Estrella’s Transformation in Under the Feet of Jesus

Essay, Pages 3 (642 words)

Views

Developing children constantly tend to bother adults with all these questions they have about different things in life. Many times when their questions are not answered, they can become frustrated and overwhelmed over their curiosity for the world. In the excerpt from the novel Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena Maria Viramontes illustrates the transformation of Estrella, through the passage, from being aggrieved, facing difficulties towards herself and her teachers, and finding that motivation to overcome her obstacles.

At the beginning of the passage, Estrella presents a state of bitterness and aggrievedness when things were kept from her, causing her to feel like she's placed out of an important secret.

Don't use plagiarized sources. Get your custom essay on

“ Estrella’s Transformation in Under the Feet of Jesus ”

Get custom paper

NEW! smart matching with writer

When she caught a sight of the red tool chest, she was filled with rage. She opens the tool chest, full of objects as “confusing and foreign as the alphabet she could not decipher.” This shows how Estrella does not understand the secret of language and is uncertain what she's doing in that point of her life.

She demonstrates her anger and frustration by slamming the lid of the tool chest which she calls a “secret.” Estrella mentions that she hates when the information is not given to her, forming a resentment towards the adults in her life. To her, the adults are the ones who obtain more knowledge, so they have that obligation to teach and explain her wonders. The more questions she asked, the less likely the teachers would hear anything coming out of her mouth because they were to focus on her appearance.

Inspecting “her head for lice” and scrubbing “her fingers with a toothbrush” represent signs that her teachers didn’t care if she learned. Estrella was a curious and persistent girl but no one focused on that.

When Estrella met Mrs. Horn, that when things began to change for her. When her old teachers bother her for appearance, she didn't mind it but when Mrs. Horn placed that question of “how come her mama never gave her a bath,” she begins to feel self-conscious about herself. She came to that realization that these confusing “diagonal lines” were words that were “ excruciating as rusted nails piercing the heels of her bare feet.” This simile demonstrates to Estrella that she is on her own now and she can not depend on an adult, that considers enough is never enough.

Once Perfecto Flores appears in the picture of Estrella’s life, she began to understand the language and her development as a person. Perfecto conveyed the irony between the way he and teachers taught Estrella. There is a clear opposite in how the teachers, who have a teaching credential, never thought Estrella the power of words, but Perfecto, who doesn’t have an education, was able to teach Estrella in a caring and helpful way. He taught her the “name that went with the tools” introducing her how and when to use them. Perfecto own the tool chest that made Estrella mad but having taken his time to teach her made her change her perspective of the tool chest from the beginning of the passage. Estrella came to that realization on “how essential it was to learn those things.” Just like tools, words also “build, bury, tear down, rearrange and repair” becoming something meaningful to use on everyday bases. When she “began to read”, she finally understood the purpose of language and gave her the motivation to keep on learning.

This passage emphasized the idea of a young immigrant that came to the understanding of the language in her new country. Those tools and the way Perfecto Flores explain with specific details to her cause hope and inspiration to learn beyond her knowledge. If she never came to the realization that she can’t depend on a dominant character, she would have not discovered the right path to her success.