Capital Citizens: Disinvesting the Individual in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

Abstract

In an interview following the 1995 publication of her novel Under the Feet of Jesus , Helena Mar (cid:2) ıa Viramontes described her novel’s imagined audience. Her comments constitute a generational gulf in her Mexican American readership, which she exemplifies through her own family’s lineage: The type of audience that I want is composed of readers like my daughter and son who did not grow up in the protest movement or in the civil rights movement and who think of all this stuff as very alien to them. Who, when we go back home, or even when we lived in Southern California and went back to East L.A., it was still very different for them because they are upper middle-class Chicanos. So different from the way Eloy [Rodriguez, Viramontes’s husband] and I grew up. There is no way to artificially raise them the way we grew up. It would become self-denial.