Maria Barrientos Ramirez's "Lessons in the Fields" is an achievement of memory, creativity and fidelity.
By the last, I mean not only her loyalty to and love of the relatives and friends she portrays in her recently published memoir of her early life as the daughter of migrant farmworkers, but her ability to evoke faithfully and vividly how she saw her family and herself when she was a child.
I met Maria, a retired teacher in Colorado, in 2016 when she guided me to contacts for an article about teaching America’s Latino history. She told me then of her interest in telling her own history. We have kept in touch, mostly through Facebook, where her bilingual posts have helped deepen my Spanish vocabulary.
They also have deepened my understanding of the immigrant experience.
I've seen Maria reach out to and advocate for immigrants with empathy and compassion. In 2022 she met a Cuban family as she boarded a bus in Eagle Pass, the Texas border town where she grew up. She had been visiting family for Christmas and was headed to San Antonio to catch a flight to her current home in Colorado. The Cubans, she learned as she chatted with them on the bus, had fled their homeland and made their way across Nicaragua to Mexico and then the United States. They were headed to family in Florida.
In an essay she wrote soon after the encounter, Maria said that she "thought for a moment and figured they had been traveling for days, maybe weeks. They had trekked all though Central America, crossing five countries and from the southern tip of Mexico to the northern border of Piedras Negras, Coahuila. The river, El Rio Grande, marks the border between Mexico and the United States. Across from Piedras Negras, is my hometown, Eagle Pass.
"I knew how lately, countless desperate people came in record numbers through Eagle Pass, since it was the safest border to cross. These people risked their lives to make it to America, to escape their life-threatening situations in their countries. I thought of how some of my family members had done the same before I was born. It was through this same river that my mom and older brothers crossed to join my father when he migrated to the northwestern states to work in the fields. Taking this same risk, my mother and brothers made it to the United States of America. I am no one to judge. I was the first fortunate one of our family to be born a U.S. citizen."
Maria noticed that the family she had befriended and other Cubans on the bus did not get off to buy food at stops along the route, and surmised they were saving every penny for their future. So she bought them food and slipped cash into bags of burritos and tamales she distributed to her fellow travelers. When she got off at San Antonio, she bade the Cubans safe journey to Florida, and thought, "My biggest blessing this Christmas was meeting these people in need and being able to help."
When Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president in 2020, he sought to end such Trump policies as expelling new arrivals without an asylum screening and forcing asylum seekers to await decisions in Mexico. The latter policy, known as Remain in Mexico, ended months before Maria encountered those Cubans on the bus.
During the Biden administration, the number of people caught at the U.S.-Mexico border climbed to a historic high of nearly 2.5 million by fiscal year 2023, with many coming from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua -- further away than Mexico, the traditional starting point -- and often seeking asylum. Trump decried the increased arrivals during his campaign for a second term, and since taking office in January has pursued mass deportations.
Maria's book was published as President Trump's immigration policies continued to make headlines and his rhetoric that newcomers are dangerous and incapable of becoming truly American spirals. Maria's lessons on immigrants, portrayed in all their strengths, faults and hopes, bring a personal and nuanced perspective to a national conversation. She opens her book with a poem she calls "Alien" that includes these lines: "Why do I need a document to prove that I am not from Mars?"
Maria was born in 1956 in Nyssa, Oregon to Lupe and Nicolas Barrientos. Soon after her mother gave birth in Nyssa’s hospital, Maria was taken to meet her older brothers, all of whom had been born in Mexico. Home in Nyssa was a labor camp where Lupe Barrientos transformed a rough cabin into a cozy refuge at the beginning of each summer. From Nyssa the family would travel to Montana to thin sugar beets, to Washington to pick strawberries, then to the Oregon coast to harvest green beans. Onions awaited the Barrientoses upon return to the Oregon-Idaho stateline. If they did not earn enough on that circuit, they would go to Idaho to work the late-season potato fields and Texas to pluck cotton. Then, at last, they would be able to return to Eagle Pass.
"Topping onions was the hardest work of the season," Maria writes.
"With wire baskets, sharp knives, and hundreds of gunnysacks, my family stooped over, grabbed as many onions as their hands could hold, then cut the stems off while the onion fell into the basket. There was a fast pace throughout the whole field. Everybody worked in pairs, filling the baskets within a couple of minutes. The first to fill the basket got the sack that lay between the rows, held it while the other emptied the basket into the sack. Then quick as a wink the roles changed, and the other held the sack while the second basket was emptied. There was a rhythm to their work. The sharp knives sliced the onion stems with one swipe. The onion heads bounced on the bottom of the basket. The basket was picked up and scooted forward in an instant to fill more until the basket was topped again and again. The popping of the hollow onion stems and rustling of the slippery onion skins under the feet added to the rhythm of the workers. The baskets and the settling of the sacks seemed to follow the beat."
When Maria was a baby, her mother would settle her in a crate near the fields, checking on her between rounds of picking. Later, Maria looked after her younger brothers, often turning the fields into their playgrounds, but also helping their parents and older brothers harvest. At 12, Maria began picking crops alongside her parents and brothers full-time.
Maria was raised to see the responsibility everyone in her family and her community had for one another. Before she reached her teens, as the first native English speaker in her family, Maria's responsibilities included translating for other migrant workers during medical appointments and for her father as he negotiated wages with farmers.
After one successful negotiation when she was just 10 years old, "my father and brother each clasped one of my hands and then took a wide step and jumped across the irrigation ditch as they swung me across the running water." Then they took her for an ice cream.
Years later, she would realize that her father "unknowingly had given me confidence that would be a stepping-stone for me to take on more challenges, giving me wings my mother, Mexican women, were not supposed to have."
The lessons were not always sweet. As she grew into womanhood, Maria worked through menstrual pains in the fields.
"Pain was a part of life," she writes. "Hard work and bearing pain from the work or menstrual periods were what I had to endure. Working hard, enduring pain to accomplish what needed to be done gave me the work ethic, persistence and endurance I need as a minority to make it."
Maria kept up the backbreaking work of harvesting until she graduated from high school.
Many migrant children, among them all but two of Maria's six brothers, did not finish high school. They missed too many classes because they left before the end of the school year to join their families in the fields, and often came back after the start of the next. Racist teachers expected little of them, dampening the spirits of some. But bright, determined Maria managed to earn good grades.
"Lessons in the Fields" ends in 1975 as Maria sets off for college with support from the Assistance Migrant Program at Saint Edward’s University in Austin, the kind of initiative that might be dismissed as DEI today. We’ll have to await the two more volumes Maria plans about her life to read about her earning degrees from Metro State College in Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Denver, raised her own family and taught in Denver area elementary and middle schools for 31 years.
I have long been fascinated by the memoirs of adventurous women such as Mary Seacole, an African-Caribbean nurse who went to the Crimea to care for soldiers wounded during the 1853-1856 conflict that Russia lost to the allied Ottoman, British, Sardinian and French armies. Or Amelia Edwards, an English novelist who explored Egypt's ruins as she traveled by houseboat a thousand miles along the Nile in 1877.
Maria is not a historic figure, but an intrepid contemporary who made her way from weeding fields in America's northwest to teaching in classrooms in Colorado and being lauded by the National Association of Bilingual Education as teacher of the year in 1996.
I attribute the rapport Maria must have had with the students she taught to her ability to recreate her own childhood. Her memoir is alive with the joys of childhood even under hard conditions – giggling over silly jokes with her brothers in the back seat on long car rides, later dreaming of a quinceañera. But she also expresses how children can get anxious when they sense the tensions of their elders.
Maria’s father, worn down by hard work, alcoholism and cirrhosis, died before Maria boarded a Greyhound bus for college. Only her mother saw her off from the same Eagle Pass bus station where decades later she would encounter Cuban immigrants.
"It was a bittersweet feeling, leaving not only friends, but also my mother who needed me financially and emotionally since my father's passing," Maria writes. "’Sacrificios,' sacrifices must be made to accomplish something better in life,' was what my parents taught me."