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The following book review was published by Daniel Muñoz - La Prensa San Diego:

At last a book that will touch your heart, with its tender  beautiful heartfelt memories of the author, Elva Treviño Hart. Her autobiography will reach every Mexican American who in their childhood were by circumstance a migrant child, following the road to the next ranch, the next field with their familias.

Elva’s journeys begin every year from their ramshackle house in Southern Texas where their family eked out a living during the winters. As the summer season arrived, their Apa (Father) would load the children, from the youngest to the oldest, and head for Minnesota or Wisconsin, to work the beet fields. These were the short-hoe killing fields that crippled the workers until the Chicanos of the Movimiento protested and made the use of the short-hoe a national issue. 

Their Ama (Mother) and Apa might have been poor, but in their hearts they held the hope and aspirations that their children would someday have a better life than what they were going through.

Elva’s autobiography will touch the heart and soul of all of us who lived in the segregated barrios of California, Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico and other parts of America. The Barrios that were home to the Treviños, held within them all the essential elements that we needed to survive and make our lives worthwhile. 

Our lives were vibrant, full of family love, our poor barrios were essential supportive areas where we, the children of those times, could nurture and grow. The warmth and love of the cocoon provided by our mothers, fathers, and the large extended families within the barrios assured that no child would lack for food, warmth and love.

Elva Treviño, like so many of today’s Mexican Americans, overcame the disadvantages placed in her path. She managed to go to elementary school and high school and with her family’s support on to higher education and earn a Bachelors Degree in Theoretical Mathematics and a Masters Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

In the end, Elva Treviño ended where many of today’s Chicanos, Mexican Americans & Latinos have arrived. They became educated, financially successful, but in the process, they mortgaged their souls and became migrant workers and slaves to today’s “short-handle hoes”: The multi-national corporations, which demand your life, soul, and spirit and turn you into a robot. Her life was not her own anymore. It belonged to the faceless corporation.

In the end, Elva discovers, she is no better off than her parents were. She had given her heart and soul to IBM. They give her money in return, but her soul was shriveling in return. 

What she did to save her soul, her Mexicaness, will make many of us think what we have sacrificed our souls for.  (All author royalties from the sales of this book will be donated to scholarship funds.  ISBN 0-927534-81-9 - contact Hispanic Research Center, Arizona State U.  P.O. Box 872702 Tempe AZ  85287-2702. )

Caminos has purchased the book.  BAREFOOT HEART is also available in the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library.  The children in the Treviño family dreaded the long hours of clearing fields of weeds in Minnesota and Wisconsin, especially after a heavy rain.  They also feared their father, who was driven to keep his family working in order to survive. 

Some comments from the book:  “The only thing I know is that I wouldn’t have been able to finish another row, Delmira said as she put her hoe into the trunk of the car.”  Also, “When we got back to the car everyone tried to get the mud off their shoes with the blade of the hoe. 

But of course only the largest pieces came off.  All day we went around with ruined shoes and wrinkled toes inside.  In Pearsall we would be ashamed, but here everyone was in the same condition.”

Readers should be advised that there is some violence in the book. One of Alva’s brothers attacks the other brother out of anger and frustration. The life of this migrant family was filled with tension and anxiety. 

Rudy Padilla can be contacted at opkansas@swbell.net.