The emotional heart of Helena Maria Viramontes' novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, revolves around the mental, physical and spiritual maturation of Estrella, a Latina girl from 13 year old living with his family on a migrant farm. To contrast Estrella's transformation, Viramontes presents us with another character: Petra, Estrella's mother, who demonstrates immense courage in the face of the same oppression as Estrella, but who processes her frustrations in the opposite way of her daughter, countering the externalization, Estrella's action-based exuberance with her mother's internal, faith-based perseverance. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In the grand scheme of the novel, Estrella's action cannot be distilled into a single moment or action: it is built over the course of Under the Feet of Jesus, resulting in a turning point that represents the infinite moments, realizations, and frustrations that experiment before it. This gradual maturation process mirrors, and is intertwined with, Estrella's recovery from the loss of her father, which is the first example of emotional growth we see in Estrella. At the beginning of the first chapter, through flashbacks, we are introduced to the character of the father, a character whose absence distinguishes his role in the story more than his actions themselves. As the novel begins, Estrella still struggles with her father's abandonment: "[Is] he waiting like me?" (22). With no way to answer, Estrella considers her own process of realization, mimicking the emotional growth and coming of age she undergoes later in the novel: "It didn't happen so fast, the realization that he wasn't coming back. Estrella didn't wake up a day knowing what she knew now. It came upon her as upon her mother. Like the morning light, passing, the absence of the night, right there, its non-return” (22). past childhood and the reconciliation of new knowledge, Estrella also begins to unconsciously question her current paradigm. In the first and second chapters, they are subtle, seemingly insignificant thoughts that foreshadow the heavier emotional growth that will occur in subsequent chapters. One night, while walking home, Estrella cannot “remember which side she was on and which side of the chain-link fence was safe” (54) The mental clarity that oblivion allows children begins to fade when Estrella is forced to accept more responsibility on behalf of her family; he struggles to remember the black-and-white, good versus evil, paradigm of his youth. His perception of his reality begins to change. Even during the baseball game she watches, Estrella can't help but wonder what's really happening: “the spotlight on the ghosts in the field. Or were the lights on her? Could viewers see her from where she was? This prompts her to ask, among a barrage of seemingly unrelated questions, “Where was home?” (54). It is the subconscious examination of roles in the baseball game that connects this question to the previous ones: we see the seeds of Estrella's coming of age process begin to grow. In processing her frustration with the reality of her circumstances, Estrella externalizes her emotions – she literally forms a "second self" as part of her identity and refers to it when acting on her newfound consciousness. In chapter four, we first see the formation of this second self, when Estrella uses a crowbar to demand her family's money back from the nurse, highlighting the separation between her childhood obedience.