ABSTRACT

Helena María Viramontes’s richly metaphorical fictional narratives about Mexican Americans in mid-to-late twentieth century Los Angeles and agricultural California can be usefully taught in a range of courses. I myself have taught her fiction in courses like Narrative and Narrative Theory (Under the Feet of Jesus, focusing on characterization, narrative perspective, and focalization); Contemporary American Literature (Under, focusing on representations of farmworker experience); Growing Up in America (Under and The Moths, focusing on twentieth-century Chicana girlhood experience); Writings by Women of Color (Moths, focusing on gender dynamics); and Chicana/o Literature (Moths and Their Dogs Came with Them, focusing on mid-twentieth-century Chicana/o experience of racial segregation and economic discrimination). Viramontes’s acute attention to interpersonal and social dynamics, her lyrical and allusive descriptions of people and places, and the immense generosity she shows toward her remarkably expansive range of character types make her one of the most important Latina writers to have emerged over the last 30 years.