Barefoot Heart by Elva Treviño Hart
Reading assignment for Monday, November 5. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class.
Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.
Discuss Barefoot Heart as a Bildungsroman. How does Elva come of age psychologically? Morally?
What do you see as Elva’s identity? Where does it come from?
A coming of age moment for Elva was when she got to spends day with white family of her friend Kit. She got to see the contrast of their different lifestyles. On page 72 her family is discriminated by the bus driver when he says, “Mexicans in the back! You know that!” Her family refuses to sit in the back and they continue to stay in the front.
Another migrant named Marielena, who was a story teller, had a huge influence on Elva. Elva never had books up o that point and these stories about princes, queens, fairies and dragons etc. opened up her world to many possibilities. On page 117 there is a moment when she is hanging out with another girl, Lourdes, and wants to be better. “I wanted to be better and richer than someone.” In her child hood she desperately wanted to be better, special, feel of value. Her hardships as well as her experiences of feeling useless to her family made her want to be more. Later Elva mentions traveling to see her sister in New York every summer. “As their world opened up, they opened up mine.” (166) As Elva began to read her first books this opened up another world of knowledge and power. Elva strives to excel in math because there she can be better than the “gringos.” It is important to note that if it was not for her struggles and experiences she would not have had such a desire and will to exceed in school. Her experiences helped her to become a great student and eventually the Valedictorian.
In the beginning of this book Elva’s life is full of adversity and deprivation. She feels useless and unable to help her family. Throughout her life she meets people is exposed to different lifestyles. She learns of fairy tales. Her mind opens up to a life different than the one she lives. Late in life when she finally becomes successful and she is in her health spa, she leaves a large tip to the woman who is giving her service because she remembers where her and her family came from and identifies with the woman. As she decides to write about her past she embraces that she is a Mexican American woman writer.
The autobiographical narrative of Elva Treviño Hart demonstrates that coming of age extends far beyond one particular moment. Treviño Hart opens “Barefoot Heart” with the stories of her family’s early struggles, detailing what it was like to pick up from Texas and migrate to Minnesota and Wisconsin to find work. Although four-year-old Elva did not fully comprehend her family’s circumstances, she was able to take her experiences and grow from them at a later age. For example, we are given a description of the octagon-shaped room earlier on in the book but Treviño Hart does not grow discomforted by it until she is much older – that is, until she discovers that her family lived in conditions deemed unsuitable for human habitation. This is a prime example of the correlation between newly acquired knowledge and coming-of-age moments.
This narrative definitely stood out from the last three we have covered. Treviño Hart paints the picture of a family that works together despite separation by age, separation by distance, etc. What can be more motivating than that?
The first lines of “Barefoot Heart” go as follows: “I am nobody. And my story is the same as a million others (Treviño Hart 1).” Without a doubt, the struggles of the Treviño family are admirable, and their positive outlook and perseverance is even more inspiring. However, Treviño Hart reminds us that her family’s story is not unique, and that there well may be migrant families that face similar circumstances to this day. The most impactful part of “Barefoot Heart” is that Treviño Hart makes a call to action: “If you eat a fruit or a vegetable that is fragile like strawberries or grapes, it is a safe bet that it went through a migrant worker’s hands on its way to your mouth (Treviño Hart 211).”
Barefoot Hart Stories of a Migrant Child is a coming of age narrative where Elva and her siblings are constantly experiencing them. The part of Elva’s life that was very touching to me was when she and her mother were at the store and Elva begged for a jacket. Her mother did not buy her the jacket because Elva began to cry, but because of what her mother saw in her eyes.
The identity that one builds off of experiences like this is, in some cases, malignant. One would assume that wealth would make one happy so one may work hard to get it, missing the true meaning of ones desire. Like Elva, who strived in school and eventually came to be wealthy, was not happy. Something was missing in her. She had to return home to figure out that who she is, is not about power and money, but her connections to her childhood.
Like Esperanza from House on Mango Street, Elva had to return home to find closure with her past life as a child working in migrant farms. She had to return to help those who could not make it out. I feel the same way in my neighborhood. I see the societal divide that excist between the rich and the poor. Living in my neighborhood, I see that people do not realize who society has caged us together and peaces us by providing us shity jobs and unemployment benifits. Our nieghbood grocery store even sales second stream food! I have to help, money and success would not be the same is we do not work for the good of people.
As Alejandra notes, this autobiographical account shows that coming of age does not happen once in someone’s life, but rather many times as the person continues rediscovering themselves. We as readers are allowed to peer into these special moments in Elva’s life such as the bumpy ride up to Wisconsin as a child to her first love and even her high school graduation. We see Elva struggle with the realities around her; the racism, classism, and sexism that was characteristic of the times. Being Mexican on the other, dirty side of the tracks played a huge role in shaping Elva from a very young age. When first getting to know Kit she stared in awe never having been so close to a white girl in her life. She felt so different because what she had learned all her life was that she was. White people were better had more more money and made everyone else by default look less than. She strived to be better. In school she wanted to beat the gringos by getting better grades than them; they couldn’t beat her there if she worked hard enough. At home, when playing with Lourdes, whose mother used to work at a cantina and was fatherless, she made it a point to let Lourdes know she was better. Elva had a father and a doll from Danchack’s and would never share drinks with Lourdes because she was dirty and in Elva’s mind below her in status. This is an immature way to look at things, however, understandable in that all of her life she had been the lowest on the totem pole. Now that Elva had found someone with less she felt better about having the little she had. As Elva matured, she became less focused on being better than people like Lourdes and more focused on beating the gringos. She liked when the system was challenged and things like señor and señorita P.H.S. we’re finally recognized for being racist. She identified more with the raza as she matured, but still continued to seek out the “other” lifestyle. Eventually she realized that this jet setting, million dollar making way of life was just as enslaving as the migrant life. She returned to her roots and took her son to see where she had spent so many summers as a child. She told her story to others who would listen and felt freed from the embarrassment she had had as a barefoot migrant child. She continues to accept and reintegrate her past and her present ultimately culminating in the Elva Treviño Hart we see and read today.
If I can water down the definition of bildungsroman and call it a coming of age story, then yes Barefoot Heart should be able to fit into this definition. The book is a memoir given by Hart about growing up as a child of parents that were migrant laborers. She begins her story when she was rather young. She is a somewhat carefree child until she has to move from her home for the summer to Minnesota so her parents can work. Then we get to see some changes in Hart. She comes to understand the world differently. From a young age she has a pretty decent understanding of loneliness. Because her parents are migrant farm workers because she is so much younger than her older siblings, Hart tends to feel isolated. I would definitely call this sense of loneliness a coming of age moment. It seems that Hart doesn’t experience it before her family moved, it was a consequence of that move they made. When she first experiences the loneliness it’s something that frightens and upsets her. She tells about when her and one of her sisters were left with the nuns while the rest of the family went out to work in the fields and how she cried herself to sleep. Eventually she got over those feelings of feeling abandoned and like Alice Bag she sort of “cultivated her isolation like a rare and beautiful flower.” Hart writes that the only time that she “was alright was when [she] was alone. And [she] was alone a lot” (73). I think this is just one of the examples of how Hart was able to come of age. She definitely was exposed to a lot of different things, so her coming of age was sort of a process.