Radical Hunger: Food, Sound, and Chicana Political Awakening in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

Revisiting Helena María Viramontes’s classic 1995 novel Under the Feet of Jesus, this essay brings together Chicana/o literary studies, sound studies, and food studies scholarship to consider how the novel visualizes and represents sound and hunger. Through close readings, I explore the relationship between sonic representations, food, and hunger in the novel and argue that the experience of hunger paradoxically produces the main character’s political force. I argue that Viramontes’s exploration of the complex relationship between hunger and audible protest is concretized in her main protagonist’s character arc. Through Estrella, Viramontes unveils the despair produced by hunger, a potent human drive that can spark growing political agency. This essay affi rms the enduring value of Viramontes’s classic in the current environment, in which food access continues to be eroded by neoliberal policies, and novel forms of contestation and protest are crucial tools of resistance and survival.