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

Abstract

Abstract In her novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), Helena María Viramontes uses the bildungsroman genre to confront anxieties of bourgeois individualization in Chicana/o cultural productions. Her novel takes shape during the transitional period between the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the emergence of a Mexican American middle class in the 1990s. Increasing demand for political and social recognition incited more diverse visions of American incorporation. However, the Chicana/o community’s past consolidation in working-class solidarity resulted in an aesthetic and political resistance to national inclusion. This inclusion was predicated on the development of bourgeois individualism and upward mobility through middle-class assimilation. Under the Feet of Jesus stages the conflict between Anglo-American, capitalist values of individual growth and national expansion and Chicana/o values of ethnic commitment and community through her two adolescent protagonists, Estrella and Alejo. The novel’s approach to temporality and history disinvests from the capitalist logic guiding both the bildungsroman genre and American ideals of individualism and progress.