Helena Maria Viramontes took a break from her work, got married and had two children. During her hiatus from academia she published in many underground literary journals such as "ChismeArte". In 1988, she co-edited "Chicana Creativity and Criticism" with María Herrera-Sobek, a volume dedicated to the literary output of Mexican-American women. She also returned to UC Irvine to complete her MFA, which was awarded in 1994. As part of the program, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a writing workshop with the Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In 1995, her first novel "Under the Feet of Jesus" was published to critical acclaim. In 2007, she published "Their Dogs Came With Them," a novel that took her 17 years to complete. It was noted for its strikingly personal and realistic prose, and discusses harsh realities and social conditions fo the poor. The novel was largely inspired by her childhood in the midst of East Los Angeles, with the gang conflicts and social strife at the center of her novel. She has said that her house is next to four cemeteries, and that when the freeways were built in East Los Angeles in the 1960s (see East LA Freeway) myth has it that the cement was poured over the resting places of some forgotten souls, their bones disturbed. "Under the Feet of Jesus" (Penguin, 1995) follows the lives of thirteen-year-old Estrella, her brothers and sisters, her mother Petra, Petra's lover Perfecto, and the cousins Alejo and Gumecindo, all Latino migrant workers living and working in the California grape fields. Since the novel's dedication refers to Cesar Chavez, who led migrant laborers to ask for better wages and conditions, Chavez' actions in such movements as the Delano Grape Strike must be considered as background to the novel's fictions. The story reflects the hardships of the migrants’ lives set against the beauty of the landscape. It reflects, as critics Carballo and Giles have noted, multiple "initiation stories," many of which revolve around the friendship and love unfolding between Estrella and Alejo. The novel's limited omniscient narrator moves in and out of the consciousnesses of the main characters, a technique which allows readers to view characters' motivations, and which Viramontes herself says is a product of the ways that the characters of the novel told her their story.