Under the Feet of Jesus

Hassett, John J.; Viramontes, Helena María

doi:10.2307/29741316

Cited by 26 publications

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Sickness in the System: The Health Costs of the Harvest

McEntyre

2007

J Med Humanit

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Cherie Moraga's play, Heroes and Saints, and Helena Maria Viramontes' novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, offer readers perspectives on the lives of migrant farm workers in California that challenge the moral imagination and conscience. Both focus on health hazards of pesticides and on the often prohibitive difficulty of getting health care for those who fall ill as a result of exposure. This paper offers a reflection on the direct political and moral appeal these works present to readers who may not see or acknowledge the sacrifices sustained by those whose undercompensated labors are an integral part of our food systems.

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Sickness in the System: The Health Costs of the Harvest

McEntyre

2007

J Med Humanit

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The Hispanic Absence in the North American Literary Canon

Kevane

2001

J. Am. Stud.

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I recently completed a book of interviews (Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, co-edited with Juanita Heredia, University of New Mexico Press, 2000) with ten of the most prominent Latina writers in the US; Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Ferré, Cristina García, Nicholasa Mohr, Cherríe Moraga, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago and Helena María Viramontes. These women, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican and Puerto Rican Americans, raised issues that ranged from the craft of writing to the inherent problems of national identities. The themes generated in our conversations with these women – their doubled ethnic identities, their complicated relationship to their communities, their difficulties in representing their communities and, finally, their work as part of the larger American canon – revealed a powerful discourse about what it means to be Latina American in the United States. After spending two years talking with these women, it is evident to me that Latina literature is a vital part of American literature and should be included in any study of comparative American literatures.

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Oscar Hijuelos: Writer of Work

Lazo¹

2007

Contemporary U.S. Latino/ a Literary Criticism

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, Oscar Hijuelos published "Lunch at the Biltmore," 1 a short nonfiction piece about a period, as the opening phrase tells us, "[i]n the autumn of 1959" when he suffered from the physical travails of a kidney infection and his father grappled with the aftershocks of a heart attack. The piece includes the standard fare for which Hijuelos is known. Starting with the opening reference to 1959, "Lunch at the Biltmore" provides a glimpse into Hijuelos's engagement with Cuba and the influence of Cuban culture on his family. He remembers eating "suckling pig (lechón)" and "a journey I'd made to Cuba." The Spanish language regularly enters the descriptions: "A quiet man, un tipo muy callado, he said little to me." The recurrent invocation of Cuba in Hijuelos's oeuvre accounts for the way he has been represented in academic literary studies. Most critical work about Hijuelos's fiction focuses on Cuban American culture, raises questions about the influence of television and music in U.S. constructions of Cubanness, and positions his fiction within debates about Latino identity-formation. 2 Karen Christian, for example, argues that the mambo performance in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 3 unravels essentialist and fixed notions of nationality and gender. "The hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity of these characters (their excess) makes them resemble drag performers whose objective is to perform convincing gender illusions," Christian writes. 4 But to focus on ethnic or gender identity without considering the socially symbolic and material function of economic conditions, particularly occupations, is to gloss over an important dimension of Hijuelos's fiction, which constantly reminds us that people spend more time working L. Di Iorio Sandín et al. (eds.

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Under the Feet of Jesus

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

Sickness in the System: The Health Costs of the Harvest

Sickness in the System: The Health Costs of the Harvest

The Hispanic Absence in the North American Literary Canon

Oscar Hijuelos: Writer of Work

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