Гелена Вирамонтес: Шығармалары мен шаруалар өмірінен сыр шерту

American novelist

Helena Maria Viramontes (born February 26, 1954) is an American fiction writer and professor of English. She is known for 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. Viramontes is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. She also creates a space to imagine Latina futures from a broken ground, unredeemed past or non redemptive history. 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.

Beyond Stereotypes: A Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (Contributor, 1985). Chicana Creativity and Criticism (Contributor and editor, 1988) .

Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (Contributor, 1983). The Moths and Other Stories (1985). Includes "The Moths".

https://faculty. ucmerced. edu/mmartin rodriguez/index files/vhViramontesHelena. htm