Jesusita

"A bleak look at a bitter life that may be too much for readers to bear." -Kirkus Reviews Jesusita is the story of immigrants-legal and illegal-trying to survive in California in the years after World War II. Jesusita, alone and impoverished, struggles to keep her four young children together. Though she finds support from Padre Montes at St. Teresa's Catholic Church, her faith won't solve her problems, especially those with her daughter, Paulina. Far from home, Filipino laborers are denied by law any contact with white women. Angie, the young daughter of an illiterate and unmarried mother, knows only one way to make money. And Felix, abandoned by his mother and separated from his only brother, is placed in a foster home on an isolated ranch. The interrelated lives of these people provide a complex, sometimes violent, and often tragic image of American poverty within the nation's postwar boom. San Francisco Book Review

This book pulled me in from the start with Jesusita's and Father Montes's compelling characters. Both are deeply flawed, but also sympathetic, in that they try to overcome their limitations-Jesusita of the poverty and single parenthood that has been thrust upon her, Montes his difficulty in relating to others. The setting, the Central Valley of California, and its small towns and farms, is also deeply interwoven into the story, especially in the importance of the church to social life. Gossip and the local "grapevine" of information play a huge role, as it does to any culture, especially an intimate one. It is this church life and its rumors that first uplifts Jesusita and then as quickly leads to her downfall. The dynamics of religious fanaticism are also well portrayed. One subplot, about a young girl's spiral downward into prostitution seems unrelated to the main plot, but may mirror it thematically in its story of a tragic fall. It is ultimately Jesusita's fanaticism that makes her a classic tragic figure who gains great heights-within her social context-but which also leads to her fall.