, an understanding of them, as developed from a study that uses critical race theory to parse those current experiences from the geneses and developments of their meanings, unearths a fractured identity for Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers with a complicated, often frustrating, genealogy.

According to Sylvia Wynter, as explicated in “Unsettling the Coloniality of

Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” the human was initially understood as creation, spoken into existence by an omnipotent and omnipresent God, and thereby identifiable as one side of a binary that existed between the creation and its creator. Initially, this binary served as a differential between the divine and the human, all men falling equally in line with Adam in that they were created as an earthly reflection of God’s image and bound to work and walk the Earth until their deliverance from original sin. “Civilization” operated in light of this binary, thereby carving out a leadership role inside society for teachers in the church. The church and its representatives (the pope, pastors, priests, and the like)

12 were understood to be shepherds of God’s flock. They served as the lone connection between man and God. In this function, the church translated God’s Word for human understanding and kept the “flock” aware of the consequences of its sinful nature.

Practically, this translated into a mission-oriented church that would spread the word of God by accessing unsaved “pagan” people across the globe and offering them the gift of divine understanding and salvation, as explicated in the pages of the Christian

Bible. It is, therefore, in the mission field that “identity as non-divinity” started to fade and “identity as rational” started to gain prominence. Rational individuals could read and interpret the Bible on their own and would adopt Christian beliefs and practices. Wynter explains, “[w]hile reason is not a god, ‘it partakes of some of God’s functions’ in that it is intended to rule over a ‘lower order of reality’” (287). In this way, the value of intelligible, Anglo-European missionaries became synonymous with godliness, and they became the new standard by which civilization would identify “Man.” By default, minority races with languages and customs unfamiliar to the ruling/preaching class became synonymous with a secondary nonhuman category and were kept there through the conscription of a new binary that separated the intelligible, rational ruling class from the unintelligible “other.” This was not, however, the only way the church affected what

Wynter identifies as the second binary that creates understanding through which society would come to identify the human.

Throughout the Bible there is no mention of race, but even before the days of colonization its words had been twisted to offer what amounts to a divine sanctioning of the dehumanization of an entire race of people. Genesis 9:18-29 documents the post- flood life of Noah and his three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. There, readers learn that

Noah was the first man to till the land and that he used it to grow a vineyard. Basically,

Noah drank too much wine and fell asleep in his tent without any clothes on. His son,

Ham, saw him – but rather than cover him up, Ham told his brothers, causing his father disgrace. Although there is nothing in all the pages of Genesis that can be read as a pact that God made with Noah to fulfill the promise of Noah’s subsequent curse into servitude on Ham and the ancestors of Ham’s son Canaan, and there is nothing that directly ties

Canaan to race, this portion of Genesis became biblical groundwork for legitimizing racialized difference. Because the descendants of Ham are documented as having settled on the African continent, and because “the tendency is strong to read the past from a perspective of one’s own time and place,” this curse became a fundamental church-based teaching that effectively repositioned the enslavement of black Africans as a fulfillment of God’s will (Goldenberg 7).

As the Atlantic slave trade of the 15th century brought a deeper commitment to slavery across the globe, this Bible verse was reimagined and taught to Christians of all ages as “Noah’s curse on Ham;” thus it was understood that Noah cursed the descendants of Ham with blackness and slavery. The mis-teaching of this myth permeated Christian understanding of divine guidance on the issue of racialized difference and, in particular, slavery. It did so to such a degree, that for more than 100 years after its first U.S. publication in Josiah Priests’s 1853 propaganda pamphlet “Bible Defense of Slavery,” it was not officially identified or recognized by the Church (Goldenberg 169).

A 1969 study of the educational materials (Sunday School lessons, primers,

teachers’ manuals, catechisms, etc.) of the American Lutheran Church found that

the church had interpreted Gen 9:25-27 in a way that justified Black slavery

and/or segregation, and it had done so both intentionally and inadvertently.

(Goldenberg 142-3)

Upon these findings, the church released this statement, “There is no doubt left that the

‘curse of Ham’ has been taught to our children as well as our adults and application has been made of this curse to our black population. And this teaching is one which has been handed down from generation to generation” (Goldenberg 143). In the years immediately following this finding, theological journals published articles like L. Richard Bradley’s

“The Curse of Canaan and the American Negro,” which clearly identify “the notion of white supremacy and Negro slavery in America [as] persistently justified on the basis of

‘The Curse of Canaan’” (100). Sadly, the damage had been done and the way this myth changed the U.S. cultural understanding of the identity of the black American was pervasive across generations and space.

This rationale established a perceived difference between races that eventually translated into what Wynter calls the genres of humanity. From here the binary established between the rational elite and the indiscernible other no longer mattered, and whole races of people were categorized first and last by their race. The ideology of racial inequity that permeated U.S. culture was not exclusively established and enforced through legislation, but was also passed through communities and generations, seamlessly creating a cultural binary that placed Anglo-Europeans in power and excluded minority races, each race having to endure its own particular system of injustice. As stated by Alexander Weheliye, in his text “Habeas Viscus,”

If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a

conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans,

not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system

of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay

claim to full human status and which cannot. (3)

Wynter presents a similar argument based on the precept that race is the only entirely constructed factor in identity as it is not based on anything biological or measurable.

From this position, she sheds light on a grossly inequitable access to rights and the role of the state in maintaining this norm. Weheliye, perhaps, says it best by affirming

Race, racialization, and racial identity [are] ongoing sets of political relations that

require, through constant perpetuation via institutions, discourse, practices,

desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams,

and cultural artifacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the

human as it is performed in the modern west. (3)

Instead of being useful as a guideline for protection for these othered races, as the law acted on behalf of the elite to provide them with and protect for them access to power, it also effectively acted as an agent that used race to keep minority individuals from accessing certain levels of knowledge, wealth, or authority that could create geopolitical or economic interference.

16 COLONIZING OCCUPIED SPACE: HOW RACIAL COMPLEXITIES UNSETTLE

THE BINARY

The mere presence of Estrella’s family on U.S. soil requires some historical and spatial situating. Before British colonial forces occupied it, the soil that makes up what is now called the United States was inhabited by Indigenous peoples. Colonialism can be encountered in a number of ways. According to “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” by

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, most forms of colonialism are experienced as either external or internal. External colonialism “denotes the expropriation of fragments of

Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to – and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of – the colonizers, who get marked as the first world” (4). Arguably, this form of colonial assertion is the most common and can still be seen today as wealthier nations invade those with a substantial crop of oil. They then use their superior military position to extract and sell this resource that, otherwise, should remain beneath the soil or be sold to support the third-world nation it is stored beneath. By contrast, internal colonialism is the

“biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the

‘domestic’ borders of the imperial nation” (4). This form of colonialism is experienced as police-state and is reminiscent of European occupation by Nazi Germany during World

War II. This form of colonialism utilizes modes of control to enforce segregation of the

Indigenous peoples and dominance of the new, first-world power-structure.

17 In the portion of North America that came to be known as the United States,

Indigenous peoples across most of the country experienced settler colonialism, which implies an imbrication of both external and internal colonialism. Essentially, European colonial forces, customs, and ideals stayed, took power, and created a new biopolitical landscape. Nixon explains what this looks like, using the term vernacular landscape as descriptive of the cultural and political topography of the nation-state pre-colonization:

A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to

the socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly

externalized – treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By

contrast, an official landscape – whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some

combination of those – is typically oblivious to such earlier maps; instead, it

writes the land in a bureaucratic eternalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is

often pitilessly instrumental. (17)

Using these terms, he then goes on to explain, “imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased” (17). In this way, European colonizers become the ruling powers present in the nation-state and become globally identifiable as the race synonymous with natural to or indicative of that space.

As the ruling class, Anglo-European settlers in the United States utilized and exported the natural resources of the landscape, including races of Indigenous peoples, to create wealth. What distinguished them from a system of external colonization is that this wealth remained tied to the space they now occupied rather than returning it to the

country of their origin. Tuck and Yang state that “settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony” (5). In this case, the Indigenous peoples’ experience as internally colonized most often manifested as several specific and effective modes of control such as churches, schools, and reservations. The implementation of these systems together was experienced as a violent interruption of the relationship Indigenous peoples had with the land, which beforehand had served them uniformly in medicinal, spiritual, and professional empowerment. While the American Revolution freed Euro-American settlers from colonial taxes, it essentially changed nothing for the Indigenous peoples, who, by this time, had been thoroughly unseated from power. Instead, Anglo-European leadership took the helm as the U.S. power structure and maintained control of the economy, the government, and the land. This framework allowed landowners the privilege of effectively mapping out standards of citizenship in reflection of Anglo-

European language, religion, and values that represented their originating culture. From this very comfortable seat, legislation was crafted that protected the rights of citizens who matched the level of intellectual and economic civility, which the elite afforded onto itself, and left subjugated races of people dispossessed of their land and means of subsistence.

The reality of colonization transpired differently for European settlers of Spanish descent in California and the native people of Mexico who shared their community, known hereafter as Californios. Initially, Californios seemed to have the best of both worlds, as the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo offered them “a sociospatial choice: to move to Mexico or stay in their homeland, in the California territory, ostensibly as citizens of

the United States and enjoying ‘all the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution’” (Sanchez 2). This treaty was merely the first to hold promises that were bound to be broken, and much like the subsequent contracts offered to

Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers, soon became the subject of scrutiny, apparently baseless in its pretenses and only scripted to hasten U.S. occupation of the California territory and thereby access its land, interesting for both agricultural prospectors and in its gold storage.

The Land Commission [was] established by Congress in 1851 to rule on the

validity of all Spanish and Mexican titles. The [Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo] in

effect turned out to be a map of dislocation. By 1875…it had become clear that

the Californios, who previously had dominated political and economic spaces in

the territory, were now…‘foreigners’ in their native land. (Sanchez 2-3)

U.S. colonization brought with it a liberal system of political economy dependent on a free market and capitalist advancement. It included not only the displacement of people, but also the mass deforestation and resource depletion of the land that had supported them. As natural resources were occupied and harvested, this translated into an economic infusion for landowners. As landowners rose in station and comfort, so did their need for workers.

In the United States, this need was answered, for a time, through the importation of black African men, women and children as slaves, purchased, traded, and owned at the expense of their classification as human beings. This accrual of people as property served to increase the landholders’ wealth both because of the labor they provided and because those enslaved were, in fact, considered a commodity and part of the economic value of

the land. The physical, psychological, and sociological violence inflicted on generations of black men, women, and children extended beyond their right to pursue wealth and forcibly altered even the ways they would function inside of historically reliable community groups like church and family. The U.S. Civil War culminated with the enactment of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States on April 8,

1864, which abolished slavery and started many freed men on the long painful road to equality, one that is arguably still walked today (National Archives). Despite this change in legislation, the capitalist nature of the colonizers has become part of the U.S. cultural norm, morphing in form and (in some instances) targeted demographic, but always creating a binary through which one group can become more comfortable at the expense of another.

In the meantime, immigration legislation transitioned to accommodate different quotas for population increase specific to peoples from differing regions of the world.

The first comprehensive immigration act in the United States is known as the Johnson

Reed Act and it was adopted in 1924. This act

established for the first time numerical limits on immigration and global racial

and national hierarchy that favored some immigrants over others. The regime of

immigration restriction remapped the nation in two important ways. First, it drew

a new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of

difference. Second, and in a different register, it articulated a new sense of

territoriality, which was marked by unprecedented awareness and state

surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land borders. (Ngai 3)

Within this program, higher quota limits were offered to countries that boasted a racial profile similar to that of the Anglo-European elite, and social and legislative practices were enacted to create a broader barrier between the Chicano/a/x migrant and assimilation into U.S. culture. The creation and enforcement of immigration legislation was seemingly created to protect the U.S. economy and infrastructure from taking on a greater population boom than it was prepared to support, but in reality it served as an exclusionary tool that “produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility” (Ngai 4). Even legal immigrants from Mexico, however, lived with subordinate positioning in U.S. society as the term Mexican American clarified that their presence in the nation was not one of belonging, but a new category – somewhere between citizen and illegal alien – the “alien citizen” (Ngai 2). Subsequent immigration legislation and movements toward restricting access to citizenship for Mexican immigrants were governed by quotas that were periodically tied to circumstances such as

English literacy, economic status, U.S. familial ties, or a specific needed skill set.1

1 Comprehensive Chicano/a/x immigration legislative history is available in Mai M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. 22 CONSCRIPTED BODIES: NEGLECTING THE MIGRANT FARM WORKER

As agricultural work transitioned away from slave-labor and towards wage-labor, landowners in California were faced with a brutal economic reality. Part of their property was given the right to walk off the land, but the rest of it still needed tending, a new and costly part of the reality of land ownership in the United States, post-civil war. Leading up to World War II, farm worker positions were filled successively by formerly enslaved peoples, Asian workers, and finally piscadores, Mexican immigrants and guest workers brought into the United States for the growing season. The Bracero Program, “America’s largest experiment with guest workers,” was enacted by an executive order signed by

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942 to bring an end to labor shortages visible in agriculture at the start of the second World War (Bracero History Archive). From 1942 to

1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed, with many individuals returning several times on different contracts (Ngai 138). Braceros were largely procured through word-of-mouth offers that boasted larger per diem earnings than the landowners agreed to pay, and mobility amongst the laborers and overseers allowed for even those amounts to be subverted by overseers who were responsible for dispersing Bracero salaries. Once

Braceros were on U.S. land, their ability to slide from temporary guest worker towards legal citizen or illegal alien was vast. Braceros who were not earning what they had expected, or not living in conditions they were willing to accept, could simply walk off the fields and seek another job. Once they left the land to which they were contracted, their status went from legal guest worker to illegal alien. On the other side of the

23 spectrum of citizenship, the process of naturalization, which allows for a change in citizenship after five years of residence with no criminal record, and Jus Soli, which confers citizenship upon all those born on U.S. soil, permitted Braceros movement towards access to legal citizenship within the United States (Ngai 5). Government support, however, for what amounted to an open-door policy for temporary migrant farm workers was not intended to extend beyond this military mission. “At the end of the war, while employers were still bringing in workers, the federal government instituted large- scale expulsions of Mexican immigrants in the mass militarized roundups of 1954 and

1955” (Shea 125). This mass expulsion, and consequential repatriating movement, changed the way migrant families would understand border patrol and the U.S. system of justice as it clearly shifted in function, depending on the race it was treating, from protective to policing.

Treatment of Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers by legal and social entities was collective and did not distinguish between citizens, noncitizens, and illegal aliens.

Instead, it cast a racialized blanket over all migrant farm workers, lowering the benchmarks for payment and support to meet the bare minimum standards by which landowners could procure work from the least demanding portion of that population.

As an identity of subalternity, ethnicity can seemingly allow for a collective

identity across classes, at least momentarily…generat[ing] segregation, exclusion,

and new spaces of marginalization, social sites (barrios) produced by concrete

social relations and in turn central to the construction of identity as an ethnic

collectivity. (Sanchez 269)

Rather than allowing farm workers access to the monetary and experiential privileges of citizenship, the Bracero program served to feed a system hungry for cheap labor by disconnecting its members from both their communities in Mexico and the resources they were promised in the United States. As salaries and treatment became increasingly depressed, Braceros were simply easier to recruit and less demanding than Mexican

American citizens, thus creating an additional layer of oppression on the “alien citizens” trying to survive on U.S. soil.

The Bracero program ended in 1964, and in its stead H-2A visa classifications were issued that identified farm workers as non-citizens and non-immigrants. This classification effectively excludes the Chicano/a/x migrant farm worker from systems of protection that would demand safe work conditions, access to healthcare, and a livable wage. As labor rights were stripped away, local unions of farm workers bonded together and found ways to organize. In 1966, Cesar Chavez united the National Farm Workers

Association and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee as the United Farm

Workers of America (currently known as the UFW). Through the UFW, Chavez worked alongside labor rights activist Dolores Huerta to organize national strikes in support of

“the cause” and against growers who offered substandard treatment and payment for farm workers (Bruns xiv).

By 1970, the UFW got grape growers to accept union contracts and effectively

organized most of that industry, claiming 50,000 dues paying members – the most

ever represented by a union in California agriculture. Gains included a union-run

hiring hall, a health clinic and health plan, credit union, community center and

cooperative gas station, as well as higher wages. (Kim)

The timing on this is all very interesting as the official creation of the UFW would come right on the heels of the Green Revolution in America, a movement most clearly characterized as a sharp increase in chemical additives to the agricultural system to speed up crop growth and cut back on pest depletion (“Green Revolution”). This change in crop growing techniques served to increase both the labor-load of each farm worker and their exposure to chemical toxins in the fields. Despite this change in circumstances and regulations, “75 percent of migrant farm workers in the United States are born in

Mexico” (Wald 567).

A current glance at the UFW homepage paints a clear picture, although the gains have been great and inroads are still being made by these organizations, environmental injustice as it relates to working conditions, sun exposure, and toxic immersion is part of

Chicano/a/x farm workers’ experience, and all without discernible legal movement towards a system of sustainability as it relates to a consistent workforce with benefits suited to fortify their health (United Farm Workers). The implications of the law as police instead of the law as protection have become a deeply seeded barrier that keeps many farm workers from seeking legal protection against continued mistreatment. Any movement towards legal action can put the farm workers’ access to these contracts in jeopardy, a significant risk to farm worker families who have subsisted within these economic conditions, some of them for decades. The H-2A program currently manages the influx of Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers coming into the United States on an annual basis. The guest worker system that this program falls under simultaneously allows for a higher number of Mexican citizens to legally work within the United States, and offers U.S. agricultural conglomerates access to cheap labor, but its contracts have

been historically slippery and unprotective of the noncitizens it procures. The complications of this program are perhaps most clearly laid out by attorneys who have worked within the courts to access protection and rights for noncitizens classified as H-

2A workers in the United States.

Greg Schell, a Legal Services attorney who has worked on a number of lawsuits

against sugar companies in southern Florida that recruit Caribbean laborers,

describes the H-2 programs this way: The H-2 program is essentially a system of

mail-order workers. It’s perfect for growers because it keeps them from having to

recruit domestic workers or raise wages to keep workers from going to another

farmer who might pay more. The regulations designed to protect domestic

workers from the adverse effects of the program have not been enforced. The

growers never suffered any lasting repercussions for violating these regulations,

even though the law prescribes a whole range of penalties for such actions.

(Rothenberg 232)

While the program was created to procure guest workers from Mexico, many migrant families continue to work in agricultural positions long after their green cards are delivered. Failure on the part of the U.S. government to protect all farm workers, domestic, legal, or contracted, results in one of the most widely known but infrequently acknowledged contemporary race-based acts of violence in the nation. The race-washing that occurs for Chicano/a/x farm workers regardless of gender, age, or legal status leaves them vulnerable to contemporary conservative political posturing that paints all people of

Mexican roots as the arbiters of violence and disease.

As a result of this inaction on the part of the country, U.S. farm workers are left with the unsettling reality that, at any moment, they may be subject to workplace raids, deportation, or arrest. Current proposed legislative change from the White House has initiated a series of raids that serves to bring this long-standing concern to media headlines, but the situation of Border Patrol within Viramontes’ text exposes that this bold public political move only makes visible to the public what has long been known to

Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers. Viramontes’ characters seems perpetually preoccupied with the watchful eye of the system and the possibility of deportation as they remind each other that eating the fruit that is rotting on the ground is stealing (5) and they remark that “La Migra” (61) could try to force them into a green van at any moment.

Likewise, the title of the book brings attention to Petra’s fear that her family will be unjustly removed from their lives as it is their identification documents, which protect their right to work in America, that are physically in her shrine, under the feet of her statue of Jesus (167). Viramontes, it would seem, uses this tactic to reveal a persistent insecurity present amongst the piscadores, and clearly ties this fear to their belief that their known lives could be ended. It is plain to see why, as even their legally sanctioned, and economically stimulated, presence on the land does not prevent the landowners, overseers, and La Migra from making choices that directly and irreparably affect the piscadores.

28 VIRAMONTES’ PISCADORES: UNEARTHING EVIDENCE OF RACIALIZATION

IN THE TEXT

An articulation of why legislation and awareness struggle to unseat the perpetual systems of violence described herein rests on understanding the formation and power of ideology, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, as “[a] systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics, economics, or society and forming the basis of action or policy; a set of beliefs governing conduct.” Landowners and their constituents were confronted with a more profitable economic plan for procuring employees if they could only justify providing workers with no more than the substandard treatment and compensation that was contracted into the Bracero Program and the H-2A visa. It was essential to their ability to capitalize as food producers that they de-value the farm worker, both in what they offer as a wage and in their innate value as people. In Jason

Moore’s “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” he states

The era of primitive accumulation gave rise not only to the ‘accumulation of

capital’ and the ‘accumulation of men’ (Foucalt 1977, 221), but also a new world

praxis: Cheap Nature. This praxis was one of accumulating and organizing not

only human bodies, but of assigning their value through the Humanity/Nature

binary. That so many humans could be reassigned to the domain of the not-human

(or the not-quite-human) allowed capitals and empires to treat them cheaply –

even as this cheapening was fiercely resisted…These movements of cheapening

29 register practically in low and non-wage labor and dramatic forms of violence and

oppression. (600)

Thus, through a system of epistemological disregard and epochal redescription (Wynter

265), landowners commodified their farm workers at a very low economic rate, relegating them to the category of the nonhuman, thereby effectively fixing landowners’ employment cost at a rate that allowed them commeasurable economic growth inside the

United States and global food systems. In Viramontes’ text, readers will find that the cheapening of the farm worker is enabled through the persistent policing of farm workers inside of a system that relies on inhumane treatment and unpredictability to breed insecurity.

Wynter proposes that race starts as descriptive in that it identifies a person in accordance with their genealogy and appearance, both of which existed before the racial signifier was attached to these properties, and long before any race-based personality- traits had been concocted that could denote a prescriptive turn. In the case of the farm workers in the text, however, because the landowners never engage directly with their farm workers, and even the overseers are never present in the narrative, the farm workers’ race becomes all that is known to the larger textual community about this cultural group.

Along the way any hope of kinship is lost and, as place merges with race, the migrant farm worker becomes synonymous with the field and, more overtly, dirt. Dirt, in this context, holds an interesting double meaning. The soil in these fields is rich in unseen nutrients; it is the complex makeup of this specific combination that participates in the cultivation of “the vegetables people’ll be eating for dinner” (Viramontes 118). But this value is hidden and what is seen, instead, is filth – useful in the agricultural fields, but

unwanted elsewhere. Estrella, the 15-year-old protagonist whose choices seem to drive

Viramontes’ plot, remembers clearly one incident from school.

She remembered how one teacher, Mrs. Horn, who had the face of a crumpled

Kleenex and a nose like a hook – she did not imagine this – asked how come her

mama never gave her a bath. Until then, it had never occurred to Estrella that she

was dirty, that the wet towel wiped on her resistant face each morning, the

vigorous brushing and tight braids her mother neatly weaved were not enough for

Mrs. Horn. And for the first time, Estrella realized words could become as

excruciating as rusted nails piercing the heels of her bare feet. (Viramontes 25)

In a move to cheapen the piscador, aligning them with dirt is pretty effective, dusting their clothes with it, their faces, making it stubbornly resistant to wet Kleenexes at school. Much like the soil in the fields, Estrella and her family are valuable beyond what can be seen on the surface. From their long days and nights in the fields, however, the commodification of the land develops a type of ideological contagion and the value of the farm worker becomes similar to the value of dirt. To the elite, and specifically the landowners, farm worker identity is so deeply imbricated in the fields that they are seen as part of it, planted and grown there, belonging there, and entirely without value elsewhere.

Ironically, being tied to the fields does nothing to provide the piscador with roots.

Part of the value of a migrant farm worker to landowners is in their lack of responsibility to provide them with job security or – as mentioned – a livable wage. Estrella remembers,

Every job was not enough wage, every uncertainty rested on one certainty: food.

The phone was disconnected. She remembered the moving, all night packing with

trash bags left behind, to a cheaper rent they couldn’t afford, to Estrella’s

godmother’s apartment, to some friends, finally to the labor camps again. Always

leaving things behind that they couldn’t fit, couldn’t pack, couldn’t take, like a

trail of bread crumbs. (Viramontes 14)

Within the text, there is unresolved friction between the imagined and actual realities of living on U.S. soil, and the memory and imagined projection of what it would be like to return home. Because hope for the American dream is so far out of reach, the object these yearnings are focused on becomes a return to life before they entered the United States.

Viramontes describes their desires as manifesting not in their direct refusal to participate in the system, but as longings for release from the economic bondage of piscador life. Even as they pull grapes from the fields, the sound of a train brings this conflict into focus. Viramontes’ writes,

All of them stopped to listen to the freight train rattling along the tracks swiftly,

its horn sounding like the pressing of an accordion. The lone train broke the sun

and silence with its growing thunderous roar and the train reminded the

piscadores of destinations, of arrivals and departures, of home and not of home.

For they did stop and listen. (55)

For the main characters in her text, this persistent ripple of home-calling is never answered; each character remains tied to the land, some by money and some by obligation, thirsting for freedom yet never quite reaching beyond the bonds of their present circumstances. They are figuratively, if not literally, enslaved.

32 INTERRUPTIONS OF AGENCY

The piscadores’ reaction to the train is further complicated when readers consider the incorporation of trains in other narratives, specifically narratives written from the perspective of land holders, or the elite. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau identifies a train in the sleepy Concord woods where he has built a cabin for the experience encapsulated in his memoir, Walden. Throughout his narrative, Thoreau is surrounded by nature and there is little to be found that implies he misses living in the midst of the busyness of civilization, but his privilege becomes visible when he writes,

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding

like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that

many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or

adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon,

they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through

circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations,

countrymen! (109)

Thoreau’s text argues that self-sustainability, through a lens that privileges man over nature, but also developing a deeper understanding of the instincts already present for animal and environmental elements in nature, should be the goal of all men. Whereas his experience with the train is from the position of critical consumer, the previously explicated text from Viramontes’ book reveals that the piscadores imagine themselves on that train in the position of the product. Perhaps this stems from the fact that many of the

33 initial Bracero labor contracts were scripted to employ Mexican citizens in the task of laying railroad tracks, and thereby being employed by the train, or perhaps because many of them rode on trains like this to their agricultural workspace (Ngai). But their hope is to ride the train as its commoditized contents rather than procure them. From this, they have historically been written into or out of the labor contracts through which their value as a commodity has been established.

In addition to Thoreau’s expectation that the train is there to serve his community, the specific terminology in his text reveals something that sets up a stark contrast with the piscador experience. He says, “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods”

(109). Much like the fields do not belong to the piscadores, the woods do not belong to

Thoreau, but the imaginative sway of transcendental writing allows him to communicate with a creative flourish that does not always mimic reality, and thus the woods become his – to observe, learn from, and ultimately manipulate for his survival. The property in

Walden, much like the property in Under the Feet of Jesus, belongs to someone else, someone Thoreau knows. The woods around him belong to that man, but the woods penetrated by the locomotive are most likely property of the state. Despite this fact,

Thoreau identifies the woods as his, much in the same way that the desk in the office provided by the university at which I work is “my desk” and the students who fill the seats in “my classroom” are “my students.” Ownership is easily asserted in these cases, because access to ownership – at all – is possible, but the experience for the piscador is different, as evidenced in the text through the many magnificent interruptions on their agency.

According to Abraham’s Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” growth needs, like an education or pristine hygiene, cannot be sought until after deficiency needs like food and safety are met. Attempting to meet these needs in any other order compromises the psychological health of the individual and creates trauma (Willems and Gonzalez-DeHass

310). As Lowe states, “[t]his economy civilizes and develops freedoms for ‘man’ in modern Europe and North America, while relegating others to geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree” (3). By maintaining a low wage standard and limiting their access to healthcare, modern liberalism places a large, theoretical wall of deficiency needs between the piscador community and the

American dream, essentially tying the piscadores to the fields, where they become dusted with the dirt in which they work. Here, the characters in Viramontes’ text not only are unable to actively participate in society from a position of power, but their desires and needs also go largely un-voiced, even in the privacy of their own homes, where readers will never once witness Petra, Perfecto Flores, or Estrella plan a future outside the fields.

Among the points of view shared in Viramontes’ text, adolescent male Alejo stands out as unique in his overt, while remorseful, stealing of peaches to supplement his meager income (5), and because he so clearly articulates a plan for his future that will take him away from farm work. During one particularly hot day pulling grapes from the field, Alejo lets his mind wander to the plans he has for his future:

His grandmother had reassured him, this field work was not forever. And every

time he awoke to the pisca, he thought only of his last day here and his first day

back in high school. He planned to buy a canvas backpack to carry his books, a

pencil sharpener, and Bobcat book-covers; and planned to major in geology after

graduating. (Viramontes 52)

Alejo’s story is especially tragic and poignant when mining the text for a deeper understanding of the obstructions that lie between Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers and their access to the American dream. By fusing the most unfortunate circumstances (more on this later) to the character with the most clear-cut vision for the future, Viramontes uses Alejo as a written embodiment of adolescent aspiration and of the bait-and-switch style failures of the modern liberal system they are enlisting within. As an individual who invokes understanding, Alejo’s choice to do so through the use of an emotionally charged argument would be indicative of the traditional (mis)representation of races of people denied education in colonized spaces. This is not, however, the way Alejo is written.

Instead, he acts as a rational and intelligent frame of reference for Estrella, as he clearly both sees the truth tied to the circumstances within which they live and delivers what he knows onto the text. He retains his self-control, even when he is the recipient of egregious violence, and helps to educate Estrella thereby breaking the expected narrative.

One hot afternoon, Estrella and Alejo escape the blazing sun in the shade of a leaky truck and he educates her about the source of the oil dripping on his pant leg. He does more than that, though, he plants a seed of cultural knowledge that takes the remainder of the text for Estrella to fully understand.

You know where oil comes from? He asked in a whisper, as if the sun had sucked

out even the energy to speak in a normal tone…Probably a leak from the motor...I

don’t mean that…Why you asking me?...If we don’t have oil, we don’t have

gasoline…Ever hear of tar pits? he asked…Millions of years ago, the dead

animals and plants fell to the bottom of the sea…Imagine bones at the bottom of

the sea…Bones and rocks and leaves. Falling. Slowly…The bones lay in the

seabed for millions of years. That’s how it was. Makes sense don’t it, bones

becoming tar oil? (Viramontes 86-87)

As U.S. agriculture is revolutionized in accordance with genetic and chemical modification, becoming prolific enough to support a rapidly growing population, Alejo’s conclusion that it would make sense that their bones become tar oil – the oil necessary for running a car, the very emblem of forward mobility and, by extension, progress – is both subtle and substantial. Much in the same way, labor extracted from Chicano/a/x farm workers facilitates the possibility of human survival. Only, no one applauds the workers; they marvel at the engineering.

When Viramontes develops a narrative that captures Alejo as a character with clearly articulated ambition and direction towards something other than agricultural work, she communicates more than just the backstory of this character. Through her placement of Alejo in a sea of piscadores without articulated ambition, she uses his narrative to exemplify a clear ratio of social perception. Readers find their exposure to the internal dialogue of Viramontes’ characters limited to only a small number of individuals inside the larger piscador community. Of these, there are an overwhelming majority of characters who cannot clearly be read as having any intention of finding work outside the fields. The combination of these factors is reminiscent of the relationship

America’s middle class has with its community of Chicano/a/x farm workers. The ratio visible within Viramontes’ text could be read as representative of the Orientalized (Said) artifice of understanding that landowners have laid upon farm worker populations.

Plainly, of the stories available, very few Chicano/a/x voices are included inside academic and popular cannons of literature – and of the representations we do find, one in the vast sea articulates or displays ambition to succeed inside the capitalist system of exclusion, yet outside the fields.

38 ADDING INSULT TO INJURY: CHEAP NATURE AND THE PRIVILEGE OF

HEALTHCARE

The underlying belief that Chicano/a/x migrant farm workers fit the bill of, and can by extension be treated as, cheap nature lays the groundwork for more nuanced systems of exclusion to privileges such as easy access to healthcare. The history of the

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its relationship with minority races, extending beyond the black/white binary, reveals a reoccurrence of alignment between actual sickness and the perception of its minority tie of origin. At the time when

Viramontes’ text is situated, “[d]isease itself was defined as much by sociocultural beliefs in the inherent uncleanliness of immigrants and nonwhites as by biological explanations.

Such definitions effectively stigmatized entire populations of already-marginalized groups” (Molina 2). The most notable of these outbreaks occur inside neighborhoods like the one where Estrella’s family resides, where access to clean water, nutritious food, and adequate rest is a daily struggle. “Rather than addressing the structural inequality that produced the unhealthy environments that hosted virulent diseases, public health departments consistently identified the root problem as racialized people who were in need of reform” (Molina 8). The persistence of this belief rippled through U.S. culture, developing greater separation from the remainder of society for these guest workers and immigrants.

Viramontes uses clean and abundant imagery to demonstrate the experience of farm workers inside a U.S. healthcare system when Estrella’s family is faced with an

39 urgent medical issue that they must seek help to resolve. Here, the clinic space is described as “too white” (134). Viramontes writes, “[t]he white trailer stuck out like partially buried bone in the middle of the vacant plot. The compact square windows facing the highway had foil taped to the framed sliding glass which deflected the sun”

(133). This blinding imagery, at the opening of Viramontes’ fourth chapter, simultaneously calls attention to both the racial discrimination at play in their circumstances and the sterility of the white space in stark contrast to the dirt in the fields.

This second explication of dirt brings into play more with it than simply low economic value and societal avoidance. In contrast with the sterility of the clinic’s white space, the piscadores’ appearance, covered in dirt, invokes an assumption in the nurse that they are sickly and decaying beyond any real help that she can offer them. She recommends that the family take Alejo to the hospital 20 miles away, but with no gas in their tank and their last $9 sitting in her cash box, accessing the hospital is out of their reach – and she does not offer to help. To simply say that the nurse refuses to help is not quite accurate; she decreases her fee from $15 to $10. When they offer to do any number of labor-related tasks in exchange for the visit, which would in turn give them the cash they need to purchase the gasoline that would fuel their 20 mile drive to the hospital, the nurse simply refuses to look at them and never owns her role in their exclusion from a system seemingly designed to help people who have fallen sick. This scene is clearly representative of a nation that refuses to acknowledge farm workers as people and instead treats them as a commodity. In brute terms, much like farm equipment that has been used till it breaks down, farm workers in this text are treated as though they are cheaper to

replace than to maintain, a perspective created and protected through the capitalist economic principles that are the backbone of the nation.

Day in and day out, the piscadores deal with agriculture that becomes food. They observe it growing in the fields, they pick it from the vines, they wrap it, haul it, and then they turn it all over so that it can be sold. Although the piscadores’ lives are tied to their work in the fields, they do not own, nor are they armed with the tools to own, anything that the fields produce. Fresh food for consumption is a commodity that the piscadores simply cannot afford. In fact, it is largely because of agriculture that there is such a sharp divide between the treatment of the human, the nonhuman, and the more-than-human

(including fresh produce). As Ashley Dawson explains in Extinction: A Radical History,

Intensive agriculture produced a food surplus, which in turn permitted social

differentiation and hierarchy, as elite orders of priests, warriors, and rulers

emerged as arbiters of the distribution of that surplus. Much of subsequent human

history may be seen as a struggle over the acquisition and distribution of such

surplus. (26)

The middlemen who crept up in between food producers and food consumers add a layer of cost, but also control the food market to such a degree that large profits become available to food producers in exchange for the commodification of produce. The expense generated for the procurement of this produce, however, has had to remain exceedingly low, thus driving large-scale industrial models to implement crop dusting pesticide solutions and chemical fertilizers instead of employing more ecologically sound, labor-inducing models.

This struggle to control and generate income from agriculture is visible in Under the Feet of Jesus, even outside of the moments that Alejo and his cousin, Gumacindo, steal the peaches to sell on their own (45). It is also visible when Estrella and her family go to buy food at the convenience store, since they are not allowed to eat the fresh produce they pick in the fields.

Petra picked up a can of El Pato Tomato sauce, checked the price, then checked a

can of Carnation Milk, a jar of Tang, then returned each to the shelf. She decided

on four cans of Spam and stacked them into Estrella’s basket at $1.80 each for a

seven-ounce can and made a mental calculation of $7.20, then returned two cans

and adjusted the amount, then realized the ESPECIAL that read three cans for

$5.00 which meant to buy six cans was cheaper in the long run and placed four

more cans in the basket.

The fresh produce was dumped into small zinc tubs and pushed against a wall and

hardly resembled the crops harvested days before. The fruits and vegetables were

firm and solid out in the hot fields; but here in the store, only the relics remained:

squished old tomatoes spilled over onto the bruised apples and the jalapenos

mixed with soft tomatillos and cucumbers peeked from between blotchy oranges.

The white onions reminded Petra of eggs…Except for the cans of Spam, the

basket Estrella held was empty. (110)

Petra and Estrella live in the fields where they work. Out there, away from the industrial conveniences available in most suburban neighborhoods, they can walk to a convenience store, not a full-scale grocer, to buy canned food and week-old produce. With the same amount of money, at a large-scale grocer, however, their options would have been

equally nutritionally depleted, as less expensive convenience foods are most often the lowest price per capita in the store. If Estrella’s family had the money to purchase eggs and vegetables and fruit and bread from the convenience store, the options they are provided still clearly do not measure up in nutrition or appeal to the ones they pick in the fields and turn over to the landowner.

This economic interference with nutrition does more than simply keep them from enjoying the food they spend all day pulling, it creates a form of slow violence difficult to identify in the short term. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the

United States indicate that an improper diet can lead to energy imbalance; increase the risk of becoming overweight; increase the risk for lung, esophageal, stomach, colorectal, and prostate cancers; and lead to hunger and food insecurity, which can negatively affect overall health, cognitive development, and school performance (“Childhood Nutrition

Facts”). Nixon explains

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a

violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an

attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all [and not just]

attritional but also exponential, operating as a major multiplier; it can fuel long-

term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life

become increasingly but gradually degraded. (3)

His text speaks specifically to toxic landscapes or issues of global climate change and works to create new, more pervasive, language with which sickness and landscape degradation due to toxic exposure can be discussed. I want, however, to apply this theory more broadly. Creating food deserts, wherein farm workers are unable to procure

nutritious food due to their presence inside spaces that are not profitable for large grocers to provide those options, creates a generational cycle that grossly limits the educational and occupational options for these families. If farm workers’ children cannot focus to succeed at school, how can they hope to grow up and out of the fields? From what will they garner the energy required for the ambition to climb out of the fields and into a new, more profitable line of work? If, however, close reading of these texts remains rooted in the human or nonhuman perspective and refuses to acknowledge the ways elements of the landscape that so deeply pervade the text are oppressed and mistreated, we miss a vital element to developing an understanding of these systems of oppression.

44 THE IMPLICATIONS OF AN ECOSYSTEM: CONSIDERING THE MORE-THAN-

HUMAN

In “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” Rob Nixon interrogates the gulf between postcolonial and ecocritical schools of thought, acknowledging that “[t]here is a durable tradition within American natural history writing of erasing the history of colonized peoples through the myth of the empty lands” (197). He explains that

“Postcolonialist critics are wary of the role that this strain of environmental writing

(especially wilderness writing) has played in burying the very histories that they themselves have sought to unearth” (197). The myth of the empty land is part of the ideology that allowed for European colonizers to treat Indigenous peoples as nonhuman.

Unsettling this myth has been an essential building block in creating progressive postcolonial language that reveals a politically charged colonial history rather than a legend. Because it ignores interruptions of agency that happen to, and through, the landscape, postcolonial analysis that excludes an ecocritical perspective fails to see the whole picture. By contrast, Nixon calls for a postcolonial-ecocritical blend that would transform the text because it “refracts an idealized nature through memories of environmental and cultural degradation in the colonies” (200), and thereby presents a more broadminded and accurate depiction of the complexity implicit in both acts of environmental (in)justice and political inequality.

Imagine, for a minute, that U.S. legislature, culture, and the U.S. food industry suffered a sudden and severe awakening from which there was an immediate and utopic

45 change of heart and legislation, and all farm workers were provided safe working conditions and a salary commensurate with their exertion of labor and need for a reasonable standard of living by human standards. Imagine the United States was suddenly displaced into this utopia, where capital gain was secondary to human rights and health. Imagine all of the above-mentioned human rights violations were rectified, and “justice” was found. Still, in this utopia, the current system of agriculture would demand deep and consistent commodification of the land. This commodification is problematic because it ignores the ecological base on which all life, human, nonhuman, and otherwise, is allowed to subsist. In order to fully explicate the layers of oppression that result from the commodification of agriculture inside this system, we must remove the blinders that imply that postcolonial criticism is complete if it has examined the nonhuman/human interchange. Viramontes’ writing strategy reminds readers to go beyond this binary through its unique narrative pattern and the repetitive use of agri- metaphors.

These metaphors create identity merging imagery to more deeply bind the farm workers to their environment in the readers’ imagination. Under the Feet of Jesus spends little time unpacking the impact of human choices on the more-than-human elements; instead, the text contains an abundance of agri-metaphors that allow Viramontes to direct and hold the readers’ gaze on the piscadores’ narrative while she simultaneously tempts them to draw uncomfortable parallels between the farm workers, the animals, and the land. For example, Viramontes refers to body parts of the main characters as the bark of a juniper tree (5), apricots (62), peas (84), and swollen roots (73). Most notably, in her explanation of Petra, Viramontes writes, “[t]he mother struggled upward, straightening

one knee then the other, and Estrella noticed how purple and thick her veins were getting.

Like vines choking the movement of her legs” (61). The veins on the mother’s legs remind Estrella of the vines from which she spends all day pulling grapes. In the fields, vines pass nutrients from the roots in the soil to the produce at their ends. The longer they subsist, the thicker and stronger they get. Young vines are easy to snap; older vines, however, require a significant effort to sever. Their existence, health, and prosperity are essential lifeblood for the fruit, but Viramontes does not use them to this end. Instead, they are written as tethers, tying the family to the fields. The veins prevent the mother from standing on her own, but more clearly for a close reader, this simile echoes Petra’s circumstances. The sustaining agricultural system that Petra works for traps her simply by its abundant persistence, much like she was tethered by the potency of its existence.

Likewise, the more abundant the agricultural system becomes and the longer it stays that way, the more difficult it is for Petra to loosen its hold. By the end of the text, Petra struggles to walk, practically paralyzed by the thick and hardening veins, but this is not the only instance that the text presents the land as bonded to the characters. Viramontes’ use of metaphors in bonding the nonhuman to the more-than-human does not end with descriptions of her farm workers. Similarly, the plants are referred to using human terms.

She writes, “Estrella sat under a vine. The sun shone through, making the leaves translucent. She could see their bones” (51), sunlight weaves (3), and the piscadores are not orphans because they were born to the earth (63).

In 1996, Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination made an argument for moving away from literary analysis that focuses on human voices in favor of one that focuses on landscape and animal elements found in the environment. His argument

specifically called for the analysis of texts that could be considered part of what Nixon called “an offshoot of U.S. literary studies” to be examined in light of the ways these more-than-human elements are affected by and change the plot progression in the text

(197). Buell’s The Environmental Imagination is approximately 25% argument for ecocritical inquiry and 75% analysis of Thoreau’s Walden. Traditionally, ecocritical studies center around texts like Walden that privilege educated, mostly male, Anglo-

European voices and include an examination of land ethic wherein the self is reimagined in its relationship to the landscape. Mining Viramontes text for landscape-focused scenes does not, however, leave readers with a land ethic through which the protagonist comes to understand the ways that she can better manipulate the natural instincts of elements of nature to find independence and a stronger sense of self. Instead, readers will find a younger Estrella and her friend Maxine, in a hot afternoon by the irrigation ditch.

Viramontes writes

They headed for the irrigation ditch and halted near the walk bridge. By then their

throats were dry and sore, and swallowing meant a painful raking. Estrella heard

through the grapevine about the water, and knew Big Mac the Foreman lied about

the pesticides not spilling into the ditch; but the water seemed clear and cool and

irresistible on a hot day.

-Wanna go for a dip? Asked Maxine, unstrapping her laces, but Estrella shook her

head NO.

-You think ‘cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or

something? Estrella asked, pushing up her sleeves…

Maxine stood and pointed. Looky, Looky, she said, along with a whole sentence

of excited English words that didn’t sound English at all to Estrella, Looky there!

She pointed to a drowned, bloated dog, which floated down the canal. The carcass

rolled on its back, its belly swollen and damp dark, then rolled back to its side, its

legs like spears dipping gently towards the bridge until it passed them. (32-34)

Through the eyes of Estrella and her family, Under the Feet of Jesus amplifies the voices of migrant farm worker families inside of spaces where educated, Anglo-European men do not go to recalibrate their relationship with nature. In labor camps and agricultural spaces, dangers found in the land are often born of industrialization and result in inadequate protection driven by privileged budgetary priorities.

Once critics reach outside of the binary that exists between the human and nonhuman in relation to social, economic, and political pressure and start to unpack the ways the land is commodified, it becomes a tortured act of disregard to not identify and explicate parallels between the nonhuman and the more-than-human, especially in a text that so tightly ties the land to the characters the way that Viramontes does. But to explicate the instances where produce occurs as solely reinforcement of the commodification and oppression of the nonhuman or, vice versa, to read Estrella’s journey as only emblematic of what occurs when growing fruit amidst toxicity, replicates the initial injustice of failing to see these elements as actual and alive and valuable in their own right. Because of the closeness with which Viramontes places the characters and the subjugated landscape, an investigation with ecological roots in Under the Feet of

Jesus is almost inaccessible to perform in a vacuum.

In addition to the agri-metaphors explicated herein, even Viramontes’ form, largely without quotation marks or narrative tags, creates a fluid and scattered textual landscape. Initially confusing and distracting, Viramontes’ narrative strategy seems to be a simultaneous micro/macro perspective, specifically when the characters are set within the fields. Her lines, much like Estrella remarks about the rows in the field, seem to have no beginning and no end. Directly after Estrella thinks about how it felt to accompany her mother in the fields as a young child, Viramontes writes,

[a] young boy of ten hobbled onto Alejo’s row. It was the same boy, he recalled,

who mimicked the hawk a few days before. Alejo greeted him with a wave of his

cap, but the boy continued walking, punching holes in the soft soil with his steps,

barely lifting a hand to return the greeting.

Ricky found Estrella’s row. He looked feverish and she put down her basket of

grapes and pressed the water bottle to his lips, tilted it to the sky, asked him where

is your hat and where are Arnulfo and Perfecto Flores anyways?...She stepped

forward, her body never knowing how tired it was until she moved once again.

Don’t cry. (53)

This narrative strategy, colloquially coined “head hopping,” creates a jarring reading experience, dropping readers into different perspectives at varying intervals within the same setting. While it can take some getting used to because of the lack of pattern, its presence in the text serves to simultaneously deliver a number of individual perspectives that build on each other to create the over-arching picture. In some ways, this is the opposite of a traditional omniscient narrative tactic. A traditional omniscient narrator knows everything, has one consistent narrative voice, and strategically shares some of its

knowledge with the audience. This style of narrative controls the text and the readers’ experience with the plot. The switch that Viramontes makes in randomly dropping her narrator into multiple, almost fragmented, points of view turns the reading experience into a literary mosaic. There are moments in the text when the change of perspective happens so sharply readers might lose sight of where, in the textual landscape, the story is occurring. While each independent point of view is interesting and relatable on its own, readers cannot help but be reminded of the bigger picture simply because of the way these individual elements are juxtaposed against each other.

The writing in this text mimics an ecosystem as the story is not driven by any one voice but is only available because each element exists and is interdependent on the rest.

This ecological parallel, wherein the chaos of the text is understandable as emergent properties in a complex system, serves to remind readers that the biological human does not exist over or apart from nature, but in and because of it, and calls for a style of criticism that embraces the challenges presented in an ecological reading through a trans- corporeal lens. As Alaimo states in her book Bodily Natures, “‘The environment’ is not located somewhere out there but is always the very substance of ourselves” (4). New materialists argue that

Our existence depends from one moment to the next on myriad micro-organisms

and diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular

reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff

that populate our environment as well as on socioeconomic structures that

produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday lives. (Coole and Frost 19)

It is therefore desirable to create a merged analysis of the biological human and the more- than-human as elements co-existing and co-mingling as part of nature and to investigate why body parts are described as produce in the text, and the smells that even their dreams house come from the fields. From this perspective, perhaps it can be argued that the elemental language that Viramontes attaches to the senses of the piscadores reinforces the merging of their cultural boundaries with their role in agriculture. Christa Grewe-Volpp expands on this idea when she states, “[t]he natural environment in Under the Feet of

Jesus is thus not a pre-discursive entity nor a place of refuge from spiritual or physical regeneration. It is rather a socially, economically and culturally determined realm into which human beings are embedded” (67). By placing this perspective in a trans-corporeal space for interpretation, it can be better understood that this family is written not only as emblematic of the struggles associated with working the land, but simultaneously and equally as products of the land, symbolic reinforcements of the violence enacted by the system itself. As such, critical interpretation can clearly reach beyond the realms of strictly political or environmental and draw out readings that surmise the toxic treatment of the land is toxic treatment of the people, and one cannot clearly be understood without also listening to the other. Environmental justice scholar T. V. Reed argues:

[a] certain type of ecocritic worries about ‘social issues’ watering down

ecological critique, mounting evidence makes clear that the opposite has been the

case, that pretending to isolate the environment from its necessary interrelation

with society and culture has severely limited the appeal of environmental thought,

to the detriment of both the natural and social worlds. (146)

By focusing on the ways that the human species exists as part of nature rather than as a dominating element with exclusive agency and the power to affect nature, a greater understanding can be drawn as it relates to environmental justice.

To hear one voice, we need not silence another; we can view them all through a trans-corporeal lens, one that identifies individual stories without losing track of the over- arching circumstance. This study implies that the vine that runs through the elements in the text does not begin or end with the human, the nonhuman, or with the more-than- human, but insists that these distinctions are drawn from our intellectual need to place each element in an identity box, clearly and succinctly labeled with not only a name, but also a value and a function. Alaimo states that

[e]mphasizing the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-

than-human world – and at the same time, acknowledging that material agency

necessitates more capacious epistemologies – allows us to forge ethical and

political positions that can contend with numerous late twentieth- and early

twenty-first-century realities in which ‘human’ and ‘environment’ can by no

means be separate. (2)

In order to understand the stories that we each have to tell, to truly hear the circumstances of our neighbors, to reckon with the gravity of our corporate and environmental choices, existing ideological binaries have to be identified, understood, and then looked past.

Because Viramontes writes Under the Feet of Jesus entirely from the point-of- view of the farm workers, she thereby amplifies the volume of farm worker experiences.

In a way, this also serves to silence both the landowners and the landscape. Despite this, the effects of toxic treatment of the land and its agricultural stripping are deeply felt

through the text. In Under the Feet of Jesus, there is one more scene that invokes an explication of the landscape while remaining clearly locked in the piscadores’ point of view. It is not a secret that the chemicals are invading their space through the air and the water, but the piscadores seem largely resigned to this fact until one of their own gets a direct dousing and the repercussions are unavoidable. Whenever the fields go quiet, the piscadores can hear the low buzz of biplanes, carrying chemical overspray to the fields nearby.

Alejo had not guessed the biplane was so close until its gray shadow crossed over

him like a crucifix, and he ducked into the leaves. The biplane circled, banking

steeply over the trees and then released the shower of white pesticide.

Alejo slid through the bushy branches, the tangled twigs scratching his face, and

he was ready to jump when he felt the mist. He shut his eyes tight to the mist of

black afternoon. At first it was just a slight moisture until poison rolled down his

face in deep sticky streaks. The lingering smell was a scent of ocean salt and

bleached kelp until he inhaled again and could detect, under the innocence, the

heavy chemical choke of poison. Air clogged in his lungs and he thought he was

just holding his breath, until he tried exhaling but couldn’t. He panicked when he

realized he was choking, clamped his neck with one hand, feeling his Adam’s

apple against his palm, but still held onto a branch tightly with the other, afraid he

would fall long and hard, like the insects did. He swallowed finally and the spit in

his throat felt like balls of scratchy sand. (Viramontes 76-77)

The imagery Viramontes attaches to this experience leaves little to the imagination and invokes a familiar scene, one that includes the image of a bug that has been doused by

chemical pesticide. The bug would turn on its back, its legs flailing as the deadly poison seals off its breathing apparatus and makes continued oxygen absorption impossible.

Eventually, the flailing slows and the bug expires. It cannot be overlooked that while this injustice is most visibly disturbing when it is inflicted on Alejo, he just happens to be among the crops and is the accidental recipient of a crop dusting intended to target pests.

While Alejo’s pesticide shower was accidental, the remainder of the text shows no involvement on the part of the landowner and lackluster treatment by the nurse at the clinic. This final point makes it evident that there is clear agency and current action involved in keeping the farm workers in an oppressed political and economic position.

Plants and animals were the appropriated victims of the pesticide shower he receives and are foremost on Alejo’s mind as he is poisoned, comparing his experience to that of a cockroach as he tries to run from the crops that remain rooted to the ground beneath the chemical dousing. The poison, however, affects every substance it touches, thereby illuminating the constructed differential between the biological human and its more-than- human surroundings.

55 HOW CRITICAL LANDSCAPE CAN AFFECT THE POLITICAL SPHERE

Recently, media coverage of instances of environmental justice has escalated, calling to our attention the dangers of coal ash depositories, toxic runoff in our drinking water, and the catastrophic impact of climate change. Despite academic research and the visible consequences of these problems, the United States remains politically polarized as to whether or not toxic residue can affect human bodies through their material connection to the landscape. The bipolar nature of both the bipartisan system and public interest on issues of environmental degradation has left the country unwilling to create a plan for or enact anything that amounts to a positive move towards protecting socio-economic groups like the Chicano/a/x farm worker. An immersion of Under the Feet of Jesus within these different schools of thought creates a more detailed analysis that allows for postcolonial, ecocritical, and new materialist theories to inform one another and enrich overall understanding for the scholar. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said states,

The inevitable trajectory of critical consciousness is to arrive at some acute sense

of what political, social, and human values are entailed in the reader, production,

and transmission of every text. To stand between culture and the system is

therefore to stand close to…a concrete reality about which political, moral, and

social judgements have to be made and, if not only made, then exposed and

demystified (1983 26).

56 An analysis that is cross-fertilized because it follows the thread of toxicity and analyzes instances of violence in reflection of agency allows for the cause and effect of each piece of evidence to be added together and creates a profile that aligns with principles recognized in productions of environmental justice. This alignment puts literary criticism in a place where humanist research has the greatest potential to be productive and reach outside the walls of academic discussion to become part of the political discourse that shapes culture. Politically positioned alongside current works of realist and speculative fiction that focus on the implications of toxic landscape and climate change, it would amplify the potential for the development of a nationwide understanding and reaction to these problems. Said states, “[i]t is not that the problems of criticism are undiscussed, but rather that criticism is considered essentially as defined once and for all by its secondariness, by its temporal misfortune in having come after the texts and occasions it is supposed to be treating” (Said 1983 51). By using multiple schools of literary theory in the analysis of a text, and by thoroughly analyzing the agency of every element through both cultural and environmental lenses, areas of trans-corporeality will allow for the product of criticism to fit more neatly into raising real cultural awareness of the inequities distributed across lower socio-economic landscapes and, by extension, the groups of people who live there.

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