Perhaps more than anything else, Under the Feet of Jesus is about the instability of migrant workers’ lives. Estrella and her family lead a precarious existence, never certain of how they will meet their expenses. At times, it’s a struggle even to afford food, particularly in the years after Petra’s husband leaves but before she takes up with Perfecto. As Estrella puts it, “She remembered every job was not enough wage, every uncertainty rested on one certainty: food” (14).

Of course, the uncertainties of poverty aren’t unique to piscadores in particular. In other ways, however, the life of a migrant laborer is uniquely unstable. For one, agricultural work is unusually dependent on circumstances beyond any worker’s control—in particular, favorable weather conditions. In addition, the job by definition requires workers to be constantly on the move, traveling wherever there are crops that need to be harvested. Home is therefore an elusive concept for most of Viramontes’s characters; Alejo at least has a grandmother in Texas he plans to return to, but for Perfecto, memories of the canyon he considers home are so distant and dreamlike that they seem more of an ideal than a real location.