49 pages • 1 hour read
Under The Feet Of Jesus
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Alejo grows increasingly sick, and Petra offers to take him in. Perfecto protests, worried about the cost and pointing out that Petra has health problems of her own. Petra, however, is adamant: “If we don’t take care of each other, who would take care of us?” (96). Accordingly, Gumecindo and Perfecto bring Alejo to the bungalow, where Petra tends to him with different folk remedies. Alejo is comforted, and wakes later that night to find Estrella sleeping next to him.
Meanwhile, Perfecto worries about troubling dreams he’s had of Mercedes, of his stillborn child, and of Petra pregnant. He works on the station wagon and hopes that the money he earns tearing down the barn will allow him to replace the battery.
In a flashback, Petra and her children approach a store, with her boys, to Petra’s annoyance, lagging behind. She doesn’t take any of the children but Estrella inside, and she thinks carefully before deciding what she can afford. Finally, she approaches a display of garlic; she uses garlic to ease her leg pain. While choosing the freshest bulbs, Petra knocks a few to the ground, but a man who is in the store fixing its freezer picks them up for her. After she and Estrella pay and leave the store, Ricky and Arnulfo are munching on ice that the man—Perfecto—gave them.
Back in the present, Petra lays in bed next to Perfecto. She overhears Estrella talking to Alejo, explaining that a lot of people have been getting sick—including Petra—and that this is why she doesn’t want her brothers working in the fields. The two teenagers move on to discuss their dreams the prior night, and whether Estrella is planning on working in the fields forever; by this point, Estrella is lying down next to Alejo, and Petra thinks resentfully that “if Estrella wasn’t working, there would be nothing for him to eat” (117). When Petra at last gets up, her skirt is too tight, and it slowly emerges that she’s pregnant. She thinks about this and about Estrella as she makes tortillas: “Soon Estrella would begin menstruation, and Petra thought of blood in the glow of the fire, the amber red of molten wood, and in the absence of her own menstruation” (120).
While her mother makes breakfast, Estrella thinks about her reluctance to go to work that day. Perfecto emerges and asks her about the barn again, but Estrella doesn’t give him a definite answer.
Later, Petra helps Alejo onto the porch; although he perks up whenever Estrella is nearby, Petra is worried about his condition, and about the financial strain of taking care of him. As she lies next to Estrella that night, she “[thinks] of the lima bean in her, the bean floating in the night of her belly, bursting a root with each breath. Would the child be born without a mouth, would the poisons of the field harden in its tiny little veins?” (125).
Perfecto once again asks Estrella about the barn, stressing that it would bring in money. Estrella hints that this would allow them to pay for Alejo to see a doctor, but Perfecto says that Petra needs a doctor, too. Estrella is upset that Perfecto is “making [her] choose” (126).
The following day, the family sets off for a clinic, but their car quickly becomes stuck in the mud. Estrella works to dig the car out, thinking about the girl found in the tar pits: “They found her in a few bones. No details of her life were left behind, no piece of cloth, no ring, no doll. A few bits of bone displayed somewhere under a glass case and nothing else” (129). After an hour of work, Estrella signals for Perfecto to again try the motor, but the car is still stuck.
Chapter 3 Analysis
As Alejo’s condition grows more serious, the realities of the migrants’ situation becomes clearer and clearer. Like Estrella giving the peach to another field worker, Petra’s offer to care for Alejo is a selfless action from someone who doesn’t have much to begin with. In some ways, however, it’s also a pragmatic choice; because the piscadores can’t look to external help (e.g. from the government) for support, they must look to one another. Petra’s hope is that in caring for Alejo, she is striking a kind of bargain, ensuring that her own children will be similarly looked after in the future:
Petra took care of Alejo, not because of who he was, but because she was a mother too, and if Estrella was sick, or Ricky and Arnulfo were sick in the piscas, she would want someone to take care of them. And of course, she did it for love of God (124).
However, an existence in which everything has to be bargained for isn’t a particularly stable one, and it often requires painful decisions; Estrella is upset when Perfecto “makes her choose” between medical care for her mother and medical care for Alejo, but the reality is that with limited money, the situation “comes down to that” (127).
Other problems are also looming on the horizon. Petra’s pregnancy once again underscores the uniquely vulnerable position of the novel’s female characters. In fact, as she thinks about Estrella’s growth, Petra imagines the female body itself as yet another aspect of life beyond her control: “When it was time, it was time and not even Petra’s glare at her eldest daughter was enough to halt the weather of what was to come, halt the flesh and blood pieces of Estrella’s heart from falling to the ground” (121). Here, Petra associates menstruation with what she regards as Estrella’s inevitable future heartbreak at the hands of men. Consequently, she views Estrella’s developing relationship with Alejo suspiciously; as she listens to Estrella and Alejo together, for instance, Petra wonders whether “this [was] what it was all about, healing Alejo so that he could take Estrella” (117). By and large, Petra sees romantic love as a dangerous emotion, preferring the “loyalty” she sees as characterizing her relationship with Perfecto (118).
Given Perfecto’s plans to leave, however, Petra’s faith in their more subdued and mature love seems misplaced. In fact, Viramontes celebrates the immediacy and intensity of Estrella and Alejo’s relationship; when Alejo wakes to find Estrella beside him, he “pull[s] closer to her, rest[s] near her chest and with her lulling breathing against his cheek, he [becomes] convinced he would not die after all” (100). In this passage, Estrella’s physicality is—far from being a threat—actually life-affirming. Again, the implication is perhaps that in such an uncertain existence, the only way of living is to embrace the moment, rather than searching for something to rely on in the future.
With that said, part of what seems to draw Estrella to Alejo is his hope for a better life. More than once, she remarks on how much Alejo likes to talk; in fact, she appeals to Perfecto at one point by saying that Alejo “can’t talk anymore. He loved to talk […] don’t you see?” (126). Within the context of the physically-demanding work the piscadores perform, Alejo’s love of words is a reminder of his intelligence and his academic aspirations. Arguably, Alejo’s poisoning reveals his dreams of becoming a geologist to have been naive; instead of becoming someone who studies oil, Alejo is now metaphorically part of the tar pits himself. With that said, Alejo encourages Estrella to dream of life beyond the fields, which helps solidify both her growing confidence in herself and her sense that the life she leads is fundamentally unfair.
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