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• Multilingualism and Wordless Faith in Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus
• Alexandra Lossada (bio)

"Censored from My Language"

"I am just incensed that I have been censored from my language," the Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes says, referring to how her subjection to the English-only movement as a child had the effect of permanently alienating her from her natal language of Spanish. "In the first five years of your life you are creating these images that are associated with the words—how important it is to know that your first introduction to the senses was in Spanish, and then to be ripped from that and [have it] taken away!"¹ Viramontes has not been able to forget how this movement changed her relationship to her native Spanish. When she entered the Los Angeles public school system—where the political pressures to provide English-only education had resulted in monolingual education—she was told not to speak Spanish, and her parents went along with this order, believing that it would be in her best interest. In spite of the fact that she entered as a bilingual speaker, she eventually lost the ability to converse confidently in Spanish, leaving her only English with which to express herself.² Surprisingly, the same writer who mourns the loss of her bilingualism nonetheless published Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel that notably decouples Spanish-English bilingualism from the kinds of pecuniary and social advantages often routinely associated with it today and that even more significantly adumbrates a way of communicating and being that offers an alternative to bilingualism as linguistic capital. In this essay, I argue that Under the Feet of Jesus offers a critique of bilingualism and provides an outline of wordless modes of communication that lie beyond bilingualism. [End Page 81]

Viramontes's 1996 novel takes place in a California labor camp, where Estrella, a young girl caught not only between childhood and adulthood but also between the English and Spanish languages, harvests fruit with her family. The family ekes out a marginal existence while avoiding la Migra (the Spanish term for the US immigration and naturalization service) and questioning their fidelity to a Catholicism that does not seem to offer salvation from their social exclusion and isolation. Throughout the novel, Estrella frequently takes on the role of interpreter. But the encounters in which she translates for others are counterbalanced by scenes that notably eschew both spoken English and Spanish in favor of intense silences, violent noises, wordless actions, and even the specter of lost languages that appear in between the lines of the novel's bilingualism. These scenes raise important questions about the linguistic impasses that arise from communicative failure, and yet they also point to ways that Estrella can resist and act that are not contingent on bilingualism alone and that repurpose the concept of faith, enabling it to be used to support forms of activism that go beyond the linguistic.

Bilingualism as Impasse

Over the course of the novel, Estrella frequently serves as an interpreter for the migrant workers who depend on her bilingualism. The novel highlights this bilingualism in its deployment of what Maria Lauret calls "wanderwords": "words and phrases in other languages that disrupt, enchant, occlude or highlight the taken-for granted English of American literature and thereby perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique."³ Generally, these wanderwords serve to make texts "more transnational," according to Lauret, and "less inclined to submit to their 'host' language's hegemony."⁴ Under the Feet of Jesus contains no shortage of scenes that spotlight the struggles between the use of the English and Spanish languages, which one might reasonably connect with the suppressive measures of the English-only movement that Viramontes and her contemporary Gloria Anzaldúa experienced as students.⁵ Yet at several key junctures in the novel, both Spanish and English fail, which results in linguistic impasses that are accompanied by poignant silences. While these impasses arise in situations that are emotionally unsettling, they are fruitful insofar as they point the main character to resources and possibilities beyond bilingualism.

Estrella is a fluent speaker of both Spanish and...

中文翻译：

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海伦娜·玛丽亚·维拉蒙特斯 (Helena María Viramontes) 的《耶稣脚下》中的多语种和无言信仰

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 海伦娜·玛丽亚·维拉蒙特斯 (Helena María Viramontes) 的《耶稣脚下》中的多语种和无言信仰
• 亚历山德拉·洛萨达（生物）

“从我的语言中审查”

奇卡纳作家海伦娜·玛丽亚·维拉蒙特斯（Helena María Viramontes）说：“我只是对自己的语言被审查感到愤怒，”她指的是她小时候受制于纯英语运动如何使她与她的母语西班牙语永久疏远. “在你生命的前五年，你正在创造这些与文字相关的图像——知道你对感官的第一次介绍是用西班牙语是多么重要，然后被撕掉并[拥有它]带走了！” ¹Viramontes 无法忘记这场运动如何改变了她与母语西班牙语的关系。当她进入洛杉矶公立学校系统时——提供纯英语教育的政治压力导致了单语教育——她被告知不要说西班牙语，她的父母同意这一命令，相信这会在她最大利益。尽管她以双语演讲者的身份进入，但她最终失去了用西班牙语自信地交谈的能力，只剩下她可以用英语来表达自己。²令人惊讶的是，为失去双语能力而哀悼的同一位作家仍然出版了《耶稣脚下》，这本小说显着地将西班牙语-英语双语与当今经常与之相关的金钱和社会优势脱钩，并且更显着地预示了一种交流方式，并且提供了一种替代双语作为语言资本的存在方式。在这篇文章中，我认为《耶稣脚下》对双语进行了批判，并概述了超越双语的无语言交流模式。[结束第 81 页]

Viramontes 1996 年的小说故事发生在加利福尼亚的一个劳改营，一个年轻女孩 Estrella 不仅被困在童年和成年之间，而且还在英语和西班牙语之间，她和家人一起收获水果。这个家庭勉强维持着边缘的存在，同时避免了 la Migra（美国移民和归化服务的西班牙语术语），并质疑他们对似乎无法从社会排斥和孤立中拯救出来的天主教的忠诚度。在整部小说中，埃斯特雷拉经常扮演翻译的角色。但她为他人翻译的遭遇被一些场景所抵消，这些场景明显地避开了英语和西班牙语的口语，取而代之的是强烈的沉默、剧烈的噪音、无言的行动，甚至是小说字里行间出现的失落语言的幽灵。” s 双语。这些场景提出了有关因交际失败而出现的语言僵局的重要问题，但它们也指出了 Estrella 可以抵制和采取行动的方式，这些方式不仅仅取决于双语，并且重新利用了信仰的概念，使其能够被用来支持超越语言的行动主义形式。

双语成为僵局

在小说的整个过程中，埃斯特雷拉经常为依赖她的双语能力的农民工担任翻译。这部小说在运用玛丽亚·劳雷特 (Maria Lauret) 所称的“流浪词”时突出了这种双语：“其他语言中的单词和短语会破坏、迷惑、遮挡或突出美国文学中习以为常的英语，从而表现出诗意意义的奇迹。作为文化批判。” ³根据劳雷特的说法，一般而言，这些流浪词有助于使文本“更具跨国性”，并且“不太倾向于服从其‘宿主’语言的霸权。” ⁴ 在耶稣脚下不乏突出英语和西班牙语使用之间斗争的场景，这可能与 Viramontes 和她同时代的 Gloria Anzaldúa 在学生时代所经历的纯英语运动的压制措施有合理的联系。⁵然而，在小说的几个关键时刻，西班牙语和英语都失败了，这导致了伴随着尖锐沉默的语言僵局。虽然这些僵局出现在情绪不安的情况下，但它们是富有成效的，因为它们将主角指向双语之外的资源和可能性。

Estrella 能说一口流利的西班牙语和...