Narrating the Inadmissible: Storytelling and Dialectical Form in Barefoot Heart and Children of the Fields

In 2009, I began teaching a course entitled the Literature and History of Mexican American Farm Workers at UC Berkeley. In the syllabus, I included autobiographies, short stories, novels, and narrative films.¹ The purpose of the course was to familiarize students with this important body of literature, but the course also gave me the opportunity to share with them my personal background as a child farm laborer in the San Joaquin Valley of California during the 1960s, and to show the significance of that personal history for the kind of research and teaching I now do at the university. As with any new course, I was immediately confronted with a problem, in this case regarding methods of reading. Specifically, I wanted to understand and be able to explain to students the relation between history and the aesthetic features of the literature. This task, which was both critical and pedagogical, became especially important for reading those literary works in which specific historical events have been omitted or suppressed. Two such works are Elva Treviño Hart’s 1999 autobiography Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child and Robert M. Young’s 1973 film documentary Children of the Fields. In this essay, I shall suggest that to read these and other similar works properly, we need to pay close attention to the dialectical relation between social context and literary form, taking into account not only what the storytellers in these works say, but the manner in which they say it—and the ways in which history exerts its influence even when neglected.

But first, to establish the critical parameters of my argument, I shall consider a work of farm labor history. In the introduction to her 1996 landmark study, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal, Devra Weber lays the philosophical foundation for the kind of labor history that she finds most useful and critically pertinent. To make her case, she revisits an old debate among philosophers of history on the relation between “structure” and “agency,” pointing out that historians have long argued over “how much relative weight should be assigned to external constraints (structure) and how much to individual motivation (agency), and what the relation is between these factors” (4). Drawing on the relevancy of this scholarly conundrum to guide her study of farm labor, she raises the following provocative question: “To what degree were workers shaped by the economic, social, and political conditions they labored and lived within, and [by contrast] to what degree were they able, within this system, to shape their own lives?” (4) Stated differently, are workers the products or makers of history? Weber stands opposed to historiographies in which farmworkers are “viewed as objects, not subjects, of history” (3) because these kinds of works inevitably result in depicting agricultural laborers as passive, voiceless, faceless, powerless victims that, at most, deserve our sympathy and sorrow but not our critical inquiry into the ways that they have simultaneously contributed to and contested the building of an American capitalist empire in the twentieth century. Even historians who are sympathetic to farmworkers, Weber argues, sometimes make the mistake of constructing a picture of them as “historical non-entities, helpless victims of a rapacious system” (48). She explains that most labor historians “have largely ignored the creative ways agricultural workers dealt with the conditions they faced and how they formed” (3) extended family ties and communal networks as the basis for political organization during the labor strife of the Great Depression. Implicitly, Mexican American farmworkers have effectively relied on the organizational and unifying tendencies of their extended familial networks in organizing countless work actions, stoppages, strikes, and unionizing efforts in the eight decades since the Great Cotton Strike of 1933.²

Weber does not ignore the impact of economic and political structures on the lives of farmworkers. Her argument is that even within the rigid limitations imposed by political and economic structures, farmworkers (indeed, all workers) are capable of attaining some level of success in changing their living conditions. To explain her position...