Reimagining Citizenship through Bilingualism: The Migrant Bilingual Child in Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus

Bringing together bilingualism and citizenship may seem a counterintuitive gesture to many given that the most prominent relationship between language and citizenship historically in the United States has been that of literacy in English as proof of citizenship.¹ It is increasingly becoming questionable, however, to what extent the monolingual approach to citizenship that distributes rights and obligations in relation to English and assumes a correspondence between one state and one language can meaningfully account for the practices of citizenship. In After Race Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres draw attention to how the changing demographics of the United States—most notably the increasing number of Spanish-speaking populations—have necessitated “the redefining of current ideas of citizenship” (2004, 69).² One productive result of such efforts to redefine citizenship is the notion of cultural citizenship, initially proposed by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo and subsequently advanced by other scholars (Rosaldo 1997, 1994; Ong 1996; Flores and Benmayor 1997). A reaction to the limits of the legal and normative idea of citizenship, cultural citizenship locates the substantial meaning of citizenship in the everyday practices of sharing space and forming and exchanging ideas. In its initial formulation by Rosaldo, it radically decentered the emphasis on state power in citizenship by relocating the substance of citizenship in the lives of those considered outside the regime of citizenship such as minority groups or immigrants. Other scholars such as Aihwa Ong have tried to view cultural citizenship as registering both the regulatory force of the legal, normative side of citizenship and the revisions to such citizenship that occur in the lived realities of the disenfranchised. According to Ong, “Cultural citizenship is a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society” (1996, 738). Bilingualism—as it refers to the dual languages of the home and the public—is a place where this dual process of self-making and being made can be seen.³ In a linguistic environment where the home language conflicts with the public language, bilingualism at once reflects linguistic choice and the social imposition of language.

This essay examines how the Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes rethinks the boundaries of citizenship by exploring bilingualism as cultural citizenship in Under the Feet of Jesus (1995).⁴ Set in mid-twentieth-century California, Under the Feet of Jesus features the growing-up struggles of a thirteen-year-old migrant bilingual child, Estrella, who moves from one labor camp to another with her family.⁵ The novel focuses on one summer she spends in a labor camp where she meets and befriends another migrant teenager, Alejo, who is exposed to pesticide fumigation and falls critically ill. The third-person narrative moves back and forth between the present and the past to provide details about how Estrella’s father left, how Perfecto—a wandering handyman thirty years older than her mother—came to be the substitute father, and how Estrella copes with the emotional hardships and physical toil of migrant labor. By focusing on the role of bilingualism in Estrella’s negotiations of identity and belonging, Viramontes shows how bilingualism can be the basis of questioning the assumption of monolingualism in contemporary articulations of citizenship.

The migrant bilingual child in Viramontes’ novel exists outside the legal and normative understanding of citizenship in several ways. Excluded from the public schools and responsible for a Spanish-speaking family dependent on her for her labor and proficiency in English, Estrella is largely immune to the institutional instructions of becoming a citizen-subject. Instead of being prepared by institutional education to later assume the full rights of a citizen, Estrella learns to become a member of a community through attending to the relations of affection and the duties of caretaking in her circle of family and friends. While the recent scholarship on the “citizen child” focuses on whether the child should be accorded the full rights of a citizen or not, Viramontes explores how the migrant bilingual child already actively participates in the obligations of citizenship...