Books like Under the feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes

Ari, a fifteen‑year‑old Mexican‑American with a brother in prison, meets Dante and a friendship sparks that forces him to confront his identity, family, and sexuality.

Sandra Cisneros’ celebrated coming‑of‑age tale follows Esperanza Cordero as she grows up in Chicago’s Mexican-American community, exploring identity through poetic vignettes.

A gripping tale of a Mexican American teenage girl facing the challenges of adulthood and grief, set against the backdrop of her Mexican American family in New York.

Believe in the power of herbs, faith, and family as young Antonio Marez, growing up in New Mexico, encounters Ultima—his grandmother’s healer who guides him to uncover his own identity and the mysteries of his heritage.

Josefina and her sisters find comfort in the traditions of Las Posadas to remember their mother who has passed away.

A tender portrait of a Mexican American family’s yearly migration across California’s agricultural fields, charting their growth, hardships, and enduring hope.

Josefina is betrayed in 1825, but discovers a young American who was just as innocent as she was when he left town without paying her.

Barefoot Heart is an autobiographical memoir of Elva Treviño Hart, a Mexican‑American woman who grew up as a child migrant farmworker in Texas and Minnesota before earning a master’s in computer science and engineering.

"Based on Josefina Borquez, a working-class woman whose difficult life spanned some of the seminal events in early-twentieth-century Mexican history, Poniatowska's Jesusa is a tough, coarse-mouthed, cantankerous character who pushes contradiction to its limits. Mystical yet practical, she faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination. A native of Oaxaca, Jesusa loses her mother at a young age, and she lives with her father until one of his girlfriends stabs her. Moved to her godmother's house, where she serves as a maid, Jesusa is reunited with her father during the Mexican Revolution, and joins the cavalry unit in the army of General Jesus Carranza. She marries another solider, a chronic womanizer who systematically abuses and finally abandons her. After the Revolution, embittered by its failure to live up to its promises to the poor, Jesusa finds work in Mexico City, first as a domestic, then in a series of factories, and begins her long history of run-ins with the police." "Poniatowska documents a life of brutal deprivation, extraordinary hardship, and hardscrabble humor while providing a unique perspective on politics and the place of women in twentieth-century Mexico."--BOOK JACKET.

Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh's Caballero: A Historical Novel, a milestone in Mexican-American and Texas literature written during the 1930s and 1940s, centers on a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican landowner and his family living in the heart of southern Texas during a time of tumultuous change. After covering the American military occupation of South Texas, the story involves the reader in romances between two young lovers from opposing sides during the military conflict of the U.S.-Mexico War. Caballero's young protagonists fall in love but face struggles with race, class, gender and sexual contradictions. An introduction by Jose E. Limon, epilogue by Maria Cotera, and foreword by Thomas H. Kreneck offer a clear picture of the importance of the work to the study of Mexican-American and Texas history and to the feminist critique of culture. This work, long lost in a collection of private papers and unavailable until now, serves as a literary ethnography of South Texas-Mexican folklore customs and traditions.

Twice married, once divorced and once widowed, Soveida Dosamantes is a survivor. She is currently writing a handbook for waitresses called The Book of Service, a compendium of lessons she has learned working for thirty years at El Farol Mexican Restaurant in the rural Southwest. Looking back on her career, Soveida comes to understand the meaning of service in her own life and the role of women in a machismo culture and in the interconnected lives of work and family. Here is a rich chorus of Latino voices and a retinue of wayward husbands and lovers, from her grandmother, Mama Lupita, to Mama's elderly servant, Oralia; from her estranged parents, Luardo and Dolores, to the lovelorn restaurant manager Larry Larragoite, to the waiters and waitresses of El Farol, even its cough-syrup-swilling cook, Lavel. A novel of antic humor and sobering pain, of nachos and nourishment of every kind, Face of an Angel straddles old worlds and new, Mexican, American, and Mexican-American, to explore one woman's acceptance of her true vocation, her true love, and, ultimately, her true self.

A teenage girl at an exclusive boarding school in the late 1960s journals her life, hoping to revisit it when she turns sixteen.