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Helena Maria Viramontes (born February 26, 1954) is a prominent Chicana fiction writer and professor of English, and activist best known for her work within marginalized communities, particularly amongst Mexican American women and migrant workers. She is known through multiple means of work such as her stories, The Moths, Growing, The Long Reconciliation, The Broken Web, Birthday, Snapshots, The Jumping Bean, The Cariboo Cafe. Her legacy left through her two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them, and is considered one of the most significant figures in the early canon of Chicano literature. Most of her works explore themes of gender inequality, social justice, and the struggle within laboring communities. Viramontes is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University.[1]
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Helena Maria Viramontes | |
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 A photograph of Helena Maria Viramontes at the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival September 30, 2006. | |
| Born | February 26, 1954 East Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupations |
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| Known for | Under the Feet of Jesus Their Dogs Came With Them |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Immaculate Heart College (BA) Cal State Los Angeles UC Irvine (MFA) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Cornell University |
| Main interests | Chicano literature |
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Family
Helena Maria Viramontes was born and raised in East Los Angeles, California. Born on February 26, 1954, to Serafin Viramontes, and Maria Louise La Brada Viramontes.[2] She was one of eight siblings in a working-class, close-knit Catholic family.[3] She grew up in a neighborhood heavily integrated in urban poverty, later becoming the center of her writings. Viramontes attended a common public school system, particularly for students from marginalized backgrounds, which often lacked resources creating a barrier for children like Viramontes.[4]
Her upbringing in East Los Angeles exposed her to the systematic inequities faced by Mexican American communities, including issues such as educational disparities, labor exploitation, and racism.[5]
Education
Viramontes graduated from Garfield High School, one of the high schools that participated in the 1968 Chicano Blowouts, a series of protests against unequal conditions in East Los Angeles public schools. The Chicano Movement played a significant role in her development as a writer[6] and the writing style she developed reflected her understanding and upbringing in the streets of East Los Angeles.[7] This inspired Viramontes to explore the intersections of politics, identity and literature in her work.
Her passion for education led her to attend a small liberal arts school. She worked part-time while attending Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles,[7] where she initially pursued journalism before turning to creative writing from which she earned her Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1975.[8] It was at the college that she became actively involved in the Chicano Movement, deepening her understanding of the intersections between literature and activism.
Viramontes is a first-generation college student, meaning that her parents did not graduate from college, and she and her siblings were the first to attend. Additionally, she was the first woman in her family to attend college.[9] Her father was against her enrolling in college because of gender stereotypes as he believed that attending college was not suitable for women. Viramontes found a way to circumvent his objection and tricked him into signing a college entrance form under false pretenses.[10]
Viramontes taught at Antioch College then moved to California State to complete graduate school. While a grad student in the English department at Cal State L.A., Viramontes was told by a professor that she did not belong there because she was writing about Latino issues. Also, while attending a graduate program in creative writing at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the early 1980s, “a professor told me not to write about Chicanos, but to write about people.”[11] While at UCI she was under the mentorship of esteemed writers. such as Thomas Keneally and Geoffrey Wolff. This is where she honed in on her craft and began publishing her work. She left the program, but returned later to complete and earn her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine in 1989. Her academic journey provided her with the tools she needed to refine her voice and explore those complex themes. In 1977, her short story "Requiem for the Poor" was awarded a prize from Statement Magazine. In 1979, she won a literary prize from the Spanish department at UC Irvine for her short story "Birthday." She returned to the fine arts program at UCI in 1990 and graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in 1994.
Viramontes now serves as a distinguished Goldwin Smith professor of English at Cornell University, where she mentors emerging writers and continues to advocate for the importance of storytelling as a tool for social change.
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A strong voice in Latino and Chicano literature, Helena Maria Viramontes is regarded as “one of the most socially and politically conscious writers of today.”[12] Her published works include two novels, a collection of short stories[13], and multiple contributions to literary anthologies.
Viramontes has largely been labeled as "a Chicana writer, as a woman writer, as an ethnic writer,” but she has stated that she has always considered herself an American writer.[14] The title of American writer was truly solidified and affirmed for Viramontes as she was awarded the 1995 Longwood College John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in October 1996, sealing her place in the contemporary American literary canon.
Today, Viramontes has two novels (Under the Feet of Jesus and There Dogs Came with Them), a collection of short stories (The Moths and Other Stories), and a vast array of contributions to fiction anthologies. Some notable contributions include to the collections Growing Up Ethnic in America[15], Nepantla Familias[16], and Adventures in Bodily Autonomy[17]. She also wrote the forward to the collection All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color.[18]
Viramontes has also written a story entitled Paris Rats in East L.A (1993)[14] which she later wrote as a screenplay[19]. Though these writings are not readily accessible to the public, the University of California Santa Barbara carries them within the special collection archive[19].
Viramontes work is largely set in California[20] and grapples with social, political, and environmental elements that impact Hispanic and Chicano Americans.
Novels
Under the Feet of Jesus (1995)
Published in 1995, Viramontes' first novel, titled Under the Feet of Jesus[21], follows Estrella, a thirteen-year-old girl at the crossroads of childhood and womanhood. The novel focuses on Estrella as she navigates life working in the fields harvesting produce in southwestern United States, aids her mother care for and teach her siblings how to survive, and explores new emotions and desires with Alejo, a young farm worker.
Against the backdrop of California[20] landscapes, this novel provides a moving look into the life of the Hispanic family, facing abandonment by their father, prejudice from the people surrounding them, and an unrelenting land that may kill them. Through tragedy and struggle, Estrella finds her strength and voice against the society that seeks to keep her on the margins as she seeks to save the life of the young boy she loves.
Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel (2008)
Viramontes' second novel was published in 2008, titled Their Dogs Came with Them. It is set in the 1960s East Los Angeles. It follows four Mexican-American women who have grown up in this urban landscape. The women, Turtle, Ermila, Tranquilina, and Ana alternate focus in the chapters though their lives are often intertwined. Each carries her own struggle of identity, social-class, and heartache.
The novel is set against the backdrop of the displacement from the construction of the highway in California.
This novel caused well-renowned Latina author Julia Alvarez to call Viramontes "one of the important multicultural voices of American literature."[22]
Short Stories in Collections/Anthologies
The Moths[23]
This short story was first published at an undetermined time in a magazine called XhismArte Magazine[24], and later published in 1985 in the collection called The Moths and Other Stories. The story follows a young girl who is recalling her childhood and the struggles she faced.
The Cariboo Café (1985)
This short story was published in 1985 in a collection called The Moths and Other Stories, which is a collection of works by Chicano women. The Cariboo Café is about two children that accidentally get locked out of the house and try to hide as a result. It is implied that they are hiding because their parents are undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The rest of the story follows the children as they get swept into different scenarios following their decision to hide.
The Surprise Trancazo (2021)
This work is contained in the anthology Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in Between Worlds.
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- American Book Award
- National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Arts, 1/1989
- Fellowship, Sundance Institute, 7/1989
- Under the Feet of Jesus, New Voices Quality Paperback Book, 1995
- Under the Feet of Jesus, finalist, Discover Great New Writers, 1996
- John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, 1996
- The Moths exhibited in Autrey Museum of Western Heritage, 5/1998-9/1998
- Alumna of the year, Immaculate Heart College, 10/2000
- Doctor of Humanities, Honoris Causa, St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, 5/2000
- Featured with John Steinbeck and Carlos Bulosan on Oregon Public Broadcasting,"American Passages—A Literary Survey" #12, "The Migrant Struggle"[25]
- Luis Leal Award, Santa Barbara Festival of Books, 2006[26]
- Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Award in Literary Arts or Publications, 2007
- United States Artists Fellowship, 2007[27]
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Under the Feet of Jesus (Penguin, 1995) follows the lives of thirteen-year-old Estrella, her brothers and sisters, her mother Petra, Petra's lover Perfecto, and the cousins Alejo and Gumecindo, all Latino migrant workers living and working in the California grape fields. Since the novel's dedication refers to Cesar Chavez, who led migrant laborers to ask for better wages and conditions, Chavez' actions in such movements as the Delano Grape Strike must be considered as background to the novel's fictions.[28]
The story reflects the hardships of the migrants’ lives set against the beauty of the landscape. It reflects, as critics Carballo and Giles have noted, multiple "initiation stories," many of which revolve around the friendship and love unfolding between Estrella and Alejo.[29] The novel's limited omniscient narrator moves in and out of the consciousnesses of the main characters, a technique which allows readers to view characters' motivations, and which Viramontes herself says is a product of the ways that the characters of the novel told her their story.[30]
Chapter 1 begins with the family driving to the fields to harvest the fruit. The chapter draws the personalities of the main characters on emotional, spiritual, and physical levels; we learn of the hardships that they experience as migrant workers. Petra, the mother, abandoned by her husband and raising five children alone, has endured bouts of insanity and self-mutilation. She meets Perfecto, who fixes things with his toolbox so well that, after he finishes, customers exclaim, Perfecto! A hare-lipped child cuts himself and is entertained by shadow-puppetry until he forgets his injuries. Gumecindo and Alejo pick peaches, not to eat, but to sell. In a darkened, derelict barn, a mysterious chain dangles from the ceiling, and the sounds of birds fill the darkness. The novel proceeds in a series of striking images stemming from Viramontes' work at the time, on a film.[30]
Working back and forth between Estrella's and Alejo's puppy-love and Perfecto's memories, Chapter 2 develops several conflicts. Perfecto, now age 73, recalls falling in love with his first wife, Mercedes[3], and the loss of an infant, his first child. He hides his hope to leave Petra's family and return forever to the scenes of his early love with Mercedes. He asks Estrella to help him tear down the derelict barn for a payment that will fund his trip. Meanwhile, Estrella meets Alejo at a dance, where they begin to fall in love. Alejo and Estrella discuss the La Brea Tar Pits, which are, according to the critic Burford, a trope for forces which devour.[31]
In Chapter 3, Alejo is sick with the daño of the fields (pesticide poisoning). He is sicker, according to Perfecto, than any yerba (herb) or prayer can heal. The family decides to take Alejo to a clinic but is halted when their station wagon is stuck in deep mud. Everyone helps except Alejo, who can barely pick his chin up.
In Chapter 4, Estrella and her family finally arrive at a remote, worn-down clinic. The only staff member, a nurse, seems distant from Alejo and unwilling to give him any but the most clinical of attentions. She suggests that the family take the boy to a hospital; however, she does not recognize how very little money the family has to pay the clinic's fee, to buy gasoline, or to pay a doctor's bill. Estrella repeatedly recommends Perfecto to the nurse as a repairman, so that the migrants can barter his work for medical services rather than pay money for them; the nurse repeatedly cannot read the vast gulf between even her small earning power and her patients’. At last, Estrella threatens the nurse with a crow bar, takes back the meager fee she had paid the clinic, and uses the money to buy gasoline to take Alejo to a hospital, where the family leaves him to the doctors’ care and to his fate.
In Chapter 5, the family arrives at their shack without Alejo. The dirty dishes are where they left them. The younger children fall asleep. Although Petra has not yet told Perfecto that she is pregnant with his child, he is aware of the developing infant and recoils from the responsibility. Leaning against the decrepit car, he mourns for the places he left in memory and the money he does not have to return. Petra is awake and restless and resolves to pray. Estrella rushes off, lantern in hand, to the only place she feels temporarily free, the old barn. As the novel ends, she is standing on the roof, silhouetted against a starry sky.
The novel's meaning develops partly through plot and partly through imagery evoked through the novel's lush language. The plot lets readers know how delicate is the balance between having enough to eat and not, between sanity and insanity, between health and incapacitating illness. Exasperatingly, the loveliness of natural scenery and of acts of human decency almost mock the workers’ frailty and hardship. The mountains and stars, frequently described, endure beyond human carelessness, ignorance, and cruelty. Peaches evoke the deliciousness of food and eating, and food's unavailability to many. Rotting fruit evoke preciousness, such as human talent, that is daily wasted. Blood, aching backs, feet, hands, eyes, all mentioned frequently, remind readers how much human life is housed in a body which must stay safe and healthy in order to live. Viramontes notes that she had "to think about the stories of the mujeres out there, their sheer arrogance to survive, their incredible strength to take care of others."[30] The juxtaposition of Petra, carrying her child, and her daughter's figure silhouetted against the sky at the novel's close emphasizes Viramontes' chicana feminism.
Viramontes often uses her works as witness to history, or as a voice for those who do not have a public platform upon which to speak (see, e.g., her short story "The Cariboo Cafe," (in The Moths and Other Stories 65–82) her novel, Their Dogs Came with Them and the article "Xicanismo"). In interviews she evinces a longtime commitment to civil rights.[29] Her commitment to rights is not abstract, since Viramontes' own parents harvested grapes during her youth.[29] The novel likewise reflects Viramontes' feminism in her creation of strong female characters. Of these, Carballo and Giles report, "Women in this novel rescue themselves."[29]
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Readers typically want a happy ending in any novel. Their Dogs Came with Them Viramontes demonstrates why a happy ending may not be possible. Cuevas, in her study of Viramontes' work, suggests that happy endings do not always occur for Latinas, and queer Latinas. People in these communities do not overcome disparities and systems of oppression, and violence. Similarly, Pattison suggests that people in urban communities are deprived of their political connections to the space and erasure of memory sites. Communities are sacrificed in the name of urban expansion.[32]
Viramontes’ novel showcases the 1960s freeway construction in East Los Angeles in which Mexican American sites of cultural memory were permanently erased. The author emphasizes the traumatic relationship between the characters and their disappearing community. In the novel Viramontes focuses on the Chicano movement that the young characters joined during a time in which the freeway threatened the erasure of their community and culture.[33] She also creates a space to imagine Latina futures from a broken ground, unredeemed past or non-redemptive history.[34] She maps the lives of four Latinas who navigate personal and political unrest with their communities while emphasizing how Chicanas and queer-Latinas have been an integral part of Chicana/o history. Her character's identities are intertwined with their communities through the imagery and metaphors of their bodies. She is able to articulate positive and negative dynamics within their neighborhood during the turbulent time of the freeway construction.[35]
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Viramontes' papers are held at the University of California Santa Barbara Special Collection[36].
Criticism
- Beyond Stereotypes: A Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (Contributor, 1985). ISBN 0-916950-54-9
- Chicana Creativity and Criticism (Contributor and editor, 1988) ISBN 0-8263-1712-X.
Novels
Short story collections
- Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (Contributor, 1983). ISBN 0-913175-01-3
- The Moths and Other Stories (1985). ISBN 1-55885-138-0. Includes "The Moths".
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https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/mmartin-rodriguez/index_files/vhViramontesHelena.htm
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- Rupali Das, MD, MPH; Andrea Steege, MPH; Sherry Baron, MD, MPH; John Beckman, Robert Harrison, MD, MPH. "Pesticide-related Illness among Migrant Farm Workers in the United States." International Journal of Occupational Environmental Health 7, 2001: 303–312.
- Rebozos de palabras: An Helena María Viramontes Critical Reader. Edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs. 2003.
- "Environmental Toxins: Changes Needed to Reduce Migrant Farm Worker Exposure to Pesticides." Cancer Weekly (20 Jan. 2004): 56–7.
- "Recoding Consumer Culture: Ester Hernández, Helena María Viramontes, and the Farmworker Cause." Journal of Popular Culture (October 2013): 973–990.
- "You talk 'Merican?": Class, Value, and the Social Production of Difference in Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus."
College Literature (2014): 41-73.
- The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl. 2016.
- "Their Bones Kept Them Moving: Latinx Studies, Helena Maria Viramontes's "Under the Feet of Jesus," and the Crosscurrents of Ecocriticism." Contemporary Literature, (2017): 361–391.
- Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. 2019.
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