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Through an analysis of two cultural works of California agriculture between the Great Depression and contemporary neoliberalism, this essay proposes that American agrarianism brings with it a new set of social, historical, and racial questions about US citizenship and environmental rights. Building on the new scholarship of environmental justice and critical race studies, the first part of the essay analyzes how John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was both motivated and structured by the desire to possess the land to claim US citizenship: regenerating white masculinity through acquiring the land based on the racial logics of the notion of private property while making “invisible subjects” (e.g. people of color and immigrants) who are not suitable for the land and environmental stewardship. The second part of the essay turns to Mexican American writer Helena Maria Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as a crucial environmental justice text that writes back against the proliferation of US environmental racism and infrastructural violence. Viramontes’s narrative, I argue, complicates and keeps questioning about our understanding of race, environment, citizenship, and human health in an effort to help us see the invisible links between the exploitation of migrant farm workers and the uneven distribution of environmental risks in the food system. For both Steinbeck and Viramontes, literature functions as a way to challenge social and environmental injustice, though it also shows their somewhat self-contradictory and problematic understanding of environmental citizenship.