Citizenship

In Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), 13-year-old Estrella experiences the anxiety of an immigration raid on the labor camp in which her family works. Estrella’s mother tells her that she is safe and if La Migra “tr[ies] to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus” (Viramontes 1995: 63), the statue that sits upon the altar in their shack. The legal protection and the implied religious blessing of that document are more than enough to legitimate Estrella’s rights. Yet, for Estrella’s mother, her labor as an itinerant worker further justifies her children’s right to belong. “Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner,” she tells Estrella. Rather than having to “carry proof around like belly buttons” (1995: 62) in order to assert their legal right to be in the United States, the mother emphasizes instead their connection to the earth, a claim that supersedes the territorial boundaries and control of the state. Viramontes’s text reminds us that even those Latinos/as with “papers” do not

always enjoy the full rights and privileges of US citizenship. There is “no sense telling La Migra you’ve lived here all your life” (1995: 62), the mother explains, because despite their citizenship status, Latinos/as are marked by an “ineradicable foreignness” (Oboler 2006: 10). Latino/a authors, like Viramontes, often expose the historical and contemporary vicissitudes of the Latino/a experience in the United States, including the repercussions of race in perpetuating the denial of their full rights as members of the nation, and potential denial of the protections others often take for granted as citizens. In contrast to the mainstream narratives of rights and equal opportunities for all, the lived experience of citizenship among US Latinos/as has instead often been fraught with political tensions, racial discrimination and, more recently, new and evolving conceptions of citizenship and the state in the era of globalization. Moreover, the literature by Latinos/as uncovers the extent to which the ongoing struggle for equality and inclusion has ensured that, regardless of their legal status, Latinos/as too have been active participants in the evolution of US citizenship, contributing to create non-juridical definitions that privilege alternative ways of belonging to the nation.