Elva Treviño Hart Reads From Her Work Monday at MSUM

“I am nobody. And my story is the same as a million others. Poor Mexican. Female child. We all look alike: dirty feet, brown skin, downcast eyes.”

So begins the prologue to Elva Treviño Hart’s “Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child,” a memoir of her experiences as a Mexican American girl who for six years migrated each spring with her family from a segregated Texas town to a farm near Sabin, Minnesota to hoe and weed sugar beet fields.

Through a series of autobiographical stories, Hart recounts her own ripening from “a brown, barefoot little girl” into “a Mexican American woman writer.”

The memoir is important because it documents the power one can achieve by “embracing exactly who you are.”
The yearly cycle of traveling to work “at the other end of the world” is the backdrop against which Hart frames the “paradoxes and contradictions” in her life as the youngest child in a Spanish-speaking family who “never talked,” but faced each day with “hard work, sadness and silence.”

Because she is the youngest, the child Elva does not work the fields alongside her family, but instead becomes the acute observer, on the alert for her father’s signal from the field that she should bring the water bucket, while also entranced by the natural world around her: “The dragonflies, the red-winged blackbirds with their shiny black bodies, brilliant red wings, and hopeful songs…The wind sighed like my mother as it blew through the trees.”

In contrast, her brothers and sisters “had to work mercilessly hard,” while she “had time to dream and create out of nothing.”

Creating out of nothing is the work of writers and Hart relishes the world of her imagination. She recounts, “I was a clear cocoon of aloneness. Totally myself.”

At the same time, she realizes her connections to her family: “Even though they were only specks in the distance, I could always see my family blurred in the heat waves, so I felt safe.”

The power of Hart’s writing is in her ability to see through the blur of the heat waves and present her experience clearly.
After receiving an MA from Stanford, Hart began a 20 year career as an executive with IBM. She admits, “I gave my heart and soul to IBM. They gave me money in return. But my soul was shriveling.

“My childhood issues were abandonment, feeling less-than because I was Mexican, and shame that I was a “useless girl” in my father’s eyes. Now I was no longer poor. Now I was succeeding in a man’s world. I had proven that a Mexican migrant girl could do it all and have it all. But I was disconnected from my culture, my family, and from my heart and soul.”

Hart turned to writing to mend her disconnection, “to integrate my childhood Mexican side back into myself.”
The stories in Barefoot Heart richly detail her Mexican American culture: each chapter of the memoir begins with a Mexican saying, a dicho. Spanish language flows through the memoir “The music of our souls, our rites of passage, and of our mating rituals was in Spanish.”

Mexican music, food and customs are matter-of-factly woven into the narrative. Family life is narrated with luminous clarity.

“Barefoot Heart” is highly recommended. The author presents moments in time in her childhood with the clarity that makes explanation superfluous to the meaning of the story.

Hart’s memoir has been in print since it was published in 1992 and has received numerous critical endorsements and major awards including the American Book Award. A Spanish translation, “Corazón Descalzo,” was published in 2008.

Elva Treviño Hart, Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child. Tempe: Bilingual Press, 1999.

If You Go

Who: Elva Treviño Hart
What: Reading from “Barefoot Heart.”
Where: 104 Hagen Science Hall, MSUM
When: Mon., July 14, 6 p.m.
Info: (701) 234-0250