American Studies Center
at the University of Bahrain
Biography
Helena Maria Viramontes
Helena Maria Viramontes (b. 1954) was born in East Los Angeles, the daughter of a construction worker and a Chicana housewife who raised six daughters and three sons in a community that offered refuge for relatives and friends crossing the border from Mexico into California. After graduation from Garfield High School, Viramontes worked twenty hours a week while earning her B.A. from Immaculate Heart College, one of five Chicanas in her class. She then entered the graduate program at the University of California at Irvine as a creative writing student, but she left in 1981 and completed the requirements for the M.F.A. degree after the publication of her stories.
She is co-founder of the Southern California Latino Writers and Film Makers group and teaches at Cornell University. Her first published book of short stories, "The Moth" and Other Stories (1985), focuses on everyday oppression in the lives of ordinary women, mostly Chicanas. In 1993 she published Paris Rats in E.L.A., which she also rewrote as a screenplay. Her best-known work, the 1995 novel Under the Feet of Jesus, portrays the life of Estrella, a young migrant worker who must cope with the many difficult situations in which she and her family find themselves. Viramontes's most recent novel is Their Dogs Came with Them (1996), which explores the brutality of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. Viramontes's powerful style is sweepingly realistic in scope and uses natural and religious symbolism.
Because Viramontes believes that writing can bring about social change, she tackles social issues in her work. In Feminism on the Border, Sonia Saldivar-Hull notes that many of Viramontes's works are not typical Latina "quest for origins" stories but rather seek to transform and rework concepts of the Chicano family. They tend to disrupt the notion of the monolithic Latino/a family as a refuge from racism and class exploitation and instead relocate "chicano families from secretive, barricaded sites of male rule to contested terrains where girls and women perform valued rituals that do not necessarily adhere to androcentric familial traditions." According to Saldivar-Hull, Viramontes's work permits both Chicanas and Chicanos to exist as unique subjects in a U.S. Latino/a America.Viramontes began to place her stories in small magazines such as Maize and XhismArte Magazine as well as the anthology Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983). Her first book, The Moths and Other Stories was published in 1985 by Arte Publico Press in Houston, Texas. The same year the University of California at Irvine sponsored the first national conference on Mexican American women writers, resulting in the volume Beyond Stereotypes: A Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (1985). Three years later Viramontes helped organize a second Chicana writers conference at Irvine and coedited the anthology Chicana Creativity and Criticism (1988).
In 1989 Viramontes received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship grant. In 1993 she published her second book of short stories, Paris Rats in E.L.A. Her first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, followed in 1995.
Contact the American Studies Center
(973) 17438746
