12/03/2006

'Barefoot Heart' hits close to home

By Loraine Anderson
Local columnist

"I wanted to take all the darkness and turn it into luminosity ... So I decided to embrace the ugliness of the migrant years. I took the ugliness into my lap as I would an unappealing child. I kissed it and held it until it quieted. — Elva Trevino Hart

I sit at my computer, deciphering notes scribbled last month as Elva Trevino Hart talked at the Traverse Area District Library.

Trevino Hart is the author of this year's Traverse City Reads community book project, "Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child.”

Like her touching memoir, she comes across as an unassuming mix of honesty, humility, humor and natural bluntness that tells the truth without rancor or pity.

"Barefoot Heart” is meaningful for northwestern Michigan, where migrant workers hold an important — though too often unacknowledged — place in our history, economy and work force.

The book is a picture window. It takes you into families, housing, schools, fields and beyond to a storytelling realm that has power to validate, illuminate and heal individuals and communities.

Trevino Hart tells her stories through the eyes of a family's youngest child, whose job was waiting with a water bucket at the end of field rows as her family weeded — a child who grew up to love math theory and became a computer programmer, then an IBM saleswoman who handled million-dollar deals.

Getting an education isn't a leap, she says. It's a series of steps along the way. Several people helped her: a father who made sure his family was back from northern fields for start of the school season; a family that bonded in its 24/7 migrant life of togetherness; a geometry teacher who taught her to love proofs, believed in and encouraged her; older migrant students who helped her get into college when the high school counselor didn't; and an older migrant girl who told the young children stories that unlocked imaginations.

The first half of her life was about filling "the hole left by poverty,” she says. The second is about writing, storytelling and being of service to migrant families and kids. All proceeds from the book go for scholarships and migrant education. While here, she gave Leland schools $1,000 so migrant kids could go on optional field trips and $2,000 to Northwestern Michigan College's diversity program.

Storytelling is important, she says. It builds individuals and communities, and it holds them together. Writing helped her bring together the disparate parts of her life, she says.

"When I wrote longhand in Spanish, I became a 7-year-old in a faded dress.”

Today, she tells bilingual migrant kids to write in the language the events happened. She tells them to trust their stories.

The trick to being a good storyteller is to listen, she says.

"If you listen, you will learn to share.”

She does both. I am grateful.