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Labor, Legality and the American Dream

by Tiffany Giron



The American Dream is the idea that the United States is a country where freedom and

liberty includes the opportunity for prosperity and success. The American Dream provides upward social mobility for families and their children, which can be achieved through hard work and with few barriers. It can be achieved by anyone regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. However, through systemic policies and laws put in place we have seen how the American Dream is limited to a select group within our society. Helena Viramontes highlights this through the struggles of a Mexican migrant family of farm workers in her novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. The family unit is made up of Petra, the mother; Petra’s daughter Estrella; two sons Ricky and Arnulfo; twin toddler girls; and Petra’s companion Perfecto Flores. In the novel, Viramontes addresses the impact that legal status has on work experiences and how migrant lives are erased through laws, policies, and the media. As a result of these systemic inequalities, which include harsh immigration policies, many migrant farm laborers must endure working under inhumane conditions and are unable to move upward economically and socially. The laws and restrictions have incapacitated them.


Similarly, this historical oppression can be seen with Mexican migrants. The Bracero program was first introduced in 1942 due to World War II and the fear of a shortage of farm laborers.

Citizenship has been used by the American government as a means to exclude certain races and ethnicities from gaining power and equal access to resources. Historically we have seen the oppression of other minority groups being treated differently because of their race. Similarly, this historical oppression can be seen with Mexican migrants. The Bracero program was first introduced in 1942 due to World War II and the fear of a shortage of farm laborers. The program was a series of laws and agreements between Mexico and the United States. The Mexican Farm Labor Agreement allowed 4.6 million laborers to travel to the United States as manual laborers. The Bracero Program was the largest transnational farmworkers program in the United States. Many of the farmworkers were undocumented immigrants. The migrant workers were welcomed for their cheap labor. However, the migrant farmworkers were required to return to Mexico when their work was complete. The migrant farmworkers did not have the same rights as citizens and were not given the protective rights that American citizens have. In a study on the Bracero Program, Abigail G. H. Manzella, Manzella notes the effects that the program had on Mexican migrant workers: “The Bracero Program," she writes, "facilitated and expanded an already ongoing economic displacement by regularizing the idea that people of Mexican descent were temporary aliens who could never become citizens, and this stereotype continues to the present day” (Manzella,154-155). America wanted to use Mexican migrants for their bodies and labor, while simultaneously denying them the right to engage in civic life and pursue the American Dream. The Bracero Program became an exploitative labor regime that lasted for 22 years.


Viramontes's novel takes place later on in the twentieth century and addresses the immorality of depriving migrant laborers of citizenship. Estrella and her family invest their lives into working in the fields to pick the vegetables and fruits Americans consume. In the novel Petra encourages her daughter not to be afraid of Border Patrol when she runs to the bungalow fearful of being followed. "Don’t run scared," Petra tells them; "You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them” (Viramontes 63). Petra is making an ethical argument, instead of a legitimate claim to citizenship. Estrella has earned her right to be a citizen, not because she has a birth certificate, but because she has worked hard in the fields that contributes to mainstream America. By centering on ethical contentions for citizenship, Viramontes criticizes an American lawful framework that avoids and overlooks those who provide their labor and their lives to the country.



Viramontes reinforces the rhetoric Mexican migrants are wanted for their labor without their presence, in the erasure of the hard work migrant laborers endure. Migrant laborers are not seen or heard by American society. Their labor goes unnoticed and is deleted by advertisements that portray their labor as tranquil and gratifying. Estrella illustrates this when she is harvesting grapes in the fields. “Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out grapes with her smiling, ruby lips, the sun a flat orange behind her. The sun was white and it made Estrella’s eyes sting like an onion, and baskets of grapes resisted her muscles, pulling their magnetic weight back to the earth” (Viramontes, 49-50). Estrella’s work is tiring and overwhelming; very different from what is portrayed by corporations and what consumers see.


He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waist and torso, the pressure of tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs.

Both Alejo and Estrella reference tar pits at moments when they feel their labor is being exploited and ignored. Alejo, a laborer in the camp, describes the portrayal of how migrant lives are erased in comparing their labor and bodies to tar pits. This erasure is mirrored by Alejo's image of drowning in a tar pit, when he is sprayed with pesticides by a bypassing plane, while collecting peaches in the orchard (Viramontes 86). Alejo imagines "sinking into the tar pits” (Viramontes 88).


He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waist and torso, the pressure of tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs. Engulfing his skin up to his chin, his mouth, his nose, bubbled air. Black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness. Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone. (Viramontes 88)


Similarly, Estrella imagines herself as a prehistoric girl falling into the tar pits when she attempts without success to dig the station wagon out of the mud to carry Alejo to the clinic, “She thought of the young girl that Alejo had told her about, the one girl they found in the La Brea 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” (Viramontes 140). All these moments show how their sense of personal identity is undermined by the grueling physical work Estrella and Alejo are required to perform. Moreover, it reflects their perception that their work is invisible to those around them: they provide vital services to society without enjoying meaningful rights or rewards, like anonymous prehistoric animals that drown in tar, eventually producing oil for consumption (Viramontes 98). Ultimately, Viramontes uses tar pits to symbolize the contrast between migrant labor's harsh conditions and their erasure in the process.


Viramontes references the inequalities the family face as a result of their impermanence in the country. The consumption of goods is a representation of the class inequalities they face every day. This can further be seen in the novel when the family is at the gas station and Petra is envious of a man in a car and thinks about how he has a place to call home and a bed to sleep on:


The white plush carpeting was so white, it was obvious no one ate in the car. She envied the car, then envied the landlord of the car who could travel from one splat dot to another. She thought him a man who knew his neighbors well, who returned to the same bed, who could tell where the schools and where the stores were, and where the Nescafé coffee jars in the stores were located, and payday always came at the end of the week. (Viramontes 105)


Viramontes exemplifies the stark contrast of the family’s instability. The car represents everything the family does not have; they do not have a place to call home because they must move with the harvest. They are also unable to participate in civic life because of their inability to establish permanence in the country and society. The man at the gas station and his clean, pristine car is an example of the luxuries that Petra and her family are not afforded. He is able to take part in the American Dream while Petra and her family remain immobile by their circumstances. Petra desires to have a place to call home for herself and her family. Home would give the family a sense of belonging to a community. Petra is envious because she notices Americans take these things for granted. She is unable to enjoy such luxuries because of the way the system is set up to exclude her and her family’s existence because they are not legal migrants.


In closing, Viramontes does a profound job in describing the interconnection that legality and labor has on the inaccessibility to the American Dream for many Mexican migrants. Through the erasure of their work and their denial of permanence in the country, they are easily ignored by society. Consequently, their lives, hard work, and very existence is erased and forgotten.


 

Works Cited


Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Harvard University Press, 2002.


López, Dennis. "“You Talk ’merican?”: Class, Value, and the Social Production of Difference in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus." College Literature, vol. 41 no. 4, 2014, p. 41-70.


Manzella, Abigail. “The Economic Displacement of Mexican American Migrant Labor: Disembodied Criminality to Embodied Spirituality and Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus.” Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements, Ohio State University Press, COLUMBUS, 2018, pp. 154–187.


Viramontes, Helena Maria. Under the Feet of Jesus. Plume, 1995.

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