Barefoot Heart

Barefoot Heart is a bildungsroman due to the accounts that Elva has when she recounts the memories she had of her family while they were migrant workers going from Texas to Minnesota, and Wisconsin to work the beet fields. She recounts the experiences she has while living in migrant farm town.  She recounts the long hours and hard days her siblings had to work in order to support the family. While all her family members worked Elva was standing on the side of the fields getting ready to take water her family working on the farm land, this was her migrate job for the family. 

Elva coming of age is both psychologically and morally due to different events that she encounters while growing up in a large family. Also the national landscape that was changing at the time also played a part in her coming of age. Some of the psychologically aspects to her coming of age were the young story teller she met when she was a young girl at the Wisconsin farms, she would tell stories to the children at night and this helped Elva get a greater imagination. The public library had a big role in the development of Elva, she was able to check out books and read as much as she wanted and this increased the way she saw stuff. The music in Elva life played a big part too, morally the music connected her with her past. With the music she was able to connect with the vibe that the past had, while still growing up she was able to learn new music through the band in high school.

A major changing point in Elva’s life was the age different she had with her siblings, and parents. The gap between her and the rest help her get more opportunities in life, like traveling to Wisconsin and to New York City. She did not have to work the fields to survive, and life was a little easier for her. She did work the farm fields, but it was not as dishonorable as her sibling saw it. But she was a supervisor, not a worker on the fields so she never experienced the back braking work. She was smart and wants to not only graduate from high school, but she wanted to go on to college. So with her being so young she was treated a little more easily because life was not as hard as it once was. Her parents were collecting Social Security, her sibling were all married with kids. So she was lucky enough to see the dark side of the migrant farm workers, and she was able to experience the American dream by what her older sibling had experienced and what they have learned in life.