“Too Clean, Too White”: Resistance to the Racial Politics of Hygiene in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

Author:

Galentine Cassandra1

Affiliation:

1. University of Oregon , USA

Abstract

Abstract The central characters of Helena María Viramontes’s 1996 novel about Mexican American farm workers, Under the Feet of Jesus, are plagued by dirt and grime wherever they go. Subsequently, these characters frequently face racial discourses of hygiene—popular forms of communication (advertisements, public health education, etc.) that associate cleanliness with whiteness and wealth, and dirtiness with poverty and nonwhite identity. Through their encounters with dirt, cleaning products, and racial discourses of hygiene, Viramontes’s characters demonstrate how ideas about cleanliness inform US racial formation. In particular, the novel’s engagement with the American ideals of white cleanliness foisted on the central teenage farm worker, Estrella, and her family reveals how personal hygiene is weaponized as a tool of neoliberalism to obscure the material conditions of laborers and the systemic environmental racism they face. In the novel, individual hygiene is presented, most often by white or white-coded characters, as the path toward environmental, racial, and economic justice in ways that distract from the structural roots of the environmental injustices nonwhite farm workers face daily. Through white color imagery and active engagement with dirty materiality, Under the Feet of Jesus challenges racial discourses of hygiene and demonstrates systemic and restorative ways of thinking about public health and the value of communal care.

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)

Reference22 articles.

1. “Living in Dirt: Reclaiming the Discourse of Hygiene in the Works of Anzia Yezierska.”;Berger,2003

2. “Capital Citizens: Disinvesting the Individual in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus.”;Collins;MELUS,2022

3. “‘The oil was made from their bones’: Environmental (In)Justice in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus.”;Grewe-Volpp;ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment,2005

4. A Brief History of Neoliberalism

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