Refusing the Colonial Discourse of Animality: Insects, Farmworkers, and Ecological Solidarity in Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus

Abstract

This article explores the role of insects in Helena Maria Viramontes’ 1995 novel Under the Feet of Jesus. Drawing on decolonial theory and critical animal studies, it argues that the novel refuses the colonial discourse of animality, thereby offering a vision of ecological solidarity between farmworkers and insects. Close readings of insects demonstrate how the novel witnesses the mutual precarity of farmworkers and insects, as well as their collective resilience, in the landscape of US industrial agriculture. In this way, Viramontes’ novel presents an environmental imaginary that challenges the linked logics of human exceptionalism and white supremacy.