Chico Lingo, by Sergio Troncoso

My brother in Afghanistan

2011-12-12T08:52:00.007-05:00

Last Friday I went to Zabar’s to select boxes of assorted nuts and dried fruits for my brother who is in Afghanistan with the Navy. As the Christmas and Hanukah holidays are approaching, one family member will be missing from these festivities. I think it was important to get this package in the mail, and not to forget those who are serving our country overseas and in harm’s way.

Until last May, Oscar was the principal at Anthony High School, just outside of El Paso, Texas. He has been an educator for decades, but he has also been in the Navy Reserve for 22 years. In other ways, Oscar also breaks the stereotype many of us might have of our military servicemen and women: he is in his 40’s, has a Master’s degree, and was working on his Doctorate. Before he left for Afghanistan, Oscar was promoted to the rank of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy. Administrators, teachers, and students from Anthony High School also recently sent him a care package.

It is strange to have a brother in places you read about in the newspaper’s front pages, where sectarian violence, for example, recently killed dozens of Afghanis and Improvised Explosive Devices still kill American soldiers in Humvees. It is strange because on the one hand I know my brother well, but on the other hand he is in as remote and as foreign a place as I could imagine.

I worry about my brother, and I hope with a little luck and skill that he will return to El Paso safely. My mother couldn’t stop crying for days after Oscar told her the news of his deployment. Now she keeps a candle lit to the Virgen de Guadalupe in our living room, to ask Her to guide him home. It is what we don’t know about his deployment, what our minds imagine, and what we see as ‘news’ about Afghanistan that is this cauldron of anxiety, fear, and hope. Our family is proud of Oscar, because we know he is doing his duty for his country.

I believe many if not most Americans are smart enough to support our military, to remember and honor their sacrifices, but to judge the politicians in Washington by a different metric. These politicians create American foreign policy, while the military is one of those instruments of that policy. For example, I don’t believe we should have attacked Iraq to rid it of Saddam Hussein or the weapons of mass destruction that were never found. That war was George W. Bush’s and Condoleezza Rice’s mistake, which of course they will never admit, because they are politicians. They manipulated the fear after 9/11 to start a war that should never have happened. From the start, we should have focused on Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda operated.

But not for one moment would I ever disparage soldiers, sailors or airmen for their service in Iraq. On the contrary, I would thank them for doing their duty. Once they are back home, I would do what I can to help them. I also believe how that war was started is one thing, but how it was carried out and how it evolved are different matters. You may start a war for the wrong reasons, but what happens during the long course of any war may have benefits. So even saying ‘Iraq was a mistake’ is too simplistic. We may not know for years what true effect we had in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Give Obama credit for winding down the Iraq war, and for beginning the process in Afghanistan. I believe the majority of Americans support this policy, in part because we see our economic problems at home as paramount, but also because the marginal benefits of what we can do in Iraq and Afghanistan decrease each year. Obama has cleaned up a lot of messes he inherited, and he has also fallen short as a leader at times, yet I give credit where credit is due.

You know, I am not a jingoistic patriot. But I am a patriot. It plays better for simplistic hurrahs, and in our TV culture with three-second attention spans, to wave the flag and spout unqualified red-white-and-blue accolades to motherhood, apple pie, and the United States of America. But I do not always agree with my mother, although I still love her. I prefer apple crisp to apple pie, and buñuelos with honey to both. I support our military and my brother in the military. But I will never stop thinking until I am dead, and that I am able to write what I think, even if it is critical of the United States, is one of the reasons why I know I am lucky to live in this country.

Before the holidays are over, and even after they are done and gone, connect with a military family, and invite them over for dinner or simply for a cup of coffee. Send a member of our armed forces a care package this week. Write him or her a letter. When we go beyond our selves, when we do something good that is not necessary or even asked for, we are all ennobled.

www.ChicoLingo.com

November Readings and Events

2011-11-01T10:40:00.012-04:00

New Jersey, New York, Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois. Oh, only five states this month: I am glad I am slowing down. It has been an exhilarating fall, as I have read across the country and reconnected with old friends and made many new ones. That is the part I love about traveling non-stop for new books: I get to talk to readers in person. I have had 'Internet friendships' for years, but now I can meet these friends face-to-face.

My best experiences so far? Eating Alma's chocolate cake in Kingsburg, California and talking to David Dominguez's classes for four hours, until I was hoarse. Also, my book party. That was another highlight. Friends from across New York City arrived ready to party in my apartment building, and bought 55 books! I was overwhelmed, and grateful. In San Francisco, it was a treat to have a quiet dinner with my accomplished high school friend Adan Griego. Finally, my three panels at the Texas Book Festival: one for From This Wicked Patch of Dust, another for Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and the last one for the You Don't Have A Clue anthology. Every panel was stimulating and thoughtful. I loved the audience questions, and relished the many conversations I had at the Barnes and Noble's signing tent in front of the state capitol. It was one of the best book festival experiences so far, and kudos to the organizers of Texas Book Festival for putting on such a great show and for their support of libraries. They certainly have their hearts in the right place.

A French scholar is writing a book about Latino literature and my work, among others, and so he is interviewing me in December. I had a testy, but fun interview with the prolific, quick-witted writer Roberto Ontiveros for the indy newsweekly the San Antonio Current, where I said: “I see in the United States a culture of stupidity that we have come to accept as the norm. In fact, most of us don’t know anything different, and so we even don’t have a sense of loss, how our minds have atrophied. We used to expect much from our writers and readers, in terms of patience, in terms of understanding and debating ideas, in terms of assumed knowledge. But no more. We’ve raced to the bottom.” That day I had read too much Emerson and spotted too many images of the Kardashians on the Internet, television, and even in bookstores. Am I wrong? Also, Crossing Borders is now available as an e-book. And finally, I was the featured author on The Latino Author website: The Latino Author.com. Thank you all: October was a helluva month. Here is my schedule for November:

November 1, 2011, 7 PM---New Jersey City University, Weiss Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Jersey City, NJ: New Jersey City University.

November 3, 2011, 6:30 PM--Co-honoree (with Aubrey Hawes), for contributions to the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, Benefit Gala 2011, Mark Twain-on-Hudson, Tappan Hill Mansion, Highland Avenue, Tarrytown, NY.

November 4, 2011, 7:00 PM--University of Texas at El Paso, Quinn 212, El Paso, TX.

November 5, 2011, 9 AM---Keynote Speaker, Region 19-Education Service Center’s 14th Annual Parent Engagement Conference, Canutillo High School, 6675 South Desert Blvd. (Loop 375/Trans Mountain Road exit off I-10), El Paso, TX.

November 5, 2011, 2 PM---Barnes & Noble, 705 Sunland Park Drive, El Paso, TX.

November 5, 2011, 5 PM---Barnes & Noble, 9521 Viscount Boulevard, El Paso, TX.

November 6, 2011, 3 PM---Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Boulevard NW, Albuquerque, NM.

November 17, 2011, 6:30-8:00 PM---Guild Literary Complex, Global Voices series at the International House, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

November 18, 2011, 11 AM-12:15 PM---National Council of Teachers of English, Panel with other authors of You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens, Chicago, IL.

I hope to see many of you at these events. I am humbled that I am one of the two honorees at the annual gala of the Hudson Valley Writers' Center. You always wonder if anybody cares, or if anybody is reading your work, or if somebody will ask you a question based on what you actually wrote rather than on what they want you or your stories to be. It is more than enough to fight your own demons; I don't think I have the strength to fight someone else's. I am on the road again for a while, and all my wood chopping for the winter will have to wait until I get a break.

www.ChicoLingo.com

October Readings and Events

2011-10-03T07:50:00.008-04:00

I'll be in New Jersey, Oregon, Maryland, Texas, and California in October. I am exhausted just thinking about it! I hope to see you at one of these readings or events. That is what makes these trips so worthwhile to me, when I connect with readers face-to-face. My complete schedule of readings and appearances is at: www.sergiotroncoso.com/readings/index.htm.

October 5, 2011, 5 PM---Weiss Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, with other authors of You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens, Jersey City, NJ.

October 8, 2011, 6 PM---National Endowment for the Arts Stage, Wordstock Book and Literary Festival, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR.

October 16, 2011, 2 PM---The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD.

October 18, 2011, 6:30-8:30 PM---Collegiate School, Collegiate Book Festival’s Opening Reception, 260 West 78th Street, New York, NY.

October 21, 2011, 5-7 PM---The Twig Book Shop, 200 E. Grayson, Suite 124, San Antonio, TX.

October 22-23, 2011---Texas Book Festival (Saturday: 11:30-12:30 PM, “Stories from El Paso,” and Sunday: 1:30-2:30 PM, “Latino Mystery Stories,” and 3:00-4:00, “The Art of Personal Reflection”), Texas State Capitol, Austin, TX.

October 24, 2011, 4:30 PM---San Francisco Public Library, The International Center, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA.

October 25, 2011---Reedley College, 995 North Reed Avenue, Reedley, CA.

Also, I recently posted a YouTube video of a reading and discussion of my novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust. I hope you enjoy it: http://youtu.be/m4pwgIuGUOM.

I received a nice review of my new book of essays, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, from the El Paso Times: "Troncoso is a complicated man trying to understand a complicated world. In his quest for understanding, he eloquently shares lessons learned in 16 provocative essays. These very personal essays cross several borders: cultural, historical, and self-imposed. For example, he contemplates writer's block in 'A Day Without Ideas,' comparing it to a deathlike existence where nothing matters and he will ‘simply be there.’ In a painful letter to his sons detailing their mother's struggle with breast cancer, Troncoso the writer reveals his true identity as Troncoso the frightened, caring, and strong father. He takes on the 9/11 attackers, in a piece called 'Terror and Humanity,' not with hatred or revenge, but with a plea for basic humanity....the collection remains timely. We owe it to ourselves to read, savor and read them again."

Finally, I am working on several projects at the same time, while reading across the country for both books, correcting one son's essay for English, reviewing Spanish grammar for a test the other son will have today, feeding my beloved cat Ocistar, buying milk, and well, you get the picture. I am not that complicated; I am just exhausted. It has been a busy time, but so far I have not dropped anything I am juggling.

I love to hear from readers. That lifts me up like nothing else. Every time readers write to me about how they enjoyed one of my stories, or identified with one of my characters, or thought about their lives differently after reading my work, that day my bones do not ache and I feel as powerful as the Housatonic River. Thank you.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Why I Wrote From This Wicked Patch of Dust

2011-09-20T08:41:00.017-04:00

Two days ago at the Brooklyn Book Festival a young woman came up to me after my reading, and asked me a simple question: Why did I write my novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust? The festival was my first big event to launch the novel, and although what she asked was straightforward, the answer is anything but. Let me give it a shot.

I wrote From This Wicked Patch of Dust, because I wanted to write about the Mexican-American border, where I grew up. I wanted to write about the poorest of the poor in a Texas colonia, or shantytown, with a dream of becoming American. Although the novel is fiction, my family was also dirt poor in Ysleta on the outskirts of El Paso, yet I loved my childhood. Any voice I have as a writer is in one way or another rooted in communicating what was good, what was struggle, and what we couldn’t answer in Ysleta.

Much of our political rhetoric only caricatures poor immigrants, documented and undocumented. There is rarely a sense of the commonality we, the more established inhabitants of these United States, share with these newcomers. I wanted to portray characters who come to life, reach out to the reader, and find a place in his or her thoughts, emotions, and even laughter. I hope you will see the Martínez family clearly, their warts as well as their merits, and believe in these characters.

I also wanted to focus on the dynamics of immigrant families. If you read From This Wicked Patch of Dust you will experience the lives of Cuauhtémoc and Pilar Martínez, the parents from the ‘old world,’ so to speak, who sometimes, and sometimes do not, see eye-to-eye on whether and how their family should become American. The children —Julia, Francisco, Marcos, and Ismael— take divergent paths to becoming American, adopt different religions or cultures, and even move to different places across the country. The siblings are in conflict with each other, they are in conflict with their parents, yet all of them still belong to and love their family. The Martinez family tries to keep it together as many things, including their own decisions, pull this family apart. How do we honor who we are, how do we break away from where we began, and what does all of this mean for our families?

Another question at the heart of my novel was: How can I portray the culture of a group, not one individual, but a related group, as in a family? That is the reason From This Wicked Patch of Dust is told, alternatively, from the six perspectives of each family member. We live in families, yet each of us experiences being part of a family in a different way. We are together, yet we are also apart, in a family. What keeps us together, and what drives us apart? That’s the drama at the heart of the novel.

How does time fragment the togetherness of a family? This is why the chapters in From This Wicked Patch of Dust are several years apart. Our common experiences are the bonds that keep us together for a while, but as we get older, as individuals and as a group, those common experiences become more experiences in the past. We start living our lives apart, yet we often yearn to come back together, as adult children, as elderly parents, to that togetherness we once had. Even though the children of Pilar and Cuauhtémoc Martínez end up in different parts of the world, so far from Ysleta in many ways beyond geography, they retain a bit of Ysleta within them.

I imagined the novel as an orchestra piece, where the different perspectives and time fragments would yield a music by the end of the novel that would give a sense to each reader of what is achieved and what is left behind after a family is gone. Some would call this micro-history, but it is a 'private history' we all experience in one way or another in our lifetime. And this experience has so much to do with what kind of selves we become. Certainly it is a different kind of storytelling than the escapism and neat ending of a typical Hollywood movie, which encourages short-term satisfaction rather than reflection. As a writer, I hope I have caused my readers to think.

Finally, the allegorical allusions in the novel are focused on this question: Why are we as a country growing further apart? Why do we have less in common with each other? Why do we see only ‘the other’ in our neighbor, or in an ethnic group not quite like us, or in a religious group not quite like us? Admittedly, a country is not a family. I know that. But there is a sense when a group feels more together, and when it has ceased to be a group at all and individuals just exist next to each other, ready to take advantage of each other at a moment’s notice.

Have we reached that point in the United States, where we have little in common with each other? Where Birmingham, New York City, and Reno are as foreign as Cairo and Tel Aviv? There is no way empirically to prove or disprove this. I can only point to our bitter political rhetoric, the media manipulation to promote narrow agendas and to divide us, and what I hear and see on the streets of El Paso, New York, Kansas City, San Francisco, and wherever else I travel.

What can bring us back together, if anything? From This Wicked Patch of Dust has a tentative answer at the end of the novel. Of course, I am always hopeful. I will always make the effort to grapple with a question even when it is one such as: Why did you write this novel? I must have said something coherent to the young woman at the Brooklyn Book Festival. After I finished talking, she bought the book and asked me to sign it to ‘Meryl.’

www.ChicoLingo.com

September Readings and Events

2011-09-09T21:47:00.005-04:00

This is my schedule during the month of September. My new novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, is being distributed right now, and my book of essays, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, should be available at the end of the month. If you are in Brooklyn, San Elizario or El Paso, please come by and say hello.

September 18, 2011, 11 AM---Brooklyn Book Festival, “The Good, the Bad, and the Family” in St. Frances McCardle Hall, 209 Joralemon, Brooklyn, NY. I will be on this panel with Tom Perrotta and Elizabeth Nunez.

From noon until 2:00 PM, I will then go to booth #125, with La Casa Azul Bookstore and Las Comadres Para Las Americas. I will be with two of my favorite people, Aurora Anaya-Cerda and Nora Comstock. They will have quite a line up of authors from noon until 5:00 PM, so please visit them and support independent bookstores and the Brooklyn Book Festival.

September 23, 2011, 2 PM---San Elizario High School, 13981 Socorro Road, San Elizario, TX.

September 23, 2011, 4-6 PM---The Bookery, 10167 Socorro Road (just past the Socorro Mission), Socorro, TX.

September 24, 2011---El Paso Community College, Annual Literary Fiesta, El Paso, TX. I will be spending the day with EPCC students, thanks to Rich Yañez. (Rich you don't know the software circus I had to go through to get that ñ into your name on Blogger. But now that I know how to do it, here are three extra to keep in your pocket, ñ ñ ñ, whenever someone leaves them out. I know about mangled surnames, believe me.)

The third annual EPCC Literary Fiesta will be at its Administrative Services Center, Building A, 9050 Viscount in El Paso. From 10 AM to 4 PM, Sept. 24, the fiesta will feature readings, a children's corner, book sellers, food, arts and crafts, and vendors. Admission is free and open to the public.

For information: Keri Moe, 915-373-5096.

To see what I have lined up for the rest of the year, please visit my Reading Schedule at:
http://www.sergiotroncoso.com/readings/index.htm.

The Lost Border: Request for Submissions

2011-08-30T20:24:00.003-04:00

Request for Submissions

The Lost Border: Essays on how life and culture have been changed by the violence along the U.S.-Mexico border

Extended Deadline: October 15, 2011

This new anthology will focus on the unique life and culture along the U.S.-Mexico border that has been changed and even lost because of the recent drug violence. This book will feature writers from both sides of the border who explore the culture that has been changed or lost, the lives that have been split in two, and the way of life that has been interrupted, or even eradicated, by the violence along the border.

Some of the questions that might be explored are: What way of life has been lost due to the recent violence? What are the ramifications of this change for culture, politics, families, institutions, the arts, and even individual psyches? Will it be possible to regain what has been truncated? What might the border’s future be? Are there any positive side-effects?

We hope that writers will conjure the past in telling moments and reflect on the forces that have spun out of control to destroy the unique bi-national, bicultural existence of la frontera. Location is a vitally important and intrinsic element of the essays we seek, and each essay should show substantial ties to the border through the essayist’s lived experience. We anticipate that the writing will draw scholars as well as those in the general public who wish to thoughtfully negotiate the border’s current complexities.

The publisher of this project will be Arte Público Press and the anticipated publication date is in 2013.

Please read the submission guidelines and follow them. We look forward to reading your submission. We will contact you by email about acceptance or rejection of your essay.

Sarah Cortez (Cortez.Sarah@gmail.com)

Sergio Troncoso (SergioTroncoso@gmail.com)

Editors

Submission Guidelines:

The extended deadline is October 15, 2011 postmark. The length of the essay should be 3,000 to 6,000 words; please title your essay. The essay should be unpublished and written in English. All contributors shall be Latino/a.

Each essay should be typed in Times Roman 12-point type with standard manuscript formatting for margins and spacing.

Include your name, snail-mail address, two contact phone numbers, two email addresses, and exact word count in the top left margin of the first page of your manuscript.

We do accept electronic submissions. Send them to: SergioTroncoso@gmail.com.

If you are sending hard copies, mail two copies of the essay and your bio to Sergio Troncoso, 2373 Broadway, Suite 1808, New York, NY 10024. No submission will be returned; please keep a copy for your records.

Please include a one-paragraph biography summarizing your publishing credits. Include a sentence or two that defines your relationship with the border (e.g. cities or towns lived in, length of residence/familiarity).

If your essay is accepted, we will need an electronic file as a Word document. We will contact you about suggested revisions.

Economic uncertainty as a political weapon

2011-07-26T12:30:00.020-04:00

You have to hand it to the House Republicans: they have outplayed President Obama in almost every respect on the deficit-ceiling debate, but primarily in their use of economic uncertainty as a political weapon. Republicans have set the terms of the debate, while Obama did not respond, analyze, anticipate, and attack months ago.

The president did not try to frame the debate, or lead the country to set the terms of the debate. He did not anticipate how sophisticated, yet simple, the Republican plan against him was, and he did not counteract it before it blossomed into the near-fiasco we are facing now.

Consumer confidence and business confidence are key to uplifting an economy burdened by recession and shock. This was the state of the U.S. economy at the end of 2008, when George W. Bush left an economic mess for Obama to clean up. This confidence is invisible, but if it is eroded over time, people and businesses don’t invest, don’t create jobs, and don’t take risks, even if they have the money. They hoard their cash.

After we weakly climbed out of recession with the emergency measures adopted by Obama immediately after he took office (some of these measures had been initiated by the Bush administration), I knew we were at the point where the economy would either gain momentum, or lose steam and fall back to some version of the disaster at the end of the Bush administration.

If we gained momentum, we would create more jobs, and the temporary measures which added to the deficit would be a historical footnote since the economy would grow fast enough to reduce the deficit in relation to the size of our economy. But if we didn’t, then we would be saddled with the ‘temporary deficit,’ and a lack of jobs, and a weak economy, and Obama would surely not be re-elected. Since I voted for Obama, I was rooting for the economy to improve, and expand, over the past two-three years.

During these past two-three years, however, I noticed something interesting. I’ve read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal every day for decades. I want different perspectives; I want to consider different voices. But whereas the editorial page of the Journal has always been conservative, at least fiscally, if not socially, the front page and news pages have been a mix. But in my opinion, not anymore.

With every slight uptick in the economy over the past two-three years, whether it was on jobs, or corporate profits, the front-page Journal articles were relentlessly negative. Sometimes on the same story, it seemed as if I were living in two realities: what the Journal reported —the economy is awful under Obama, we are going nowhere, these corporate profits are illusory— and what the Times reported— we may be turning the corner, banks have recapitalized, companies are flush with cash. Was the Journal being too pessimistic, or the Times too optimistic?

You could pick your facts to support either side, and that’s my point. But why would anyone want to ‘talk down’ the economy? I even imagined that perhaps the new Journal owner, Rupert Murdoch, had placed the kind of editors who would undermine confidence in the American economy under Obama. But perhaps I was being too paranoid, I thought. But I also knew such a relentlessly negative spin on anything that might improve the economy would also have an effect on whether individuals and companies spend money, even modestly, to grow us out of the deficit we incurred after we cleaned up the mess Bush left behind. Most people in business read the Journal.

Obama didn’t help himself by focusing on healthcare reform, instead of jobs, eighteen months ago. He didn’t help himself by not recognizing that House Republicans, after last November’s election, did not trust him absolutely, assumed he was a traditional, even radical liberal, and would not work with him. They want him out. Period.

As an old friend pointed out to me this summer, perhaps Obama was too young when he became president. Too inexperienced. Too much in belief of himself, instead of recognizing what effect he had on others, particularly on a white middle-class seeing the livelihoods slip away for their children, while this country becomes more Latino, more Asian, more Muslim, while American corporations react to globalization by shipping jobs overseas, for more profits which their investors (often ourselves) demand.

If Obama had recognized the unique ways in which he would never be trusted by House Republicans, and perhaps a great swath of the American electorate, he would have ‘triangulated,’ à la Bill Clinton, before or certainly after last year’s election. That just means Obama would have acted as a fiscal conservative to counteract the (reasonable and unreasonable) prejudices of these Republicans and that part of the American electorate that would never trust him. In that way, Obama would have positioned himself for reelection, in the middle of the road, which is how you win elections in this country.

When Obama ordered our Navy Seals to kill Bin Laden, that was a perfect moment of ‘triangulation’: the quasi-Muslim American president, who may or may not have been born in Hawaii, killed one of America’s greatest enemies. You could sense when that happened that Obama’s harshest critics even tipped their hats to him, and perhaps for a moment reconsidered their zealous opposition to everything Obama. That moment put Obama in a new light. The problem is that Obama did not have, or aggressively pursue, enough of these ‘triangulation moments.’

If he had done that, if Obama had recognized that a significant portion of the American electorate and these adamant, inflexible House Republicans were already painting him as a stick-figure liberal who will only explode the deficit any chance he gets, Obama would have acted differently, and set the terms of the debate. He would have gotten out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and pointed out the huge waste of hundreds of billions of dollars on defense spending, while our allies spend so little and ride our coattails. He would have attacked government waste seriously, and closed unnecessary departments (but not the ones helping the disadvantaged or the needy). He would have repeatedly pointed out how certain American companies pay so little in taxes, because they have sweetheart tax breaks from Congress. He would have recognized that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played an important role in the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis at the end of the Bush administration, and how Republicans and Democrats both benefited from their political and economic ties to these companies. Everybody in Congress was greedy when it came to Fannie and Freddie.

But Obama didn’t do any of the above, relentlessly, day after day, ahead of the curve, so that he wouldn’t be boxed in later. He allowed House Republicans to set the terms of the debate, and responded only to what they wanted, and simply kept giving in to their demands. And they have just kept saying no.

What I think is rarely pointed out is this: by passing this temporary, short-term increase in the debt ceiling, with deep spending cuts and another vote in early 2012 on the debt ceiling, House Republicans are using economic uncertainty as a political weapon. The more uncertainty there is in and about the American economy, the fewer jobs will be created. The more economic uncertainty there is in and about the American economy, the more the stock market will languish, or even decline. And of course, the more the government is contracting before the election, the fewer jobs and services will exist in 2012. The fewer jobs in the American economy, and the worse off Americans feel about their economic prospects, the better the 2012 elections will be for the Republicans.

They have outplayed Obama, and now here we stand on the brink of default. We will all pay a huge price for these selfish political games. When we ‘talk down’ the economy, when we lose our AAA credit rating, and when the dollar’s role as a reserve currency erodes, we all lose. What happened to ‘us’? Why are we not a ‘we’ anymore? Who could be that transformative, adaptive figure who can still lead us to change for the better, while still making us believe we belong together as a country?

www.ChicoLingo.com

Solve the mystery, win a free book

2011-05-31T16:00:00.010-04:00

I am a contributor to a terrific new anthology, You Don’t Have A Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens with a Teacher's Guide (Arte Público Press), which was published a month ago and has been receiving stellar reviews. From Booklist, the anthology won a starred review. Kirkus called it “a consistent, well-crafted collection.” The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books said, “The mix of realistic and fantastic mysteries guarantees broad reader appeal for this impressive collection.” Much credit should go to our editor, Sarah Cortez, whose careful guidance throughout the project was exemplary.

This anthology is chockfull of writers I admire: Mario Acevedo, Carlos Hernandez, Diana Lopez, René Saldana, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Richie Narvaez, Gwendolyn Zepeda, Ray Villareal, Manuel Ramos, Daniel Olivas, and many others. I am proud to be included among them, writing mysteries and encouraging teens (and all of us, for that matter) to read.

So herewith is a challenge, to all intrepid readers in cyberspace and beyond: whoever can solve the mystery of my story “Nuts” in this collection, and email me what really happened to whom and why, will win a book signed by me and mailed to you. The first three individuals (teens, I hope) to send the correct answer to my email inbox at SergioTroncoso@gmail.com will win a free book. Will you have a clue? Well, that is the question. Read the following paragraphs carefully.

I wrote “Nuts” because I wanted to write a story to make the reader think about what really happened in the story and to prompt the reader to figure out the puzzle. I believe in ‘close reading,’ that is, reading so that every word is weighed carefully for its meaning, so that every detail is understood for why it is there. “Nuts” is written for that careful reader who will not miss any detail, and whether a detail matches other details in the story. I also want the reader to ponder what is in between the lines of the story, to understand the relationships between the characters, and to appreciate what is left unsaid between them. I have two teenage sons, and one of them is allergic to tree nuts, so I also wanted to write about that hidden, quotidian danger he faces. By the way, my sixteen-year-old figured out what really happened in “Nuts” on his first reading!

So about those clues. First, the cookie clue. Think about the cookies, and every instance in which the cookies are mentioned. Compare these instances. What do they tell you about what really happened?

Second, have you seen the movie “Juno”? You better run to Netflix, if you haven’t. Remember the relationships between Juno, Bleeker, and Katrina de Voort? How is a scene in that movie and what is meant (but not said) about these relationships important to understanding what Zendon is feeling about his friend Ethan? Are there any other clues to indicate what Zendon is thinking, but not saying, to his friend Ethan?

Third, sometimes we hear names incorrectly, especially during an emotionally charged moment. Does 'Sookie' sound like 'Soupy'?

Fourth, isn't that a strange name for the person who writes Ethan that email at the end, ‘Doable HePrey’? Did you know that ‘Sergio Troncoso’ can also be ‘Cooing Roosters’ or ‘Scrooges Riot On’? I love anagrams, don’t you?

Finally, once you decipher the meaning behind the above clues, what can you tell me about Ethan’s moment of decision in the email, the response he almost sends, versus the response he actually sends at the end? That is the coup de grâce to understanding the meaning of this mystery.

For the prize, I will give the three winners a signed copy of You Don’t Have A Clue. You can give your friends your unsigned copy, challenge them to solve and understand the mystery, and you can keep your prize book. We need to encourage everybody to read. I hope if I see you at a reading you will say hello, and tell me how you solved the mystery and how you can’t wait to get into another story to solve the puzzle, to explore a new world, to gain a new perspective, to relish that shiver scurrying up your spine when you say to yourself, 'Aha! Now I know!'

www.ChicoLingo.com

Obama's Focus

2011-05-04T06:39:00.006-04:00

I like the photo released from the Situation Room, with President Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates, Joe Biden and others riveted by the live screen as our Navy commandos enter Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and put a bullet in the terrorist’s head. President Obama looked apprehensive, serious, and tough. But above all, focused. He took a gamble to get Bin Laden with commandos, rather than deciding to bomb the hell out of the compound. The man from Chicago would either win big or lose big.

But the gamble was a good one. The risk was commensurate with the reward: it was high risk to have our military men in harm’s way, to risk a fiasco where they get killed, but it was also high reward to identify Osama Bin Laden, to kill him, and to prove to the world that the deed was truly done. What mattered was not only that our commandos were terrific, and that they completed their work without U.S. casualties. What mattered most of all was this focus from President Obama and why we were there. What 9/11 was originally about, and why we should ever risk putting our military in harm’s way.

Too often, in the aftermath of 9/11, fear and paranoia were manipulated to focus on targets having little to do with what happened on that awful Tuesday in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. I experienced that day as a New Yorker, and it is the day I became in my heart a New Yorker. But it is also the day I began to see this country twisted by opportunists and demagogues to focus not on Al Qaeda primarily, not on Bin Laden, but on agendas having little to do with what and who wounded us so profoundly.

Why did we start a war in Iraq? For weapons of mass destruction? But they weren’t there. For vague Al Qaeda connections? But the terrorists who harmed us were principally in Afghanistan, and later we now know, Pakistan. My opinion is that President Bush started the war in Iraq to finish his daddy’s work, to pay back Saddam Hussein for targeting his daddy, to prosecute a personalized, blustery foreign policy that put our military in harm’s way. For the wrong reasons. For the wrong target.

Hussein was a creep and a dictator, but that isn’t a national security reason necessary to commit to a war. And of course, once you start a war, as Eisenhower warned us, the military-industrial complex, from generals to lobbyists to anyone else who profits from wars, will make sure the ill-begotten war continues for years, with thousands of people dead, with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted. Attempt to stop a war we should have never started in the first place, and how many right-wingers will smear you as soft on ‘defense’? How many in the public will believe them? How stupidly can we keep going round and round without the right purpose?

Here was another wrong target and wrong focus. How did we allow what happened on 9/11 to be twisted first into fear about security within our borders, then into paranoia about border security, and finally into attacks against undocumented workers? We allowed idiots like Lou Dobbs to manipulate our fears into a full-throated xenophobia against anyone dark-skinned, anyone ‘not like us,’ anyone whom we could easily blame, anyone weak and close at hand.

We couldn’t get to Bin Laden, but we could kick these Mexicans pouring concrete on our sidewalks and slaving away for pennies, yes we could kick them in the ass and feel good about ourselves. It might have been false, this feel-good kick, but it was something, and it was what we had. How many of us stepped up, said no, and yelled at the xenophobes, to tell them they had the wrong target? How many pointed out that our lack of work ethic, and our lack of focus on educating our kids, and our adoration of a superficial, materialistic culture were primarily to blame for our not competing effectively against nations like China? Believe me, right now dying Detroit could be revived if civic leaders just rolled out the red carpet for one million, hard-working, undocumented Mexicans.

Obama, in that picture from the Situation Room, was focused. He was focused on the right target. He was focused on what should have been the target all along. Al Qaeda, and all it represents. Period. Now that this commando mission has been completed successfully, perhaps we in the United States can start focusing on our problems straight on. Our real problems. Not our prejudices. Not our fantasies. Not our petty vendettas. But the problems that matter, to solve them and to make us a better country. To overcome even the worst of our days.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Work@Character

2011-03-31T09:05:00.004-04:00

Yesterday Laura and I had our last face-to-face teacher conference of the academic year for our younger son Isaac. Next year he will join his older brother at one of the best high schools in New York City, and this conference was bittersweet for us.

Both our children attended the Bank Street School for Children starting as three-year-olds. Aaron graduated two years ago, and I’m on the parents’ committee for Isaac’s graduation in two months. Bank Street has been a remarkable school for both our children, and it will be hard to leave it.

But what struck me was how Laura and I reached this point, with two similar, yet also different kids, both who work hard and possess unique abilities, but who also needed to overcome specific challenges. My kids are excellent students at their schools; they have scored at the highest levels in standardized tests to reach their goals. Both are avid readers of very different books, yet Aaron and Isaac share a sense of humor that is light years beyond mine. Do I even have a sense of humor? I am their strict, mercurial father.

What is obscured by this bit of bragging about my kids —who are not kids anymore but young adults— is the years of hard work of parenting to help Aaron and Isaac become the best version of themselves. I believe in learning by doing, Bank Street’s philosophy, but also Aristotle’s. I never did my children’s homework. On the contrary, in recent years, I have hardly seen what they have worked on after coming home from school. But when they have a question or a problem, I teach them how to find the answer for themselves. When they are stuck, I prompt them with questions to guide them to their own revelations.

We provide the space and time to focus quietly on their schoolwork. Friends who are wild or rude, I tell my kids, are not welcomed in our home. When Aaron and Isaac start wavering on the good habits we have encouraged, when they watch too much TV, or have not chosen the next book to read in bed, then yes, I am the heavy. I draw the bright line too many parents fail to draw: to turn off the TV, or to make finding a new book a priority, or to rewrite what they thought was ‘good enough.’ Real pride in your work is when you learn to do it yourself —not when somebody else does it for you— and when you know the work you accomplished was excellent. But often children have to be guided to get there.

Case in point. A few weeks ago, Isaac had brought home two short papers in which the teachers had given him only average marks. Isaac knew it wasn’t very good work, and he showed me the papers with what seemed a mix of fear and shame in his eyes. I read the papers, and yes, they were lightly researched, and his arguments were unsupported and often unclear. I remembered when he had worked on these papers, and I knew he had not given them the time they required, or the focus. Isaac is a bright kid and a good writer, but perhaps that week he had worried too much about succeeding at Oblivion on the Xbox, and too little about the failures of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

We talked about it, and we decided he would ask his teachers if he could rewrite both papers over the following two weeks of Spring Break. I told him it didn’t matter if his teachers didn’t give him different grades, but what did matter was that he should do his best work. And this wasn’t his best work, was it? No, he said, it wasn’t. Yes, I was a bit the heavy. I also told Isaac he wouldn’t play the Xbox over Spring Break, nor watch any TV, until those papers were rewritten, and well.

Isaac asked his teachers about rewriting the essays on the Friday before Spring Break, and they agreed. The teachers also decided to extend that offer to all the kids in the class: if anybody else wanted to rewrite their papers, they could. But, as far as I know, only Isaac would rewrite his papers during this vacation.

Now let me tell you about what happened over Spring Break. Isaac worked from morning until afternoon, for five days straight, rereading and expanding his source material, outlining his arguments, and reconstructing his essays. Sometimes he would ask questions. Occasionally he showed me what he had written, and I gave him my honest opinion. He rewrote page after page.

Whether he was motivated by his desire to get to Oblivion before his vacation ended, to please his mean old father, to show the teachers what he could do, or a combination of these, I don’t know. But Isaac worked independently, and ferociously. I was in awe, and prouder than any father could be.

Weeks later, at the conference, Isaac’s teachers noted how remarkably better the second go-around of his Civil War papers had been. They had given Isaac the highest marks for his rewrites. That was the work they had been accustomed to seeing from Isaac. Moreover, the teachers happily noted that on an in-class essay after Spring Break Isaac had again written a beautifully coherent essay on the Civil Rights movement.

Perhaps the teachers suspected that I, the writer-father, had ‘helped’ him on the rewrites during Spring Break, but the in-class essay confirmed it was Isaac who had done the work on the rewrites. And indeed it was. I just set the bar high. I did not allow him to lower it because I knew he could reach it. I gave my son advice to prompt him to think for himself when he needed it. Isaac learned by doing it, the hard way, the only way. The way toward good character.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Packinghouse Poet

2011-02-20T20:50:00.015-05:00

I have spent the last week delightfully immersed in the poetry of David Dominguez, who wrote The Ghost of César Chávez and Work Done Right. David is also co-founder and poetry editor of The Packinghouse Review from California’s San Joaquin Valley. You should read this poet.

His narrative poetry struck multiple chords with me. His images were evocative, from working at Galdini Sausage grinding pork, to driving his red pickup across the California desert, to setting the tile floor for his new house. These images reminded me of growing up in Ysleta and working on Texas farms as a child. I hated the poverty of this existence, yet it also defined who I was. There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.

Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses. We idolize Warren Buffett and the culture of wealth. However, we don’t realize the meaning of the most radical recommendations for profitable companies and the ideal business climate: monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing power and predatory practices against hapless, powerless consumers.

What is best is a balance, between making money for entrepreneurs and their companies, and providing beneficial products and services for consumers, with protections against abuses. I think we have lost that balance in this country. The richest of the rich have dramatically increased their share of the nation’s income, while the bottom sixty percent of this country —yes the majority of the people— have seen their share of income shrink in the past thirty years. Worse yet, multitudes have been convinced we need even less protection from the abuses of Wall Street, that we need to give more tax breaks to businesses and the super-wealthy, and that somehow these policies will rain money on the plebes below and return the United States to an idealized past glory. Good luck with that.

But I digress, yet only slightly. David Dominguez’s poetry brings us back to a focus on the working man, the pride and heartache of work, and the heritage of our families, Chicano and Mexicano. This is what I think good literature should be: expertly crafted lines, unique images that spur thinking, and…and…a focus against the grain and against what society stupidly values, a view that unsettles our comfortable perspectives. This kind of good literature fights against our über-focus on ‘material success equals what is worthy.’ This pernicious focus infected the literary world long ago, and transformed ‘what is good’ in books into only ‘what is entertaining,’ escapism for the masses.

What I believe propels David Dominguez’s poetry even a step further is his introspection. He wrestles with how his success as a writer and teacher has left him in an ambiguous place beyond obreros, beyond his father and grandfather, yet not quite an Americano:

At the register, the cashier glanced at my blazer.

“This it?” she asked, not “Hola, señor.”

Once, after weeding and hoeing my flower beds all day,

I came here to buy insecticide and Roundup,

and the same cashier asked me, “Cómo le va, señor?”

Like many, I prefer Macy’s over the swap meet

and would rather play a round of golf

alongside the wet eucalyptus clinging to the riverbank

than rise every morning to mow lawns

or gather with others on street corners,

praying for the chance to hop into trucks as underpaid

construction workers building housing tracts.

I’m spoken to informally in English if I’m clean

but in Spanish if I’m sweaty and dirty.

It happens all the time; I could bet on it:

the odds are as reliable as rope.

This strange, in-between existence has certainly been central to my life. To succeed in the American literary world, you must write in English, perfectly and singularly. You must appeal to what most literary buyers want to read (or at least a significant number of readers). This 'market appeal' often has nothing to do with obreros, or Chicanos, or issues that criticize the mainstream. You must appeal to the lowest common denominator in this culture, and that is ‘entertainment that transports you somewhere, without making you think too much, without being too complex.’ As you, the writer, push forward into American culture (should you?), are you leaving more of yourself behind? Who were you anyway? Who should you be? These questions have no easy answers.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Moral luck

2011-01-31T21:20:00.008-05:00

This week something strange happened to me. I was in an elevator in my co-op, and I got stuck. All four elevators in my 23-story building were replaced last year, at a significant cost to shareholders. Yet the expense was necessary, because the old ones had begun to fail too often. The new elevators were speedy, and after a few kinks had been worked out last year, they were running smoothly. Until I stepped into elevator No. 3.

I got into the elevator on my floor, and was headed toward the lobby. I pressed L, and the doors closed, but the elevator did not move. The doors opened again on my floor. I pressed L again, and the doors closed, but the elevator did not move. One more time. Of course, this should have been my clue to take another elevator, but I am a stubborn human being. This time it cost me.

On the third try, the L button remained lit, and the elevator started to descend. At about the fifteenth floor, it stopped. The doors did not open, the L button was still lit, and I was stuck. I pressed the button for the third floor, to see if that would prompt the elevator to move. It did not. I pressed the phone button on the elevator panel, but no one picked up at the front desk, and now I was peeved. I wasn’t nervous. I just thought, “This stupid contraption is wasting my time. How much did we pay for this thing?”

I called our concierge on my cell phone, and Vinnie picked up immediately. He said the mechanic had been working on elevator No. 3 and was about to leave. Vinnie grumbled something about the need for better elevator mechanics. He told me not to worry, that they would get me out in a few minutes.

I stepped away from the elevator panel, and reclined against a corner. I was alone, but perhaps I could check my email, I thought. I did notice the four shiny wooden walls around me, the painfully bright miniature elevator lights above my head, and a rising tension in my throat, but I quelled my own imminent claustrophobia by scrolling through my email on my beloved iPhone. After about ten or fifteen minutes, my forehead was damp, but I was still okay. Vaguely I could hear the mechanic on the other side of the door, perhaps a floor above or below me. I didn’t even know on what floor I was stuck.

Suddenly the elevator moved. It descended I would guess about two floors, and then braked hard to a stop. I was getting angry. Again it moved, and again it stopped abruptly, as if the emergency brakes had been automatically applied. On the third time the elevator moved and stopped without rhyme or reason, the doors popped open on the third floor, and I jumped out, relieved.

A handyman from our building asked me if I was okay, and I said that I was, although I felt dizzy. As I walked from the lobby onto Broadway, my head didn’t feel right. I had errands to do, groceries to buy, manuscripts to send out, and I did all those things, but within an hour after my elevator incident I felt as if someone had kicked me in the head twice. Perhaps those jolts in the elevator had been more severe than I had imagined. I wondered how my brain had sloshed inside my head as the elevator dropped and jolted to a stop twice.

After two hours, I had to lie down. It took about half a day to get my bearings again, to rid myself of being lightheaded.

Days later, I am fine. Don’t worry, dear reader. I’ll imagine you worried, even though you didn’t. It just makes me feel better to think that, and sometimes you need to do whatever gets you back on track, even if it is only within your imagination.

Today, as I was walking home with my son after his tennis lesson, a woman who was texting as she drove a shiny SUV, narrowly missed us on a crosswalk on Broadway. Well, narrowly missed my son. I put my hand to his chest and stopped him, having eyed the driver and her fingers furiously working her little gadget over the steering wheel. How do we ever survive in this world? With a little luck, and sometimes a little help.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Bookery in Socorro

2010-12-23T00:19:00.006-05:00

After buying asaderos at Licon’s Dairy, I drove Laura, Aaron, and Isaac to one of my favorite independent bookstores, The Bookery in Socorro, on the east side of El Paso. The Bookery is walking distance from the historic Socorro Mission, one of the three missions on the Mission Trail.

The Bookery is an adobe labyrinth stuffed with books on tables, books on the floor, books overflowing on bookshelves. It is easily the best place for buying Latino literature in El Paso, but this bookstore has so much more: young adult books, history books on El Paso and the Southwest, hundreds of picture books for kids, a menagerie of stuffed animals, Mexican calacas, Christmas decorations, trinkets hanging from vigas on the ceiling. After a dusty trek through the desert, I feel as if I’ve walked into a treasure room whenever I visit The Bookery.

But as I chatted with Margaret Barber, longtime owner, I worried. She told me this has been her toughest year financially. Of course, her bookstore has suffered as most of the book industry has suffered. People are reading less. Young adults, and others, prefer to download books electronically, rather than holding books in their hands.

To add to Margaret’s troubles, some in El Paso confused the closing of another wonderful bookstore, the Book Gallery, with The Bookery. School districts and teachers stopped ordering from The Bookery, with the assumption that The Bookery had closed. Yes, the Book Gallery in El Paso closed (alas), but The Bookery in Socorro is still open, and alive. We need to support it.

Where else can you find an owner who has read hundreds of the books she sells? Who will sit with you on her porch under the rough-hewn vigas, offer you coffee, and talk about books, and the famous writers who have visited her store, and the scuttlebutt of the neighborhood? Margaret is unstintingly honest, and will pointedly let you know when an author, or his or her work, is not up to snuff in her estimation. Isn’t that what everyone wants, an honest opinion? Don’t you want to be introduced to a new author, or pointed in a new literary direction, by a book lover who possesses an uncanny memory? Let me tell you, you don’t get a Margaret Barber on Amazon, and you don’t get her at Barnes and Noble. You get her only at The Bookery.

I hope if you are shopping for the holidays, or if you are savoring warm asaderos from Licon’s Dairy, or if you yearn for an afternoon of intelligent, irreverent conversation about books, that you will hit the brakes at The Bookery on Socorro Road. We need independent bookstores, we need independent voices, we need people thinking and arguing passionately about what should be in your brain, and why. What we don’t need is more homogenization, or mass-market brainwashing.

To open up your mind, go to The Bookery on El Paso’s historic Mission Trail, at 10167 Socorro Road. Margaret’s phone number is 915-859-6132. From I-10, you get off at Americas Avenue, follow Americas (Loop 375) until you get to Socorro Road, and then head east. As soon as you pass the Socorro Mission, The Bookery is on the left side. It is one of those places worth fighting for.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Provinciality of the United States

2010-12-15T09:58:00.009-05:00

Literal Magazine: Latin American Voices continues to be a provocative voice in culture, literature, and politics. One of the best things about publishing your work in a magazine such as Literal (“How Has the Loss of Juárez Changed Border Culture?”) is to read who else is in the issue. What fascinated me were two interviews, with the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes and philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Two quotes in particular resonated with me:

“What’s going on is that this country, the United States, has become very provincial. When I started out, my editors, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, were publishing Francois Mauriac, Alberto Moravia, and ten or fifteen foreign novelists. Now there’s no one. Those of us who have been established for a long time, like Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, or myself, have kept on publishing, but almost out of condescendence. There is no interest in new writers, in the vast quantity and quality of writers we have in Hispanic America. This country has become very self- absorbed and preoccupied, and it still does not understand what is going on in the world.” –Carlos Fuentes

“I still believe that a healthy democracy needs an education that focuses on (1) Socratic self-examination and critical thinking; (2) the capacity to think as a citizen of the whole world, not just some local region or group, in a way informed by adequate historical, economic, and religious knowledge; and (3) trained imaginative capacities, so that people can put themselves in the position of others whose ways of life are very different from their own.” –Martha Nussbaum

For many reasons, what Fuentes and Nussbaum were saying hit home. I have seen how little U. S. readers read in translation, or how rarely they seek out foreign writers in their own language, be it Spanish, Chinese or German, and so on. American pundits and politicos have also narrowed their agendas and appeals, to forego fact-checking, to trumpet narrow-minded biases. What is routinely ignored is a more expansive appeal to the public to appreciate working in someone else’s shoes, for example, particularly one who is dark-skinned and has an accent.

The United States suffers from a growing deficit of imagination. Not just for humanism. Not for embracing a Kumbaya moment of idealism. But for the truth. Even my thirteen-year-old knows that to better understand your position and your argument —he learned that in mock Supreme Court cases his class studied and debated— you need to ‘see’ the other side. The critical thinking of Socrates is based on answering questions that unmoor you, and probing your opponent with similar questions, but all of this ‘education’ is based on souls being open to such give-and-take. What happens when we as a society become more insular? What happens when we stop reading to challenge ourselves? When we don’t care enough to question our own thinking?

These questions mattered in a writing group in which I recently participated. One story I submitted was set on the Mexican-American border, and although the story received many favorable, enthusiastic comments, two or three in the group pointedly had an issue with my use of Spanish phrases and sentences intermixed with my prose in English. Didn’t I want to expand my readership? they asked. Wasn’t I limiting myself as a writer by excluding people like them who didn’t understand Spanish? (We were talking about four or five sentences in a story that was 28 pages long.)

I was blunt and unapologetic. I told them New York readers were at the end of my line, in terms of the readers I was focusing on. I wanted to be authentic to the setting, the Mexican-American border. I asked them how many had read Vargas Llosa, or Paz, or García Márquez in Spanish? How many of them had stepped outside their comfortable linguistic boxes, to seek truth in other worlds and other languages? I mentioned how I had learned German to read Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Mann in the original. Perhaps I was too harsh on my fellow writers. But even among the educated in cosmopolitan Manhattan, our provincialism is growing. But at what cost, and why?

What happens when a society stops caring about the hard work of imagination, self-criticism, and education? Will this society even realize what it has lost? This season, give a book in translation, or prose or poetry from a university press, to someone you care about. Point them to other indie cultural favorites, in magazines or literary reviews. Broaden their minds, and prompt their critical thinking. Help our citizens earn their place in this democracy.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Consumer Used and Abused

2010-11-09T17:00:00.021-05:00

Why can’t corporations be more flexible? Why can’t they put a dollar value on trust, which could be engendered by being more consumer-friendly? Let me tell you about a few different experiences, frustrations, and one triumph in my little island of consumerism. I know the Republicans are currently trumpeting how “the free market” can do everything better than government, how businesses are the solution, not the problem, for reviving the American economy. Let me give you my more complex view.

I love my iPhone. It has truly changed my life, and I owe it to my sons, who converted me to Macs a few years ago. Our family, amazingly, has four iPhones, two MacBooks, a MacBook Pro, and an iMac. We have become avid customers, but only after Aaron and Isaac were able to awake me from my PC-Dell hypnosis. You can’t see this, but I’m shuddering, remembering the dozens of hours wasted with PC reps trying to solve the stupidest problems.

But today I texted one of my sons, and scolded him for going over his data limit. In about a week, he zoomed past the measly 200 MB of monthly data, the cheapest data plan ($15) offered by AT&T for the iPhone. I’ll be paying extra for the over-usage, that is, $15 for the next 200 MB of data. Of course, if I had originally signed up for the next highest data plan, at $25 per month, I would have gotten 2 GB, or ten times the data usage. But then I would be paying $25, instead of $15, per month. The company is basically trying to force you to switch to the higher data plan.

Why can’t the cheapest data plan be $15 per month for, say, 1 GB? It seems the cheapest plan, at 200 MB, is meant to be exceeded by even the casual data user, so you’ll be trapped into paying $15 for every extra 200 MB of over-usage. What a rip! I feel as if I’m being used and abused by AT&T, not a customer, but an easy mark. And I haven’t even mentioned the two-year AT&T contract imprisonment I need to endure to use my iPhone.

Again, a credit card I have owned for decades, from a major credit card company that adores the color of money and metals on its plastic, has sneakily changed the amount of time I have to pay my bill every month. From what used to be about 25 days, to now about 8 days! Again, another trap. Forget to pay this credit card for a few days, and they have you by the cojones, so to Sarah-speak.

Is it me, or do you also feel besieged as a consumer? At every turn, instead of service, another trap. Forget to read the fine print, or just act normally, and you will be forking over the fines. I know, some Republican Tea-Partier will say, “Caveat Emptor! The market is king!” But I know many of them feel just as used and abused as I do. I know because I’ve asked a few of them in private. But in public, at social gatherings where the walls have ears, or web cams, they must repeat their holy mantras.

My question is this: have American consumer businesses become more predatory over time? Is there a way to measure this? If these are not just my experiences, but part of a broader trend, why? Have we somehow lost a social contract with businesses, in which consumers should be willing to pay good money for products and services, but also should expect these products and services to be reasonable and reliable? Why haven’t businesses more often put a value on trust? Trust is hard to quantify, but it is real. Because if I trust a business, believe you me, I will go back to it, even if it makes an occasional mistake. That’s loyalty, and it’s worth something.

Let me tell you how my trust was recently restored. Last week, on the black MacBook I use to type this blog, the screen froze as I opened my FireFox browser. The rainbow Apple wheel spun without point or purpose for ten, fifteen minutes. I turned the computer off, and turned it on, but now the dreaded question-mark folder appeared on the screen. No half-bitten gray Apple. Nada.

I took my three-and-a-half-year-old MacBook to an Apple store in Manhattan. Apple Genius Nicoya —I will never forget her name— told me my hard drive had failed. Kaput. Dead as plastic. I told her I had AppleCare, but she noted my AppleCare coverage had expired in May, after three years exactly. There’s no renewal. That’s it. I was screwed. I must have looked puppy-dog-died devastated, not because I lost the info on my drive —I didn’t, I had backed up everything— but because I truly loved working on this MacBook. Nicoya stared at me for a moment, then declared, “You know, you never used your AppleCare once, and that’s a shame. Why don’t I just give you a free hard drive? Can you wait a few minutes while I install it?”

Steve Jobs, Apple Genius extraordinaire, if you ever read this blog, find this Nicoya, and give her a big fat raise and a nice kiss. You know, nothing overtly sexual, just a thank-you peck. My family and I will be buying Apple products for years because of her. That’s what customer loyalty means.

www.ChicoLingo.com

A Peculiar Journey

2010-10-23T09:17:00.002-04:00

I go through spurts in writing. This past summer I wrote, and rewrote, more than I have in years. I got into a certain rhythm. The ideas were flowing, and my skills, such as they were, produced work I did not throw away. I experienced what I will only describe as a painful low, yet the summer ended with an unexpected bonanza. Yes, I will have new work next year, but I won’t discuss the details until the dust settles.

That’s why I stopped writing Chico Lingo three, four times a month. I had to focus on my paid gigs, so to speak, and this blog, which has strangely grown near and dear to my heart, was neglected. Chico Lingo is my way to discuss and explore topical ideas, even philosophical points. It is my way to be part of the cultural and political discourse of this country. It’s a community newsletter, an alter ego, a peak into my brain on any given week, and even a platform to jump into a question I want to explore further, perhaps in more crafted writing. I think it’s been a good discipline for me to write Chico Lingo.

After the flurry of writing and rewriting of the summer, I have taken a step back from my literary work this autumn. Yes, I am working on shorter pieces. Yes, I am in the middle of a few small projects that editors have asked me for. So the writing work never quite goes away. But the intensity is different, and I am also retooling. I am questioning how I write, from the micro level of the line, to the possible structures of stories, to the architecture of novels in my head. I always try to improve my skills, and I do like to experiment. I hope all of this makes me a better writer.

I work hard, then I take a step back to see if I can find better ways to work. It’s a recursive process, Hegelian, if you want to get philosophically fancy, or simply learning by doing, and then thinking about what you learned, and what you did. I imagine myself a maker of a chair, who made lots of chairs —a whole dining room set!— in a concentrated time, and now I take a step back to see how I can learn to make different chairs, with different tools and technologies, with new knowledge about stains, lathes, and woods. I might even try making a table.

One main focus of my retooling is to try capture and use a more poetic rhythm to my prose. To take my written words from not just clear writing and good storytelling, but to sing that song with words that will be my own.

It has been a long literary trek for me. Early on I think I wrote in a certain simple way because my native language was not English, but Spanish, or more precisely the Spanglish of El Paso. Years ago I was simply trying to get my point across. I was trying to survive, whether it was at Ysleta High, or Harvard and Yale. Also, I believed first and foremost in ideas, not words. Perhaps this is the curse of the philosophical mind, to know that what you write —its logic, argument, and import— is far more essential than how you write it. I still believe this is true, in a way. Heidegger, for example, was a terrible writer, but a great thinker. What he wrote, once you more or less understood it, reoriented what the world could be. Nietzsche was that great exception as a philosopher, a unique and important thinker for what he wrote, but also a gifted stylist by how he wrote in German.

So I needed to write simply, to get my point of across, to be heard. I loved thinking about complex philosophical problems, and so that also lent itself to writing simply and directly. When you read philosophical papers, the writing is often direct and relatively simple, but your head hurts trying to understand the argument and logic.

But the reason I left philosophy was because I found it too isolating. I married philosophy with literature in my stories, to try to achieve this nexus of exploring difficult questions, but through stories, believable characters, many of them from the Mexican-American border. Writing philosophy in literature was also a way to destroy stereotypes in Mexican-American literature. Over decades of writing, I became better at it. My English improved. I became more of a native English speaker, even though I never left my Spanish behind. After much struggle and self-education and self-reinvention, I again wanted more of myself and my writing.

That’s at the point I am now. Where I want more from my work in English. More poetry. More language that cuts through the colloquial and the cliché. Whereas early on in my writing career, I hardly read any poetry without being baffled or bored. Now I am primarily reading poetry, and lustily so. I gave a speech recently, which delved into my peculiar journey, “From Literacy to Literature.” I hope you get the idea. I still remember how Plato ridiculed the poets and warned against their influence, but now I happily inhabit that world in a poem, and it is that momentary beauty that nourishes me even as I try to take it apart.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Terror and Humanity

2010-09-11T23:58:00.004-04:00

(On September 11, 2001, an editor from Newsday called me at home and asked me to write about what was happening in New York. I didn't know what to write, or if I could write anything. I was traumatized by what I saw on TV and what was happening a few miles from my apartment. The next day the following article appeared in Newsday and many other newspapers. I think the words still resonate today, amid the battles we are fighting with each other and within ourselves.)

This one is for the thousands of individuals who died yesterday. Those innocents. It's hard to write this, to write anything. The fathers and mothers. The children. Brothers and sisters. They died for somebody's idea of a just cause. But you were simply killing innocents, can't you understand that? The children visiting the top of the World Trade Center were simply looking at the view. The mothers who jumped out of these skyscrapers, in desperation, did not know about your just cause and did not care about politics. These innocents who died are America, and those who will mourn them today will rebuild our great city and our great country in their honor. We don't have a choice but to rebuild and try again to live in this sometimes nightmarish world. In these thousands who died amid an ordinary Tuesday morning that metamorphosed into terror, we have a representation of America. But that does not mean they bear any individual or collective responsibility for your hate.

You hated them simply because they were a disembodied 'America' in your mind, an abstract idea, something easy to hate because you had already categorized them into something distant, something you can't or won't touch, something far away you will not have any discourse with. A thing. For you, killing the Twin Towers was killing America. Killing buildings was equivalent to killing people, to killing a country. All these 'things' were the same, in your hate-filled mind, but you were wrong. You have killed innocents. You have killed individuals. You categorized us into this thing that you hate, you idealized us into something wretched, and you went about trying to kill this idea-thing with your horrible acts. But you were wrong, and this is why America, this unique and wonderful land of diversity, this expanse of individuals working together, cannot be defeated by your hateful acts. We will rebuild our country, and we will always remember those innocents who died yesterday.

What I believe this Tuesday should teach us, if we can still learn anything in our deepest grief and shock, is that our ideas, when we turn them into hateful things, when we categorize innocents into being disembodied entities, these ideas and the minds that latch onto these idea-things for the sake of a warped clarity, they are at the root of what is evil. To be human is to engage with, to care about. To be human is to love another. To be human is to communicate with someone, even if you are only shouting at them. The most human of all is discourse. With nature. With other human beings. Even with other ideas. But when you prefer an island of clarity in your mind, when you don't want to be contradicted, when you don't want to defend your actions, then you will turn human beings, innocents, into things. And then it so easy to kill these 'things' in your mind.

But even if America, that America of individuals working together, was deeply wounded on this black Tuesday, even if thousands of us died because someone turned us into a thing to hate in his mind, America will not be defeated. We will get up again. We will grieve. We may even hate for a while, too, because our anger has reached unimaginable levels. But we will fight against our hate, we will argue against it, in our own minds, and we will finally put it aside as something at the root of evil, where we do not want to go. And then we will win our fight to be human. One day in the distant future, one day perhaps far away, we will have a good day when we don't cry anymore for those thousands of innocents who died yesterday. We will never forget them, but we will go on with caring about, loving, and arguing with each other. And then, on another clear and sunny day, when we should be taking our children to the park or to visit a famous skyscraper or simply getting them ready for their first week of school, we will be wounded again by someone who has not bothered to escape the idea-things in his mind. And never shall we give up on ourselves. Never. This one is for the thousands of individuals who died yesterday. I wish I had known every single one of them.

www.ChicoLingo.com

American Anima

2010-08-26T20:24:00.005-04:00

Sometimes you need a break to regain your anima. That is what I needed after finishing a few projects, after a long hot summer, after trying to make sense of the American political scene where a large segment of the population lives in willful ignorance or willful opposition to the great values I thought this country stood for.

Yesterday I suggested to my thirteen-year-old son Isaac that he read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: freedom is slavery, Barack Obama is a Muslim, bigotry is tolerance. Does the truth matter anymore? I am not sure. Everything is politics and spin. Where do we stand? Who cares. It is only a matter of whether I win against you, whoever ‘you’ are, and whether I can convince enough people that lies are truths. And if enough people act on these ‘lies,’ who is to say they do not become ‘truths’ anyway? That is the head-spinning historical moment we are in.

I could rail against the specific lies swirling in the political and cultural scene, but plenty of other commentators are already doing that. Instead, I feel I should be a philosophical conscience, someone who tries to understand what this moment might mean for our community.

As readers of Chico Lingo will note, sometimes I gain meaning from the specific, and sometimes I pull back to philosophize about my experiences. The movement from specifics to generalities, and back, is a way to test what I think with what I see and experience, and to adjust my thinking with reality. Perhaps somebody like Hegel would call this ‘dialectical,’ but I simply try to stay away from such fancy words.

I believe you can think profoundly without obfuscation, by using simplicity like a sword. That is why I write philosophical stories. Philosophy in literature is that unique nexus between specific characters --their situations and motivations-- and moral values. Such stories can ‘show the way,’ so to speak, without being heavy-handed; they can encourage readers to experience truths they can appreciate in their own lives. If you as a writer write a good story, it will be good most importantly because it will be believed.

So what are some of my preliminary conclusions from the strange and acerbic political scene of the United States? The commonalities of our American experience have been undermined because of our economic problems. Or to put it another way, we are losing our sense of community, of belonging to and with each other, in large part because we or family members have lost our jobs, we feel economically insecure, and we have experienced businesses and governments fleecing us, instead of representing our best interests. This Great Recession has turned us against each other. Whites against African-Americans and Latinos. Christians against Muslims. Even the old against the young.

When I sat in philosophical seminars as a Yale graduate student, it always seemed odd to me that abstract arguments about ‘the truth’ were precisely detailed and logically dissected, yet no one ever chose to point out that professors were gentle, encouraging, and even forgiving with their favorites, while being merciless and impatient with students outside the chosen circle. What constituted ‘the circle’? It was different for different professors.

But the point was that if you were in the circle, you could learn from your mistakes and be encouraged to take chances to progress as a philosophical thinker. If you were outside the circle, you were ignored or dismissed. The discussion of ‘the truth,’ and even accepting such-and-such arguments as legitimate for or against the topic at hand, depended on aspects that had nothing to do with ‘the truth.’ What often mattered underneath our discussions about the truth was how friendly you were with the professor, did he like you, or did he know you already. When you were given the benefit of the doubt, you could go far. When you weren’t, you were stopped dead in your tracks.

I think something similar is happening in the United States. Our beliefs in religious freedom and protecting the rights of political minorities (enshrined in the Federalist Papers and the Constitution), our belief in welcoming immigrants to become enfranchised Americans, as long as they worked hard to succeed, even our beliefs in equality and fairness- all of these values depended on an economically prosperous America. As long as we were dominant in the world economy and growing domestically and producing profits and jobs, then we could not only tolerate, but encourage, these traditional American values.

But the economic world has changed. Although we are still the world’s largest economy, many countries have grown faster than we have, some of our companies did not adapt well to the multi-polar world, the dollar is under siege as a reserve currency, and too many of our citizens became fat and lazy, perhaps too entranced by an insipid materialism and celebrity culture. We don’t read. We eat too much. We are not as good as we were in math and science. The economic world beyond our borders is not only catching up, but in many respects is leaving America behind.

So we have begun to turn on each other. We have begun to abandon cherished values. We debase the Constitution, while proclaiming to protect it. Bigotry is defended with a defiant wave of Old Glory.

I am left pondering a final interesting question: Is our declining relative prosperity in the world a cause or an effect of our frayed community? Perhaps as we became more of a heterogeneous community, it also meant we worked less well together, we trusted each other less, and we could more easily take advantage of each other. So our cultural, racial, and religious diversity in part caused our economic problems. Perhaps it is not a matter of cause and effect at all, but of interrelation. Our differences and our economic problems have fed on each other, in a vicious cycle.

In any case, we need to get ourselves out of this ditch so that we can recognize the best in ourselves. Or, in our dire straits, we need to remember who we are, and so get ourselves out of this ditch. For me it doesn’t matter which way we regain our anima, as long as we do it. A good start would be to turn off the radio and television, and reconnect with the small and neglected spaces within our mind and within our community. What you will find here is who you are. In these spaces, nobody will tell you who you should be, nor how you should think.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Traveling Alone Together

2010-07-08T09:18:00.002-04:00

I am toward the end of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on my iPhone no less, and I have relished every second with this poet. Just as with Emily Dickinson’s Collected Works, which I also read on my iPhone, I have longed to take a leisurely subway ride, or to have a free hour or so before I sleep, to reenter this portable world of words.

Whitman and Dickinson are so different. I admire Dickinson’s almost mathematical precision and rhythm. Her abstractions on poems often match my thinking in an uncanny way: as her song ends I understand, and yet the idea lingers in the air and adds depth where no words are written.

Whitman however unleashes the line from any certainty, and revels in nature’s details, as if ideas would only intrude in the world before our eyes. I admire Whitman’s enthusiastic camaraderie, his openness to sex, immigrants, the offbeat, and the wonder of being alone.

Both poets in a way seem alone with their poetry. They are to me deeply humanistic, yet this is not a humanism that values the chitchat of society, or the glib conclusions of casual and catty observers. They seem alone to me because they travel within themselves. To stop and remark politely would despoil their journey. They hearken to ‘others’ --what writer does not want to be read?-- but these others are those like themselves. They are traveling alone together.

I started Chico Lingo to communicate, debate, chronicle, and explore the days before me. At times I write to you, the reader. Sometimes I plead for understanding. On other occasions, yes, I will pontificate and complain. But I also write to myself. It is one of the interesting and peculiar activities human beings can do: they can reflect on what they think, through writing in my case, in which my ‘thinking’ is arranged into words and paragraphs, through Chico Lingo.

I embarked on this journey into myself principally because this is how I have always been. I want to be alone together with others who are not glib, who question what is given to them by authority or tradition, who wonder at thinking and understanding, the process, and who see what is in between the said, the concluded, and the promised. When I have ignored this ‘searching self with an acute perspective,’ to give it a name, I ignore myself. I do it when I am in a hurry, when I am in pain, and when I am weak-minded. And I have always regretted it later. It is as if I had temporarily lost who I truly am.

I have often imagined it is the soul reaching out, this thinking and writing alone together. This soul is meant to be understood and read, and it is meant to reach someone, but that audience is whoever listens, and perhaps limited to those who already will not forget the quiet self that shadows them even within their family. The audience for this soul, instead of being a target, grants itself into the company of those wanting to be alone together.

So I seek my audience with a vague hope to be heard, but even if I am not, if my words and strange musings remain unread and not understood, I would still reach into the darkness. I don’t know why. It is not for the audience. Nor is it for a vain self. It is --how can I explain it?-- at once to sanctify and upend life, to lift it from what it is, to focus thought into words and create a call to what was and what is when we live.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Illegal is Illegal

2010-06-20T08:46:00.005-04:00

That stupid tautology is what passes nowadays for thinking in today’s debate on illegal immigration. It’s stupid, because instead of explaining or justifying anything, that tautology glosses over the complex context of undocumented workers in the United States, and how many of us benefit from their work. With such glibness, we wash our hands of understanding their plight.

It’s good to be a hypocrite in this country on illegal immigration. It’s rare anybody calls you on it; it’s rare self-satisfied hypocrites do any reflection. Illegal is illegal. That’s it. Case closed. I’ve even seen that slogan trumpeted on political placards in upstate New York.

I was in Missouri last week, staying at a nice hotel, paid by the school which brings me in to conduct writing workshops. As I was editing and grading stories and essays from my students, there was a knock on the door. Two women with cleaning carts smiled sheepishly as I opened the door, and said in heavily accented English they would come back later.

I beckoned them in, saying it was okay. As I worked, I heard them chat in Spanish about Mexico defeating France in the World Cup. I introduced myself in Spanish, told them my parents were from Chihuahua, and saw their jaws drop. Yes, we were all Mexicanos, the guy in the oxford shirt with the Macbook in front of him, and the ladies who were cleaning the toilets and vacuuming.

I spoke to ‘Julia’ for a while, from Guerrero. She told me she desperately wanted to learn English, but had no time. “Trabajo dos trabajos. Diez y seis horas seguidas, y no me da tiempo.” That is: “I work two jobs. Sixteen hours back to back, and I don’t have the time.” She smiled a toothy smile while she said this, and my heart wanted to break. I asked her how they treated her at this hotel, and she said the manager was extremely nice to them. Julia told me she sends money back home every month, to her family in Guerrero.

What is remarkable to me is how often this scene has been repeated in about every hotel I have stayed in America. A few months ago, I was in Denver at an annual conference of writers. At one of the fanciest hotels in the Mile High City, again an undocumented worker was cleaning my room. I chatted with ‘Maria Teresa.’ As we spoke on the second day, she was almost teary when I handed her a signed copy of my first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories. I told her to have her children read her the stories. I almost lost it myself when she responded, as we said goodbye at the door’s threshold, that she wanted her children to become like me.

These are the people who are the overwhelming majority of the undocumented workers vilified by the idiots in Arizona, and elsewhere, as illegal immigrants. They are the salt of the earth. Many of them are desperate to be Americanos. But Americans already in power, many of Italian, German, Irish and Scandinavian descent, have forgotten how their grandfathers and great-grandmothers arrived in the New World. We want our hotels clean, and cheaply, so we can profit from the labor of Latin American workers.

We want our strawberries and apples picked beautifully, without bruises, and cheaply. But we turn the other way and somehow don’t hear when someone explains how this is possible at high-end markets like Fairway or Zabar’s in Manhattan, or across the country at Stop & Shops. Who is in the fields picking our fruit, for hours under the merciless sun? Who cares! Illegal is illegal, they say happily, as they stuff another strawberry in their faces at the Marriott.

I instead talk to undocumented workers, especially if I see them working diligently to make our country better. I ask them how they are. I listen to their stories. And I can only respect them in return. That’s the decent thing to do. That’s the right thing to do. When did we become so callous?

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers, and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn’t an INS officer.

I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn’t see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it’s so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned, and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Literal: Latin American Voices

2010-05-31T22:31:00.007-04:00

This spring I have an essay in a groundbreaking magazine I hope many of you will buy and read, Literal: Latin American Voices, edited by Rose Mary Salum. My essay, “A Third Culture: Literature and Migration,” focuses on a topic I discussed at the Guadalajara International Book Fair last November, namely how my writing has been affected as an immigrant to the English language and American culture.

What is exciting about this bilingual issue (Spanish and English) of Literal is its mixture of literature and politics, art and photography, translated works from Latin America and Germany, poetry, fiction, and interviews. Its nexus is Rose Mary Salum, an incessantly curious editor, who has created an intellectual cornucopia. I have read about six other issues of Literal, and each is a surprise, a provocation, and a plea to look at the world anew. I have C. M. Mayo to thank for introducing me to Rose Mary in Guadalajara, where over a long lunch the three of us had one of the best conversations I’ve had at any literary event.

In this issue of Literal, the highlight for me was an unpublished essay by the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The essay was a talk Paz gave at the University of Texas at Austin in 1986, and is entitled, “Writers and artists in the history of Mexico.” For anyone who cares about the role of the intellectual in society, in fomenting democracy or stifling it, for anyone who wants to understand the link between Mexican culture and its politics, this is an important work.

Paz focuses on the attitudes of Mexican intellectuals to modernity from the 16^th Century to the 20^th Century, inaugurated by the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the eventual rise of the PRI. Clericals dominated intellectual life in Mexico in the 16^th Century. Within a rigid orthodoxy, they struggled with uncertain attitudes toward modernity. The revolutions of intimacy and reason, the critical cadre of intellectuals exemplified by Hume, Descartes, and Newton, catapulted Europe and the morals of its people to an intellectual ferment that was modern, particular, and pluralistic.

The positivism that arose in Mexico in the 1860s, however, was a global explanation for Mexican society, which instead should have been a philosophy particular to that country. As Paz relates, the positivism of Porfirio Diaz and his cronies was simply the adoption of the “old theology” with a pseudo-scientific focus. Before Juárez, intellectuals were part of the church. After Juárez, intellectuals became part of the state, an unfortunate trend which continued even after the Revolution of 1910.

Paz asks the question: how can you modernize a nation and its morals if those responsible (namely intellectuals) are not completely modern? He argues that Mexican intellectuals possessed a ‘pre-modern psyche’ with modern ideas. Mexican intellectuals were not democratic, or interested in solving social issues; they adopted philanthropy, as a social action from above, given their uncertain status as statist elites. Patrimonialismo, or corruption, became a social norm; a political-bureaucratic class and centralismo flourished.

What Paz says is missing from Mexico, and what he would have wanted Mexico to have, are a balance of power in politics, a critical and independent press, the autonomy of the legislature, and “authentic democracy.” He longs for that “fraternity of man,” which he believes exists among average Mexicans, and which he sees spontaneously on display during an earthquake, where neighbor helped neighbor.

The role of the intellectual, according to Paz, is to help create this fraternity: “I am one of those who believes in gradual and peaceful changes. That is why I speak: I believe in the word. Gradual and peaceful changes are not attained without the intellectual class. Not because this class is owner of the power to change something, but because this class exercises the power of persuasion that other classes do not possess. From there, a change of consciousness must be fundamental.” (My translation)

There is no clearer explanation for why I started Chico Lingo. To have an independent voice. To persuade. To change how people look at the world. The word is not flimsy, even though it possesses no obvious power. But sometimes the word reaches deeply into souls, particularly those who are still listening and looking, and that is where you may win a world.

www.ChicoLingo.com

King of the Chicanos

2010-05-24T20:29:00.008-04:00

Today I finished reading a wonderful novel, King of the Chicanos (Wings Press), by Manuel Ramos, which was published a few weeks ago. Ramos has written several crime fiction novels, and so the prose is tight and clean and the plot moves quickly. But the importance of the novel is its focus, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the questions which arise about whether the movement continues today, in other forms, in other venues.

Most of the events described in King of the Chicanos take place before my time, when I was in grade school in El Paso. But these events, and particularly the issues of the protagonist, Ramón Hidalgo, resonate today. The unabashed support for racial and ethnic profiling of Arizona’s new immigration law and that state legislature’s attack against ethnic studies programs demonstrate that we are in a Back-to-the-Future moment.

The fight for respect, for being treated as equals, for pride that lifts us to become better citizens, was a fight fought by our predecessors, and a fight that needs organization, commitment, and passion again today. Hidalgo is a natural leader who is animated by the police's brutality against Chicanos, by the establishment’s disenfranchisement of Mexican-Americans, from politics to literature.

Can we say we have progressed so far that these issues are not relevant today? Of course not. I would argue, in some cases like Arizona and the media’s stereotypical portrayal of undocumented workers and even American Latinos, that we have regressed to a worse state of affairs.

But what takes King of the Chicanos to a subtler, more complex level is Ramos’s unstinting portrayal of Ramón Hidalgo’s mistakes as a leader and flaws as a human being. There is vicious infighting in the organization Hidalgo leads; personal conflicts trump organizational imperatives. In one sense, this is the limitation of ‘familia,’ of not taking the organization beyond a personal level, to a more professional, perhaps politically powerful level. Hidalgo is also self-destructive in a way, womanizing his way out of a marriage with an excellent partner whom he never ceases to love.

Lessons learned, I kept thinking, as I finished the novel. Yes, there are important lessons learned in King of the Chicanos. This work should be read by many young, and not-so-young, activists who are tired of being stomped on by the likes of Jan Brewer and Rush Limbaugh. We need more than raw passion this time. We need to be focused, and we need to be bigger than ourselves, and we need to be a political force that can translate our power to the ballot box, to legislatures, to the courts, and eventually to mainstream American culture.

I also want to point out, in my literary realm, how our struggle continues. We need more books by and about Chicanos, and not just the version of ‘Mexican-Americans’ assumed in New York or Austin. But to have that, to have more quality books published by small and large publishers about Chicanos, we need to buy more of our books, we need to educate our community about our stories, and we need to keep telling our stories, in every corner, in every town, until we are heard. But first we need to listen to each other. Only then will others turn around, and pay attention to the literary commotion and debate that is ours.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Mr. Fixit

2010-05-13T22:30:00.000-04:00

I have spent the past two weeks fixing broken things, or having them fixed by experts. My son’s MacBook needed the RAM replaced at the new Apple Store near Lincoln Center. I fixed the blinds on our window that were about to crash down on our heads. I called the A/C repair guys, who came to oil and clean out the air conditioners in our apartment, but I wasn’t very impressed with them: I had to make sure they did the job right, and often they were sloppy.

Our electronic Yamaha piano had four keys that wouldn’t pop up anymore, in part because our fat cat Ocistar jumps on the piano to launch himself out the front door whenever I go to the trash room on our floor. I found an electronic piano wizard, courtesy of the Sam Ash Music Store, who repaired it beautifully. I’ll permanently fix the cat-piano-problem with the thick cover I ordered for our Yamaha.

A reliable handyman in our building fixed the kids’ toilet, which didn’t flush properly anymore, and replaced our tub faucet, which during a shower gushed water onto my feet but precious little on my head. Another handyman re-caulked both bathrooms.

I fixed the navigation system on our Honda Pilot, and repaired the filter and cleaned out the pump that produces a nice waterfall for a small fish pond in our house in Connecticut. Two dead trees are decaying in our side yard; they need to come down. When will it end? I wish I could repair the state of Arizona, or pay someone to do it, but even some problems are too big for me.

There comes a point when too many things are broken. I reached that point two weeks ago. Everybody was complaining, but not doing anything about it, and so I grabbed my Fixit flag and charged into the first problem first, and then the next, and the next. But it really never ends. Today the mop broke.

Of course, I’ve been ‘repairing’ my novel all throughout this Fixit frenzy, which means I’ve been rewriting it. That also never ends, until it does, and how you know when the writing is ‘finished’ is an epiphany of sorts, a sense of judgment that this, what you have on the page, is what you always meant to write. Whether someone will publish it is, again, another matter.

But I still do have a sense of tired accomplishment, that several of the things I fixed, or got fixed, will stay fixed, at least for a while. This state of ‘fixedness,’ so to speak, is but a brief moment in time. Soon enough something else will fall apart and need repair. I don’t live for that stasis, but for the struggle to reach it and for what I learn by fixing things. It’s really philosophical, and all that crap, but I’m exhausted. So maybe that’s the point of the state of ‘fixedness,’ to rest. I sorely need it.

“Dad, something’s wrong with the printer!” I have to go.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Arizona

2010-04-30T18:11:00.011-04:00

Obama won the last presidential election, but Latinos are facing the political backlash from conservative whites, who see, more clearly than ever, that their days are numbered as the ethnic majority in this country. That’s one conclusion I can draw from recent news and events. I am felled by an awful spring flu, with a fever and an achy body and a nose that gushes as if it were the well of the Deepwater Horizon. But this is too important a day to be a bystander.

Arizona’s new law, SB1070, has been given an acceptable façade with the argument that it’s only against illegal immigrants and that it won’t result in racial profiling. But what is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that someone is an illegal immigrant? What does an illegal immigrant look like? Like John McCain? Sarah Palin?

It’s a law that the rogue cop who already hates all things Mexican, illegal or not, will easily abuse to jail a poor mother and father who don’t happen to be carrying their birth certificates in their back pockets. I suspect that even if American Latinos have their birth certificates when they sleep, that the Arizona birthers will assume these documents are fraudulent. They simply don’t like Mexicans, whether they are here illegally or not.

I conclude this not because I am paranoid, or because I see every political issue through an ethnic or racial lens. I do not. Read my blog, witness my marriage, see how I raise my children, examine my voting record. What you will see, I hope, is a person who was given great opportunities in this country, who is conservative on some issues and liberal on others, who is proud of his Mexican heritage, yet still criticizes and tries to change practices within our community to make it more successful, more powerful, more open-minded.

But when I see that yesterday the Arizona state legislature also passed a bill that “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” I know that this legislative majority in Arizona does not like Mexican-Americans. Imagine, a Mexican-American studies program in Arizona is being compared to treason. What kind of mentality makes that irrational link? The Arizona Department of Education is also trying to fire teachers with accents who teach English classes. What is happening in this crazy state? This weekend, the ‘education’ bill is awaiting the governor’s signature.

So I don’t draw my tough conclusions on anything but the evidence of idiocy that are the actions of the Arizona state legislature. I can only wait for those legislative Caesars in Texas to also take up racist and xenophobic causes, or Oklahoma and Alabama. Are we about to start a new Confederacy in the South? What happened to giving opportunity to new strangers to this country, to helping them become Americans, which they so desperately want? What happened to being open-minded about someone who doesn’t look like you, who doesn’t sound like you?

For Latinos, we must organize. We must protest. We must register to vote in huge numbers, and then vote with our neighbors and friends at the ballot box. We must get involved in politics locally, seek alliances with those who will help us. We should never stay silent, and allow others to do the work of fighting for causes we care about. That’s what this country is about: getting involved, gaining our voice, getting a chance to fulfill our highest potential. These days should prompt a new grito for freedom, respect, and self-determination.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Financial Chess

2010-04-20T19:36:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow I will make another financial chess move. We are refinancing the mortgage on our house, to a super-low interest rate, at a shorter term. We close on the deal in the morning. My father often criticizes me for “always worrying about money,” but discovering a financial advantage and having the guts to take advantage of it have been the ways in which I have gained my economic freedom.

During the nadir of the financial meltdown in March 2009, I was smart enough not to panic, even though I worried about my investments and what my wife and I had achieved, in stock gains, over many years. As the market came back over the past year, I vowed to take into account that worry. I sold stock, and Laura and I decided to use those gains to pay down our mortgage and so shorten the years of our mortgage debt.

When I was younger, I had almost 100 percent of my investment money in stocks, stock mutual funds, and only an emergency fund in bonds. As I have gotten older, and with the experience of 2009 fresh in my mind, I have realized I want to preserve more of what I have, and not to focus only on growing it. So I adapted. Adapt or die, I say, to any would-be investor.

Yet the bonds I have purchased have been on the short-end of the yield curve, because I expect interest rates to go up. They can hardly go down any further, so the best bet is that they will either stay stable for a while, or go up. When interest rates go up, the prices of bonds go down: an inverse relationship. So any bond that is long-term (i.e. greater than ten years) will be hurt more by a one percentage increase in interest rates, than a bond that is short-term (less than three years, or just one year).

Another financial chess move I have made over the past three years is to increase my foreign stock allocation. When I teach an investment analysis course, I always give my class the current total stock market capitalization of the world, and what portion belongs to the United States. Since the 1970s, the American share of world stock market capitalization has declined. The world outside the U.S. is growing faster than the U.S. Brazil, India, China, and South Korea are great growth stories.

Even individual American companies I purchase for my portfolio I examine in light of their foreign revenues: companies with their eyes on foreign markets will simply have less of their eggs in one (domestic) basket. If you think our budget and trade deficits will have a negative effect on the dollar (I do), then you will benefit by having companies earning their revenues in Euros, Yuan, Won, and Yen.

I also expect taxes to go up. Why? We have these gigantic deficits and lack the political will to tackle spending on entitlements and the military nationally, and on state and city government budgets and bureaucracies locally. I blame both Republicans and Democrats for this situation, and think they will come together when they are forced to come together. Crony capitalism on Wall Street and dysfunctional politics in Washington have left us in a mess, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world. I believe the Tea Party activists are overstating their case. I see reported profits for S&P 500 companies higher than expected, and perhaps there is a chance we can grow out of this deficit hole.

Right now I would vote for Obama again. Why? He has been pragmatic when faced with the economic cleanup of the Bush mess. Obama has forced consumer protections on credit-card companies and is actually regulating, as the government should, the practices of financial institutions which drove the American economy into a ditch. The laissez-faire, I’m-a-deregulator philosophy of Bush allowed the powerful to take advantage of the weak and uninformed, and the well-connected to seek a public bailout when their crazy risks exploded in their faces. And ours. We can’t let that happen again.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Returning the Blood to Words

2010-04-09T17:56:00.007-04:00

At almost every AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) there is a moment, a panel, a writer who reminds you of why you became a writer in the first place. The annual conference is in Denver this year, and Martín Espada, the master poet, was the man for me this year. Last year it was Marie Ponsot.

Espada: “Writers should return the blood to words.”

Espada said so many things on his panel, “Justice, Community, and the Republic of Poetry,” with Tara Betts and David Mura. But that sentence encapsulates his ideas about writers fighting the deadness of language used by politicians and even the deadness of perspective given our busy and often compromised lives.

Espada read and sang in a way only poets do, to uplift the literary sprits, to call us to the social mission of writing, to dethrone the accepted, to criticize the unjust, to delve roughly and humorously into ourselves too, lest we forget that not only is the world the issue, but also the self.

Years ago I had a similar reaction the first time I heard Curbstone’s Alexander Taylor speak at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. Sandy, who died in December of 2007, may he rest in peace, invigorated me and gave me purpose. I write to change the world, to prod myself, to seek answers to questions often unasked, to lead the good life as Aristotle may have envisioned, which is hard and unrelenting. And I try to do this with good stories that engage the reader. Philosophy in literature, some have called it. So hearing Sandy, just like hearing Martín, captured my soul.

I dropped everything, even the panels I am missing as I type this, to write this entry. This is what great writers do: they cause you to act. They don’t just entertain you (although they have to do that if they are storytellers), but they prompt you to do, to change your perspective, to ask yourself tough questions, to believe in a just republic and imagine the impossible.

Martín Espada and Sandy Taylor were great friends. I also remember hearing Martín speak about reading poetry to Sandy as he lay in the hospital during his final hours. I knew Sandy, since I had been briefly on the Curbstone Board. But I do not know Martín except from afar. I am lucky to have paid attention to their words.

I have been pondering why it is that poets, recently, have been the ones inspiring me. It is their exceptional use of language, and their thinking beyond the norm and the staid. This poetic thinking I believe is deeply philosophical. These writers seem to pose the question of ‘seeing’ without assuming what it means, or what it has meant, or what it can mean. ‘Seeing’ for these poets is a new act with every poem.

During breaks, I am finishing Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and have already received recommendations from poet-friends on what to read next. It has been a great conference so far. But now I need the solitude and quiet that beckon me even in a crowd.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Loss of Juárez

2010-03-31T23:21:00.012-04:00

I am back in El Paso with Laura and the kids, having just been in El Paso two weeks ago for the Juntos Art and Literature Festival. The kids have spring break at their schools, and we needed a break from New York City.

We visited the Centennial Museum at UTEP, which was closed for César Chávez Day, but the Chihuahuan Desert Garden, around the museum, was open. We spent a leisurely hour or so marveling at the variety of cacti, giant carpenter bees, and yellow-and-black butterflies of the garden. The peace of the garden’s nooks, El Fortin, and other hideouts amid the flowers and sun refreshed us unlike anything in recent memory.

But as we drove back to Ysleta on the Border Highway a sense of sadness overtook me. My kids, for two years, have been clamoring to go to Mexico. My wife and I have said no, because of the rampant violence in Juárez. Today we settled for stopping on the shoulder of the freeway, just after the Bridge of the Americas and on top of the Yarbrough overpass, for pictures of Mexico and the infamous border fence my children have studied in school.

The violence and the wall have separated us; it is no compensation to look at Juárez from afar; I wish my children could know the Juárez I knew as child. But I will never willingly put them in harm’s way.

What others who have not lived on the border may not understand is how close El Paso and Juárez were and are even today. Close culturally. Many with families in both cities. Close in so many ways. When I was in high school in El Paso, my family always --and I mean every Sunday-- had a family dinner in Juárez at one of my parents' favorite restaurants: Villa Del Mar, La Fogata, La Central, Tortas Nico, and Taqueria La Pila.

It was going back in time, to the city where my father and mother met and were married. But it was also to experience another set of rules and values, to a mysterious country with more bookstores than I ever saw in El Paso, to tortas and open-air mercados, to primos who would drop everything to show me their horses, and even to my first funeral- the open casket is still vivid in my mind. A young boy, the son of a friend of my parents, had been run over by a car. Juárez for me was primal and vivid; it was my history. I thought I understood it instinctually, even spiritually, and that’s just when it baffled me the most. After graduating from Harvard, I spent a year in Mexico City to get my fill of this labyrinth of a country.

On Monday just before we came to El Paso, I was trying to explain this to friends in Boston, at a Passover seder. How Juárez was closer to El Paso, than New York City was to New Jersey. How people went to lunch in Juárez and were able to return to the United States in a couple of hours. How we used to go to Waterfil over the Zaragoza International Bridge (on the outskirts of Juárez) for Easter picnics, clinking cases of sodas, or groceries we couldn’t find in Ysleta. Yes, it was that close, in the most trivial and profound ways, and we took it for granted.

Two years ago that world changed. Two years ago an unprecedented orgy of drug violence exploded in Juárez. Two years ago we lost Juárez, as a place to show our kids where their abuelitos came from, and in so many other ways. It is a deeply felt loss for many of us in El Paso.

I am tired of pointing out that the voracious drug habits of the United States and the millions of dollars of American guns illegally exported to Mexico are root causes of the drug violence. Not to mention a corrupt local police force in Mexico, and an ineffective national government. For the moment, the hypocrisy, the idiocy, and the cheapness of life are too much to bear.

I just miss Juárez. It was never a joke for me, as it was for some of my Anglo friends and not a few of my Chicano friends from El Paso. It was a portal to another world that felt at once deeply familiar and strangely fascinating. When will this nightmare end?

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Texas Board of Ignorance

2010-03-17T20:17:00.011-04:00

I left Texas to educate myself. At Harvard College, one of my greatest shocks was how little I knew about my heritage and Mexican history. I was born and lived in Ysleta, less than half a mile from the Zaragoza International Bridge, yet I knew nothing about where I was from. So I spent four years at Harvard College studying Latin America with visionary teachers like Peter Smith and Terry Karl; I learned Mexican history from John Womack.

I imagined one day life would be different for a young and eager high school student from Ysleta, one who was proud to be an American citizen yet who also wanted to know more about his roots. But the recent vote on textbook standards from the Texas Board of Education shows that Texas is going backward, not forward. Close-mindedness is winning. Ignorance is trumpeted. Isolation and indoctrination are the new watchwords for those afraid of a changing world.

To recap: last week, the Texas Board of Education, led by a conservative majority, voted to call into question concepts like the separation of church and state and the American Revolution as a secular revolt. The majority voted to emphasize the political contributions of Phyllis Schlafly, while minimizing Thomas Jefferson, apparently too democratic for their tastes. In fact, the United States, according to these conservative activists, should not be studied as a ‘democracy’ anymore, but as a ‘constitutionally-based republic.’ Guess who decides what’s in the Constitution? Previously this conservative majority had attacked the historical contributions of César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

This is what happens when people hunker down. When your state is becoming too Mexican-American and African-American, when you feel you are being left behind, when perhaps you see the day when you will not be the majority anymore, then you retrench and attempt to rewrite history. But what happened to thinking? What happened to understanding that many Latinos, including my mother, hold deeply conservative values, yet simply do not want to be mistreated or disrespected? What happened to studying the fact that the Constitution counted a slave as two-thirds of a person, while also being a unique founding document that created checks and balances between branches of government to control their powers? Why can’t we study the failures of our history as well as our triumphs, and still appreciate that we live in a great country?

One conservative board member, in an interview, said the majority’s vote was “the return of American exceptionalism.” But sadly, the conservative vote of the Texas Board of Education shows exactly the opposite. The United States was an exceptional, historically unique country because it was pluralistic, because you had freedom of speech and freedom from a state-imposed religion, because unlike hierarchical Europe you could achieve whatever you wanted to achieve regardless of class, religion, and then later, race. We have always been a work-in-progress; that's the root of our greatness.

The United States remains exceptional as long as we correct our mistakes, as long as we keep confronting our problems head on. That’s what a democracy does, at least when it functions well. The problems get aired out, confronted, and eventually fixed more or less.

But when you trumpet some weirdly nostalgic ‘America’ that never existed, without the messy conflicts, without the democratic debates, without the will of the people manifesting itself through blood and protest, what you are holding high is an ‘American absolutism.’ You are saying, in effect, stop thinking. Stop including the newcomers, like Latinos, and stop turning them into Americans. You are saying stop the potpourri of religions now in America; let’s all be Christians.

You are saying, without saying it, that we are not confident anymore. We are not pluralistic anymore. We must close shop. We must bar the doors. This scary new world is too much. Let’s teach our children to hide.

The only saving grace is that I learned about the vote of the Texas Board of Education in El Paso. At least El Paso is barely part of Texas. I don’t have to explain myself in El Paso, and I don’t have to endure suspicious stares or seemingly polite comments about my accent in Ysleta. As Texas becomes more like El Paso, maybe one of these days, before I die, I will feel at home in the rest of Texas too.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Viejitos

2010-03-10T18:58:00.015-05:00

I have really excellent parents. The only problem is that they drive a new Toyota Camry, and I’m worried it will be a death trap for them. Of course, I had them take it to the dealer, and the dealer in El Paso said their car wasn’t part of the recall. But do I trust the dealer or Toyota? Didn’t I just see a report of a runaway Toyota (which had been given a clean bill of health by a dealer) that had to be stopped with the help of a California highway patrolman? The driver was so shaken up by the near catastrophe that he needed an ambulance. I can only imagine what would happen to my elderly parents in that situation.

As our parents grow older, we worry more about them. My father and mother are both 75-years-old. My father Rodolfo, who has diabetes, can’t walk more than ten feet without needing to sit down or to lean on his wheeled walker. He is still ‘there’ mentally, but his body is betraying him. My mother Bertha has become the boss of the family, and has always possessed an incredible memory. She is the one who drives, buys the groceries, and keeps my father’s doctor appointments, with him in tow. Without her, I don’t know what we would do.

Luckily, my brothers live in El Paso, and so they help my parents whenever there is a true emergency. But in reality, my parents love to be self-sufficient, are beyond intrepid, and will only ask for help as a last resort. Having unlimited long distance on my home phone helps me keep in touch with my parents. I am the one who alerted them to the Toyota recall during its initial weeks, who told them to get their H1N1 shots, and who helped them with their taxes. I also invest their savings (extremely conservatively, given my parents’ preferences).

It is possible I am just bothering them, when I call them once a week. Perhaps they would have gotten their flu shots anyway. But I do have lengthy conversations with them about all sorts of topics, which I think sometimes changes their outlook, decisions, or practices. It is not out of guilt that I call them, and it is not because I believe my way on such-and-such a topic is the only way. I have a brother who generally listens to me financially, and another one who does not. (I won’t mention who’s who.)

But this ‘family exchange of information,’ I believe, is the root of good neighborhoods and the root of strengthening communities to do better for themselves. I think we, particularly Latinos, should do more of it. I hear on the Upper Westside, mothers and fathers having conversations about which schools are better and why, what scholarships are available, what’s a good summer camp for kids and why, what’s a reliable money market fund, what’s the best kind of mortgage and with which bank, and so on.

There is probably always a tendency to go it alone, to stay within yourself, to provide for your family, and not to waste time giving advice to others who might not do the same for you. It’s true: I don’t have all the time in the world, and I’m often in a hurry with six tasks on my to-do-list for the morning. But if I can help, if someone asks me, and if that day I can offer a practical suggestion, I’ll do it. I’m certainly more likely to help a friend than a stranger. And I’m certainly more likely to help someone who I think is a good character, rather than someone who seems to smile at me only when he or she wants something.

So from faraway I try to be a good son. I simply want my parents to be safe and happy. Today this is what my excellent parents did for me. My publisher sent hundreds of flyers to my house, for a reading I’ll be doing in El Paso on Friday. I won’t be arriving until late Thursday night, so my father and mother volunteered to take the package of flyers to downtown El Paso, to the El Paso Public Library, where they will be distributed by those running the Juntos Art and Literature Festival.

Of course, my parents drove to the other side of town in their Toyota Camry. Of course, my mother found parking (miracles of miracles!) in the heavily congested area around the library. Of course, I worried every single minute. Until she called me on the phone (as they dodged traffic on I-10 on the way back to Ysleta!) and said the lady who picked up the flyers was very nice to them. I need to tell them about the El Paso City Council's new ban on using cell phones while driving.

www.ChicoLingo.com

228 Miles

2010-02-26T00:54:00.003-05:00

Tonight I drove 228 miles, from Lawrence, MA to New York City, through a monsoon for the first 194 miles, and after Greenwich, CT through a snow hurricane that still roars outside my apartment window at midnight.

It was the most treacherous driving I have done for a while; I witnessed the aftermath of at least six accidents. On the Merritt Parkway, where on a normal night most ignore the 55-mph speed limit and cruise at 70-plus, every inch of the road surface glistened, the lane lines were invisible, and cars were sliding and hydroplaning even at 40 mph. It was tense, let’s just say, for four and a half hours.

I was in Lawrence this morning to give the Daniel Appleton White Fund Lecture, created in 1852 by Judge White, who was a contemporary of Hawthorne and Emerson. Judge White, whose memoir I discovered through Google Books, was the first president of the Salem Lyceum, and an advocate of democratizing knowledge through public lectures and discussions.

In the memoir, I noticed how open-minded he was, and truly, far-sighted: he believed deeply in his Protestant faith, yet castigated fellow Protestants who instead of possessing a culture of openness and inquiry were of an “opposite spirit” who “judging, censuring, avoiding, and reviling one another” undermined the right of others to be more, or even less devout, than them. He admired the Puritan immigrants and their search for religious freedom in the new world. Of course, in the spirit of Judge White, I talked about how Latinos can develop their voice and become full-fledged participants with cultural and political power in our American experiment.

The trip was worth every treacherous mile. Before the lecture, I conducted a workshop with ESL students at Northern Essex Community College. The stories the students told me about their lives as Dominicanos in Massachusetts, or immigrants from China and Bangladesh, were hilarious and poignant. We talked about how we have often been put down for having accents, or why even family members or neighbors might make fun of our dreams to educate ourselves.

We exchanged stories about how to find the right mentors, how to focus on yourself even when the world is hostile, and how to build that sense of self-esteem that keeps you focused on your goals. I took apart their oral stories, and showed them how naturally they were already excellent storytellers who could make an entire room break down with laughter. I pointed out the plot climax they so easily crafted and the true-to-life dialogue they inserted into their stories about encounters with police and immigration officials. The lecture was a great experience, but talking to these students, from twenty- to sixty-years-old, was the highlight of my trip. They have so much to say, and they do indeed have great teachers in Lawrence helping them say it.

I like an exchange with the audience as much as I like giving a speech to focus on complex points about culture, philosophy, or how I survived throughout the years. I learn as much from my audience as I feel they learn from me. These trips, like the trip to Lawrence, energize you and make you believe again that storytelling can make an essential difference in creating a better self, inspiring group self-reflection, and building a community out of individuals.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Camino del Sol

2010-02-18T16:57:00.012-05:00

This week a pleasant surprise was dropped into my mailbox: my contributor’s copy of the new anthology, Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing, edited by Rigoberto González and published by the University of Arizona Press. This is a masterful collection of contemporary writing, and I hope it will be used widely in schools. I have two stories in this book, “Punching Chickens” and “The Snake.”

But what thrills me whenever I appear in an anthology is to read other writers I admire, or to discover new work I am not familiar with. This collection includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published over fifteen years by the award-winning Camino del Sol series, which has been at the forefront of publishing quality American literature written by Latinos.

Virgil Suárez’s “Animalia,” the first poem in front of my eyes as I randomly opened the book, was nothing short of enthralling. The animals, the casual violence of children against animals, humans killing, eating, pleading with animals- the words and images spurred my memory and arrested the present like a poetic cinema. Diana Garcia’s “When living was a labor camp called Montgomery” took me back not to Califas, but to Socorro, Texas, to working on a chicken farm, to the dreams of workers amid an awful stench, to muscles that quivered in spasms with the sun, to the choices and accidents that led to an escape.

The personal essay “A Different Border” by Ray Gonzalez, the founder and first editor of the Camino del Sol series, brought me home to contemporary El Paso. The sleepy, isolated town has a growing military presence, anti-immigrant groups like the Minutemen lurk along the Texas-New Mexico border, and young, educated Chicanos buy into an often vapid, ahistorical existence. And still, this country uses, abuses, underpays, profits from, and then attempts to deport and even destroy human beings from Mexico. Not human beings, really. But ‘cheap labor.’ Or worse, ‘illegal aliens.’ It’s a borderlands’ movie epic: “Be Blind, Rewind.”

But the most intriguing work in Camino del Sol was the introductory essay by Rigoberto González. If you want to know, in a short read, about the history of Latino publishing in the United States, the authors, trends, sub-trends, categories, and publishers, the obscure as well as the well-known, the distant past as well as the future, then this is the essay for you. It is a survey in the best sense of the word, which is to say it records, examines, and appraises the state of American literature written by Latinos. You get the sense of a movement, perhaps gaining speed as of late, a flourishing through hard times and obscurity, that will not be denied anymore, that has become its own validation.

I became a writer to tell stories I had not before heard. I became a writer not to aggrandize myself or my family, nor to provide a false, perhaps romanticized version of Ysleta or El Paso. I became a writer because these stories, from my community, deserved to be heard. They deserved to be heard after I read stories in German in Vienna. They deserved to be heard after I studied Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Conrad at Widener Library.

The panoply of stories and poems from the Latino community still deserve to be heard, and read. I suspect many, if not most, of the writers in this anthology began with a similar motivation: a sense of pride mixed with a sense of strangulation, a belief that I am someone, that we are the people, that time is short, that our voices are just as often clear as faint, that today is the time to release a world.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Between Scylla and Charybdis

2010-02-09T21:22:00.006-05:00

As I hunker down for this epic snowstorm that may or may not arrive tomorrow in the City, I have been working on my finances. I do a few things at the beginning of the year, which I believe should help any investor remain disciplined and focused.

I would call myself an investor who is comfortable with risk, but over the years as I have amassed more capital I have shifted to preserving what I have as much as growing it. The other issue is that I have always ignored Wall Street research, simply because much of it is momentum-based: if the stock goes up, then it’s a good stock, and if it goes down then it’s a bad one.

Of course, almost no one can tell the direction of a stock before-the-fact (unless you’re cheating). You can be a lucky investor, but I want to be an intelligent one. Moreover, not enough attention is paid to the business of a company and the trustworthiness of its management. You want a company relentlessly focused on building shareholder value, cutting costs and overhead, deploying capital for the benefit of shareholders, not for fat-cat CEOs. All in a marvelous business where the profit margins are high. So the ethos of Wall Street, which seems to be “fleece the individual investor and even the taxpayer, if you can get away with it,” is what you want to avoid.

First, I re-balance my portfolios. That is, if I want 40 percent in bonds, and 60 percent in stocks, if those are my targets, I check at the beginning of the year and move money to regain those targets. What you are doing is moving money from your successes (say stocks, which climbed to 65 percent of your portfolio) to your failures (say bonds, which declined in relative value to your stocks, to 35 percent of your portfolio). It’s systematic contrarian investing. I recently read an article in the New York Times that showed how steadily saving for and re-balancing a diversified portfolio every year would have turned this past decade into an investing success, rather than the dismal failure it was for those who did nothing.

Second, I have been increasing my exposure to international stocks over the years, particularly emerging markets. It’s simple. The United States is a mature economy, with a dysfunctional political system which shows no sign of tackling our major problems. The American share of worldwide stock-market wealth has relentlessly declined: in 1970, the U.S. stock market was 66 percent of world market capitalizations, in 2007 our share was 42 percent, in 2008, 29.9 percent. It’s no secret that China, Brazil, India, South Korea, and so on are growing faster than we are.

So I invest in foreign-stock mutual funds, particularly index funds covering everything from developed economies to emerging markets. Also, I make sure the mutual funds I own do not hedge the dollar. Why? I want the currency risk, for better or for worse. That’s part of the diversification of international investing, and it’s also a bet against the dollar and our trade and budget deficits. Our politicians will blame each other and vie for short-term power, until one day they will discover the mathematical oppression of our spending-beyond-our-means on unnecessary wars and gargantuan entitlements will have weakened us to a regional power, if that.

Third, I have diversified my portfolio to include things like raw land in Texas, where the demographics are excellent, and TIPS, or Treasury inflation-protected securities. Although there is scant inflation now, and TIPS seem overbought because of the worries about the deficit, I believe you need a smattering of unconventional assets that will help you fight inflation when it rears its ugly head again, especially after we have printed truckloads of dollars. There could also be a scenario in which interest rates are high, because of our weakened dollar and jittery creditors, and the American economy stagnant, our stand-of-living in a deleveraging decline. Unconventional assets mean uncorrelated assets, and will mean less panic for you in whatever scary environment you find yourself in.

Over the past two years, I do feel something fundamental has changed. The politicians in Washington have stopped working together; our democracy seems more ambush-demagogy than the voices of the people; the way we talk to each other, through TV and radio, in ten-second sound bytes, prevents us from understanding each other. I just want my family to survive.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Poetry of HTML

2010-01-31T22:29:00.008-05:00

I like fiddling with the inner workings of web pages. Over the years I have created my website, instead of farming it out to a web-page developer. True, my website is not as spectacular as many I have seen on the Internet. But I have extensive and ever-changing content, pictures, text, audio, video, podcasts, and now this blog.

There were many reasons why I began to develop my own website years ago. First, I really like to tinker. Second, I’m a bit of a control freak, at least as far as my work is concerned. Third, yes, I’m a cheapskate. Fourth, I believe a certain amount of my work should be available free, particularly for those who don’t have much money. Finally, I love to understand by myself how things work. This gives me a sense of being autarchic, a country under its own rule. Tinkering is about curiosity, in my mind, whereas independence is about enjoying being alone and working on a problem. These traits certainly reinforce each other.

It’s a similar feeling I get when I chop my own wood in Connecticut, instead of buying it in neat bundles at the supermarket. When I am finished with a task, and I have done a good job, either by splitting the wood right so that it fits into my woodstoves and fireplaces, or by seeing the effect I wanted on my blog or website after tinkering with HTML, I know I have accomplished this feat. I’ve learned something new. I gain enough confidence to try something a bit more complex next time, to expand my expertise.

I’ll give you an example. Although I have loved the different layout possibilities of Blogger’s blogs and templates, when I created a short video of reading my story, “The Abuelita,” for an anthology in which the story appeared, there was a problem. I was able to embed the YouTube video at the bottom of my blog’s front page (with the latest three entries), but whenever anyone clicked on individual blog entries the video would remain at the bottom of the blog, out of sight of readers. An enormous amount of white space was always left between an individual blog entry and the embedded video. The Blogger template did not adapt to single blog entries, but remained the ‘long layout’ of the three latest entries even when readers clicked on separate entries.

I popped the hood of the template HTML, and began tinkering. I found, after trial and error, I could override and then simply delete the right HTML instructions that pushed my video to the bottom. Now as you can see, individual entries as well as the ‘long layout’ of the latest three entries both have the video immediately after the last words of any blog text. For Garage Band podcasts, iMovie videos, favicons, sitemaps, slideshows, and so on, the story has been the same. How do you do that? Let’s try this. I want to give up! My head hurts. Oh, my God. Yes! Hey, guys, look at this! True, it’s not always a happy ending, but so often, as long as I’ve stayed on the case, I have figured it out.

Why am I this tinkering fool? It really gives me a deep pleasure to figure it out. There is a certain grammar to HTML, and once you begin to understand this grammar you can manipulate it to your heart’s content. Strangely, I have begun to read poetry on my iPhone, Emily Dickinson’s collected works, and I have found a kinship between my tinkering with HTML and figuring out the lady of Amherst’s grammar, so to speak. Invariably, every second and fourth lines in her quatrains rhyme and are trimeter, like a poetic hammer. I have so much to learn, but in discovery there is an infinite joy.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Anger Magnus

2010-01-22T14:51:00.011-05:00

There is so much to comment on, and so little to comment on. I thought about Obama’s ‘slow-burn’ of political advocacy, as one friend described his style. I had just criticized our president for not defending, more aggressively, the kind of change many of us voted for last year. Obama, lay it on the line, and punish those who don’t support you, from the left or the right. Be practical, be bold, but please don’t be gone.

I thought about the Senate-election debacle in Massachusetts, and how ‘democracy’ is not the great ideal it’s held up to be. Do right-leaning Democrats truly think going back to George W. Bush’s deregulated, ‘pirate economy,’ as the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson aptly described it in last Sunday’s business section, will help this country create jobs, protect consumers, lower the boom on banks, big pharma, or wasteful government? I don’t like high deficits either; what was Bush’s record on deficits, anybody remember?

It’s incredible to me the myopia, the forgetfulness, the stupidity of much of the populace, as well as the ‘news’ that isn’t news anymore, but loud and ignorant opinions. I mean, is anybody else with me on this one? What happened to not being a Democrat or Republican first, to not thinking about just ‘winning,’ or ‘us’ versus ‘them’? What happened to us? We’re on this death cruise together, and China’s eating our lunch. They’re not the only ones. Anyone want to stand together and fight back? I am patriotic, and I do love this country. But our politics are dysfunctional, Congress is a joke, and how we talk to each, the vapid ‘news’ of cable, talk radio, and the like, simply foments the same idiotic behavior that got us into this mess.

That’s right, I’m pissed. We need practical people. We need to stop the moronic dog-chasing-its-tale on television and radio. In fact, if it were up to me, as a dictator, I would destroy all the television sets and radios, and force people to read. Even the New York Post is thoughtful compared to cable.

The problems with our culture go beyond the national politics and media. I see what's wrong on the street every day, whether it’s El Paso, New York City, Kansas City or LA. I am often the strictest parent in their schools, my kids don’t fail to remind me. What do I do? I make sure my kids do their homework, every night. I am there to help them, if they need it, every night. I encourage my kids to read books, every week. Friends who are wild, disrespectful, they are not welcomed in my house. Period. These are the values of my father and mother, Mexican immigrants. These values work. My kids are excellent students. They work hard and achieve the highest grades. They are proud of themselves, not for false accomplishments, but for true ones. Isn’t everybody like that? What happened to us? Jeez.

I am angry at the Supreme Court. What the hell is wrong with them? The majority just made the little guy feel even smaller than before. What happened to ‘non-activist conservative judges’? These hypocrites just overturned decades of precedent, in favor of mega-corporations with billions of dollars. Wave the flag for ‘free speech.’ Lower the flag for more influence for lobbyists and for rampant political corruption. The little guy doesn’t matter to these clueless Solomons. Sotomayor, you matter. We just need more of you.

Work hard. Take care of your family. Save money. Pay your mortgage religiously. Love the variety of people you see on the streets of Manhattan every day. And get kicked in the ass. What a week.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Earthquake in Haiti and Charitable Giving

2010-01-14T15:24:00.013-05:00

‘Heartbroken and shocked’ are the words to describe my reactions to the news of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. The bloodied children without their parents, running in rubble-filled streets. A leg sticking out from under tons of concrete, while a young man next to it tries to dig out the teacher, trapped yet alive, under what’s left of a school.

Particulars, photographs and video, humanize this event in far-flung places like New York, London, Tehran, Shanghai. We are responding, at least some are responding, to help. I have sent money, which is not much, but it’s what I can do right now.

Some, instead of identifying with the human suffering in Haiti, are reacting in small, mean ways. Rush Limbaugh cynically notes the catastrophe is to Barack Obama’s advantage: the president will gain cred with the black community. Limbaugh quips, "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax." How anyone who’s semi-moral can listen to this exemplar of excess and do-nothing claptrap is beyond me. Yet Limbaugh has made millions, but not from an America that represents its most generous and open-minded citizens.

I hated CNN when Lou Dobbs dominated their spotlight, but last night, one day after the Haitian earthquake, Anderson Cooper was reporting from Port-au-Prince, while Fox News was lovingly focused on Sarah Palin’s musings with Bill O’Reilly. There is a morality to reporting the news: what you focus on and how you focus on it reveal much about who you are and what you care about. We’ve entered a Nietzschean moment on the news: the power of the people will decide what’s ‘truth’ and what’s ‘trash,’ and their decision may change (schizophrenically) every few years.

When I give to charity, I am indeed hard-nosed about it. I want to give to charities which are efficient. That is, whatever dollars I give I want to make sure the highest percentage, perhaps over 85 percent, goes to the purpose of the charity, not overhead, nor managerial salaries, nor more ads to entice more donors. I want to give, but I want it to be effective.

So I’ve relied on a few sources, and three important ones are the ratings of the American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP), the annual Forbes list of efficient charities, and Charity Navigator. One of my favorites charities, the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which awards scholarships to educate Latinos, uses about 87 cents out of every dollar for its programs, and garners an ‘A’ rating from AIP.

It’s been a tough couple of years for many people, but after looking at what is happening in Haiti, I want to help. I want to do something besides watch the unfolding tragedy on television. Here are a few charities, and their efficiency percentages (i.e. what percentage of donations goes to their programs). They need your support now. All figures are from Charity Navigator, the letter grades from AIP.

Doctors Without Borders, (87 percent; A)

CARE (90 percent; A)

Save the Children (92 percent; A)

International Medical Corps (92 percent; A+)

American Red Cross (90 percent; A-)

Dozens of charities and their hyperlinks are listed by AIP, and Charity Navigator is free, with an email registration. Give now, do it intelligently, and help those who desperately need it.

P.S. On the subway today, I read this poem on my iPhone, from Emily Dickinson's complete works:

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Harold Hernesh

2010-01-07T00:07:00.011-05:00

I am late sending out my holiday cards again, but I did remember to slip one under Harold Hernesh’s door. Harold lives in our building on the Upper Westside, and our family, including my children Aaron and Isaac, befriended Harold when we rented a one-bedroom across the hall from him. The following year we bought a co-op in the same building, but on another floor; Isaac was a mere three-weeks-old. We have lived thirteen years in this building-qua-miniature-city of 350 apartments.

Harold, who is eighty-seven-years-old, always reminded me of my grandmother, Doña Dolores Rivero, a survivor of the Mexican Revolution. Both were unbelievably tough, gruff and perpetually half-frowning. Yet if you stopped to talk to them, and got to know them beyond their flinty exterior and garbled retorts, beyond their complaints about dogs or inept store clerks or greedy banks, these viejitos revealed a fearful vulnerability of what they had seen and what they had barely escaped. Harold was eighteen when he was imprisoned at Dachau by the Nazis in 1941, for being a Jew.

I have given Harold copies of my books. He doesn’t know it, but I made a version of Harold a hero in my story of violence and redemption, “Remembering Possibilities.”

Yesterday Harold stopped me in the lobby and handed me three lollipops, one for me and each of my children. He always carries candy in his pockets, and hands it out to children, or their parents, every day. I have a jar of Harold’s candies in the kitchen. For years, Harold sat with his sister in the lobby of our building, chatting and introducing her to his friends. But Harold’s sister died recently. Harold is now, I think, alone.

So when he uncharacteristically asked me to follow him to his apartment, I said yes. I had been to his place before, to fix his cable because he had forgotten he needed to have both the cable box on and the TV on channel 3 for the system to work. Honestly, how do oldsters survive in this complex, idiosyncratic world? I don’t know. I battle with these things myself, and I can only imagine what shape I’ll be in when I’m eighty-seven. Will I be able to manage an apartment by myself at that age? Laura and I can barely do this now.

“The Lithuanians! They were worst than the Nazis!” Harold blurted out, as he handed me a book to read, a story of another Holocaust survivor. When Harold says words like ‘Lithuanians’ it sounds like ‘Lith-punians,’ and he half-spits every other word he says. It’s possible Harold had a stroke a long time ago, but I’ve never asked him. His blue-gray eyes wandered into the distance, and he recounted a story I had never heard before. As he said, “The luk-thpiest daay of mai lifept.” The luckiest day of his life.

A Nazi soldier and his Lithuanian collaborators had taken him to a field of mass graves, and ordered him to dig. He would be digging not only his own grave, but the graves of other prisoners who would be shot that day. His spade hit the ground, but it was frozen solid. They beat him, and yelled at him to dig. He smashed the shovel into the ground, but still the ground would not give. They snatched the shovel away from him, and tried to dig themselves, to no avail. “The luk-thpiest daay of mai lifept,” Harold repeated. Bitterly cold and windy days like today, he said, have never bothered him on Broadway.

I don’t talk to Harold, nor did I ever bike fifteen miles as a kid to visit my abuelita on Saturdays, because I feel sorry for old people. I listened to them, because I loved their stories. I relished the bittersweet humor that came from hardscrabble or harrowing experiences. They took me ‘there,’ wherever ‘there’ was, and I was captivated by and transported to another world. For me, it was their gift.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Christmas Tamales in Ysleta

2009-12-24T16:43:00.010-05:00

Laura and I drove through Ysleta in search of masa natural for champurrado. La Tapatia was packed, they were out of masa, but I did escape with two packets of Licon’s asaderos. I didn’t want to brave Wal-Mart (a quagmire the day before Christmas), but we still needed a few ingredients for Laura's guacamole. Yesterday she, Aaron, Isaac, and their cousins, Caleb and Joshua, baked and decorated dozens of gingerbread cookies. Today we are cooking for the-night-before-Christmas meal, but really it is a day to be with la familia.

My Muslim sister is here with two of her daughters; my Jewish wife and my kids are in the kitchen, munching on tostadas and chopping vegetables for the turkey’s stuffing and trimmings. My brothers, Oscar and Rudy, who live in El Paso, cut and shaped tree branches and created a nativity scene for my parents in the living room. Everybody is exhausted from shopping, and later we have to wrap our Secret-Santa gifts to place under el niño Jesus. At midnight, we will rip the wrapping paper off the presents, the kids will shout and compare their booty, and everybody will sit around the living room catching up and telling more stories.

This is probably a repeat of what happens all across the country. We don’t really question the different religions anymore, we rarely have anything but humorous, if occasionally pointed exchanges (mainly I love needling everybody while they roll their eyes), and we enjoy each other. The different branches of our familia are seldom together, so when we do descend on Ysleta, from New York, Washington, D.C. and beyond, we are simply happy to see each other.

This morning, in the breaking news section of the online El Paso Times, I read a report about a traffic jam in front of Lupita’s Tamales in Canutillo. The Wal-Mart shelves for dried tamale leaves and molasses have been ransacked. All the masa, natural and preparada, at tortillerias and tamale shops is gone. A few moments ago, I swiped half a tamale from an abandoned plate next to me: “Dad! That was mine! How could you?”

I understand the shocked tone, as if I have committed a sacrilege. But I gulp down the tamale quickly, and delightfully. La Tapatia’s tamales are heaven on earth. Zeke’s chorizo, I could write an entire column about it. The unique smoky taste, the fresh pork meat. Zeke’s tostadas are nothing like the facsimiles they peddle in the Northeast to the unknowing multitudes. Fresh Licon’s asaderos, the mere thought of them, make my mouth water. Oh, how joyous to be back home, and hungry!

I know it’s not all about the food. But family togetherness, at the preparation of a feast, is an ancient ritual. It is a messy, tumultuous, chaotic affair, which probably few outsiders would endure. I am glad we do it. I look forward to it all year. We have grown over time to accept each other, and to accept each other’s choices, even though we probably would have not made the same ones.

This year no severe conflicts punctuate the air. No old recriminations. I don’t know why. A few years ago, during a Christmas vacation, I had a fight with my father that took years to overcome. But this year is blessed, with our family together, laughter in faraway corners, disparate cousins working and playing together as one, and everybody remembering why it was such a good idea to return to Ysleta for Christmas.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Latinos and Jews on Hanukah

2009-12-16T23:25:00.014-05:00

Laura is traveling for work, and tonight Aaron, Isaac, and I lit the candles for the sixth night of Hanukah, the Jewish festival of light. We took turns lighting different candles, sang the prayers. I knew the first part, but hummed the rest. The kids were my guide. In a few more days, we will be in El Paso. If we go to a Christmas posada in Ysleta or midnight mass at Mount Carmel, Laura and the kids will also join me.

How did we become this interfaith, multicultural family? It all began at Harvard, in Economics 10, when I saw this composed, attractive sophomore sitting a few rows in front of me. We chatted a few times that year. She thought I was Greek; I thought she was English. We were both way off. I was a Chicano from El Paso, Texas, and she was a Jew from Chicago and Concord, Massachusetts.

I really became friends with Laura at a Mexico seminar the next year. Laura was majoring in Government, fluent in Spanish, and focusing on Latin America. We jogged together for months along the Charles River, before we began dating. If you want to get a sense of our first kiss, read my short story, “Remembering Possibilities,” in The Last Tortilla and Other Stories. Laura is always embarrassed when I mention this, but it is a moment I wanted to immortalize in my work. That’s one of the hazards of living with a writer: parts of your life may end up in the lives of literary characters.

I can’t tell you it was easy to become one. My parents adored Laura, primarily because she spoke Spanish, but also because she was easygoing, “suavecita” and “muy gente,” as my parents would say, while I was sometimes stubborn and mean, “el terco que no se aguanta.” Laura fit better in semi-rural, small-town Ysleta than I did. Laura’s parents, however, did not like me because I was not a Jew. Sure, this got better over time, after years of their understanding that I loved their daughter and wasn’t going away. I also grew to appreciate their focus on family and the intellectual debates at the kitchen table. Today, our harmony, mutual respect, and yes, even love are achievements, but they were hard-won.

A few years ago, an engineer with the same last name wrote to me, and sent me a research paper on our surname, which is unusual in Mexico. He had traveled to obscure archives in Mexico, traced the Troncoso name to the same town of my father’s family, and even traveled to Spain to study the archives of the Catholic Church. His findings? Our surname originates from ‘Trancoso,’ and has Sephardic origins in Toledo, where ‘los judios de Trancoso’ were either cypto-Jews hiding their heritage because of the Spanish Inquisition, or Jews kicked out of Spain to the New World in 1492. I have a book, by Pere Bonnín, Sangre Judía: Españoles de Ascendencia Hebrea y Antisemitismo Cristiano, a bestseller in Spain already in its fourth edition. This book is a compilation of research on Spanish Jewish ancestry. My last name is in this book.

As Laura quipped, once I told her, “Now I now understand the attraction.”

So I may have Sephardic ancestors, but given my mother’s fervent, unyielding Catholicism, I probably have Tomás de Torquemada’s ancestors too. Perhaps we became one big, messy familia long ago. But I believe Laura is my family, and her family is my family, not because of what happened five hundred years ago, but because I love Laura. I know the quality of the person. That’s why I light the Hanukah candles even though Laura is not at home. It is what our family would do. It is what I do.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Support Free Public Libraries

2009-12-09T12:24:00.010-05:00

I am sitting inside a cathedral to reading and writing, the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. It is an astonishingly beautiful place to work as a writer. I could not have found anything better at Harvard or Yale, my alma maters. The difference, of course, is that the NYPL’s reading room is free to the public.
You can walk right in off the street, at 42^nd and Fifth Avenue, turn on your laptop, and enjoy peace and quiet while taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi. This reading room and the New York Public Library’s elaborate system of branch libraries are the kind of things that make New York City a great place to live.

The NYPL's main reading room is an inherently democratic place to work. Students from immigrant families study for GMATs or LSATs at long oak tables, expertly refurbished some years ago. Oldsters on their laptops work quietly under brass laps, this morning’s cold rain in Manhattan only a distant memory. Men and women in suits type frantically, glancing at journals or books. Tourists stroll in, mouths agape at the painted clouds on the ornate ceiling.

I wrote my second book in this reading room, and back then no guards checked your laptops or packages when you walked in. Now they do. They check on the way in and on the way out, perhaps a consequence of 9/11. I remember how quiet the reading room was back then, and it is still a serious place to work. No loud disturbances are allowed, and guards make sure you follow the rules.

The outside of the NYPL’s Research Library, as this magnificent Beaux-arts building is known, is also sheathed in white this morning, and perhaps the marble lions and exterior are undergoing yet another renovation. It must be difficult to keep something so precious, yet so old, up-to-date and in fine condition.

In the 1930s, the famed Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named the lions Patience and Fortitude, for what he felt New Yorkers needed to survive the economic depression. Today, as the reading room is again packed with people, I am certain some in this grand room are struggling to find work and survive in our current economic downturn. But haven’t free public libraries always been places to fortify yourself when the world turned for the worse? Hasn’t the free public library always been a refuge?

For years, I have always contributed a modest $100 to the New York Public Library, because I like libraries, I love books, and any place that gives you the space and time to ponder quietly and deeply should be supported. But today, when I return home, I will add to my donation to the NYPL. It’s an invaluable resource for everybody, and I hope many of you will be inspired to support your own local public library.

Imagine a city where you have no place to go to read, write, or think. Imagine a city without an institution promoting the free exchange of ideas, the dissemination of a plurality of ideas, through books, the Internet, newspapers, and journals. Imagine what a bleak place that would be, not just for you, but for your parents and grandparents, for your children. Sometimes we take for granted what we have, and the unique institutions that promote the essence of our democracy. Today I will do my part to help my library. Let’s do it together.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Guadalajara: Feria Internacional del Libro

2009-12-03T00:47:00.017-05:00

It has been an astonishing trip to Guadalajara, Mexico to be part of the gigantic book fair, one of the largest (I am told) for the Spanish-speaking world. I have to thank Director Franz Josef Kunz of the Goethe-Institut of Guadalajara for inviting me to be part of the panel on “Literatura y Migración.”

I knew it was a good start when I was wending my way into the American Airlines plane in Dallas to Guadalajara, and seated in first class (!) I find none other than Dagoberto Gilb, a good friend and a great writer. Of course, once the flight left rainy Dallas, I squeezed my way to first class to chat with Dago. I gave him a hard time for the white wine and warm nuts the ‘elite’ of first class enjoyed, while the plebes of coach went hungry. But it was great to see Dago up and about.

The next day I was waiting to have lunch at the Hilton across the street from the book fair, with Mr. Kunz, Carlos López de Alba, and Yuri Herrera, both on our panel, and who did I spot with her Blogger file open, and typing away, just as I’m doing now? Catherine Mayo. Seeing Catherine in Guadalajara was just literary nirvana. She is one of those writers you learn from and whose standards are nothing but excellent. Catherine is here to discuss her book, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, recently selected by Library Journal as one of the top thirty books for 2009.

The highlight of Guadalajara for me has been “Literatura y Migracion.” Carlos, editor of the literary magazine Reverso, moderated the panel, and it included Yuri who wrote the novel Trabajos del Reino, María Cecilia Barbetta, an Argentine who writes in German, and Léda Forgó, who was born in Hungary but also writes in German.

What the free-wheeling discussion focused on was this literature of writers who are writing in languages not necessarily their mother tongues. But the discussion quickly turned philosophical (I brought up Heidegger and the influence of German philosophers on my own writing), or how adopting a new language forced ‘immigrant writers’ to choose words purposely, to take on the roles of outsiders in their adopted cultures, to find their place in words rather than in a ‘home country.’ For us, I believe, language has become our country.

It a funny and often disquieting existence to be neither here nor there, to have your existence, particularly your literary existence, in play, a question rather than a settled home. It certainly forces you to think about what you want to say, to take a step away to consider what and how you write, because that is how you start when you don’t quiet belong as an immigrant. Sometimes this perspective turns political, sometimes reflexive, and at other times it is simply an advantage to write about Hungary or Argentina or the Mexican-American community in a language that already is a step removed from that home. In some, this perspective is a way to work through self-alienation, or even to become a bridge between two worlds.

I came away from this panel with only deep admiration for Carlos, María Cecilia, Yuri, and Léda. Writers from across the globe struggling with similar questions I struggle with everyday. Writers who are intelligent and should be read enthusiastically. Writers who embody why seeking international alliances, when your literary endeavor is unique, will allow you to understand exactly how a community can be formed from the most disparate of individuals.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Know Thyself and Buyer Beware

2009-11-23T22:46:00.009-05:00

Know thyself and buyer beware. These are phrases I not only preach but also practice, particularly when I make financial decisions each year. I have been talking about the importance of financial literacy with friends and also leaders in the Latino community. Here are a few thoughts.

I believe in self-honesty and knowing what you don’t know, self-education, and self-reliance. Let me take the last first, and tell you why and how they apply in becoming a financially literate individual.

Self-reliance. When I graduated from Harvard in the mid-1980s, I had no money, I was in debt, and I was about to enter graduate school at Yale, to assume even more debt and continue my education. I watched every penny. My bed for years was cinderblocks I found on the street covered by an old sheet of plywood and topped by a thick piece of foam. I saved money, even while at school, and opened my first money market fund.

Self-reliance and my cost-cutting ways were my methods of increasing the amount of capital even when I was earning small salaries as a teaching assistant. Yet even then, I knew that unless I made my savings grow, I would never go beyond a hand-to-mouth existence. So I also began investing in mutual funds. It was the beginning of one of the greatest bull markets in history, so I was also lucky.

Because I used my own investment money, no committee had to be consulted, no outside investor would ring my phone in the middle of the night to cry about losses, and I could choose out-of-favor or even unknown companies (except to me) and invest in them for the long-term. Self-reliance also meant patient money.

Self-education. As I invested, I also began to read. Benjamin Graham. Peter Lynch. Ralph Wanger. Warren Buffett. Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal. John Bogle. Jeremy Siegel. Philip A. Fisher. I am still reading books about investing, by investors and fund managers, and professors of finance. I also taught myself financial accounting, by reading accounting books. I wanted to be able to read and understand 10-K reports and annual reports, and how companies work to make profits.

But my education was not just book-learning. As I invested and learned on the fly, I saw how the financial press was manipulated by many mutual fund companies that trumpeted ‘stellar funds’ with great short-term records, only to have these same funds explode with assets the next year and the managers produce mediocre returns or leave for more money to other fund firms. These ‘stellar funds’ also carried high costs: win or lose, the fund managers still made money for themselves.

Costs matter. Costs are permanent. Invest in index funds, which are the lowest cost funds, particularly at a place like Vanguard. Index funds also have no prima donna fund managers. Buy three or four index funds that represent the stock and bond categories you want to be in, and that should be the plan for the majority of investors who are passive. Passive simply means you are not buying and selling individual stocks, you don’t have the time and inclination, and it’s better to know what you don’t know and invest in index funds. Investing is Socratic: those who don’t know who they are as investors will soon be ripped off by manipulators who appeal to the greed and vanity of the hapless.

Self-honesty. I made many investing mistakes. In my early years, I invested with ‘stellar stock funds,’ which soon tanked. Taco Cabana, another mistake. Stay away from restaurants and airlines. I know certain industries pretty well, but others are too difficult for me to understand, or too unpredictable as businesses. I stay away from what I don’t know, and if I want to know I do hours, even years, of homework.

I have not made many mistakes selling; I don’t know why. I do have a sense of when to get out when I have followed and invested in a company for years. But I have made mistakes buying early, a bit too high, for example. Over-enthusiasm. In a market rout, I don’t panic. I have thick skin, and I don’t report to anybody on my investments. Last March, the nadir of recent stock market valuations, I was indeed worried, yet I stuck to my individual stocks and index funds. I did nothing, which was the smartest thing I did all year.

Investing is about being efficient with the extra capital you have. Invest it well, learn who you are as an investor, and make saving money your constant priority. Then investing will be your path to independence.

www.ChicoLingo.com

A Week To Remember

2009-11-16T21:20:00.013-05:00

Last week was quite a week for me. I read with Reyna Grande at the famed El Museo Del Barrio, and loved meeting Reyna for the first time. Aurora Anaya-Cerda of La Casa Azul Bookstore arranged the East-meets-West reading of Latino writers.

I hope the readers of Chico Lingo enthusiastically support Aurora’s online bookstore: independent bookstores like hers offer a much-needed perspective in literature, a multicultural voice for variety and quality. Aurora is also one of those people who simply lights up a room with her enthusiasm for books, authors, events for the people, la comunidad. She’s a treasure, and I think of her as mi hermana.

Also last week I read at La Junta, an event presented by the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and La Menta Collective. Let me just tell you, I was blown away. I had been invited by Glendaliz Camacho, who knew Aurora. The place was packed, the walls were covered with the eye-catching artwork of Alta Berri and Adrian Roman, poets Mundo Rivera and J. F. Seary mesmerized the crowd, and Glendaliz and I read our stories. At the end, the band Mona Passage rocked the roof off the joint.

The La Junta evening was one of those nights you keep replaying in your head. I loved the people I met there, into literature, music, and art. I marveled at the setting, a beautiful brownstone dedicated for decades, behind the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, to promoting the cultures of people of African descent. It was a place where I knew the people “get it,” that is, they understand that literature and art should be not for a self-selected elite but for la gente.

I also received an invitation to the Guadalajara Book Fair (all expenses paid) for a panel entitled, "Literatura y Migracion." So I’ll drag my bones to Guadalajara on December 2, and force myself to have the time of my life in Mexico. Finally, Literary El Paso came out, and the Texas Observer gave it a great review in which they featured my story, “The Abuelita,” the first story I ever wrote.

I know, I know, I’m bragging a bit. But weeks like these are few and far between. It’s usually struggling alone to write, and failing. Or cursing yourself for being no good. Or nursing another rejection. Or simply not measuring up, in my eyes, as a father or as a husband. You might be surprised, if you possessed a kind of moral or psychological vision, to see the hundreds of invisible, but permanent scars on me. Many self-inflicted.

So forgive me, dear reader, if I rejoice in this good week. I just don’t try to hide anymore behind a façade that always advertises all-is-ill or all-is-well. That’s one of the reasons I started writing Chico Lingo a year ago. I didn’t care anymore what people thought, what imagined or real restrictions constrained this writer’s life, or whether ‘this’ or ‘that’ would be best for my career. I wanted to tell it like it is. I wanted to write about it. Period.

So I had a helluva week. It will keep me going for a while, during the tough, 51-other weeks in the year. I will never stop trying to capture that astonishing presence of life, and that’s what I can do to honor each day.

www.ChicoLingo.com

(The La Junta picture, with the Puerto Rican and Dominican flags behind me, was taken by Vivien I. Perez, VIPhotos.)

Radio Yankee Baseball and Hideki Matsui

2009-11-05T14:58:00.005-05:00

Last night was almost the perfect night for me. On TV, I saw the New York Yankees win the World Series and Hideki Matsui, my favorite player, was the hero. 6 RBI’s in the clinching game. It doesn’t get much better than that. The only thing missing was John Sterling’s play-by-play, but even then I was able to hear Matsui’s heroics this morning on the Yankees’ website in Sterling’s voice.

As I have mentioned in Chico Lingo before, I have over the years become a Yankee fan. During the regular season, Yankee losses twisted in my gut for weeks, while Yankee wins propelled me into a giddy joy. I used to laugh at my brother Rudy who is an inveterate Dallas Cowboy fan, how he would lock himself in his room whenever the Cowboys lost and refuse to speak to anyone, how he would not eat.

Now I was up past midnight until the last out was made in a Yankee game. I thought the Phillies were focused and dangerous, always threatening to regroup and deny the Yankees their 27^th championship. I rooted for Matsui whenever he came up to bat. I wanted A-Rod to get rid of his demons, Damon to outthink them again with his feet and bat, Teixeira to prove why a superstar is worth the dollars flung at him. Whenever the Yankees lost in the post-season, I couldn’t sleep. I had become my big brother Rudy.

But absolutely the best time I experienced Yankee games, better than even going to the stadium, was to hear them on the radio at night, as we drove to Connecticut to our weekend house. John Sterling, the voice of the Yankees on WCBS 880, and Suzyn Waldman are just an excellent radio team. Both are knowledgeable about the game, provide interesting, intelligent baseball conversation as each game slowly unfolds, and something about their repartee is genuine and easy to hear. It’s hard to explain.

At night, as I guided my Honda Pilot through the traffic on 684 and Route 22, the children asleep in the back and Laura on her Blackberry, it might be raining outside, or wind might be whipping the car around, or an idiot might be zooming past at 100 mph, but Sterling’s voice assured and expertly guided me through the game. When Matsui hit a homer (“A Thrilla by Godzilla!”), or the game ended (“The Yankees win! Thhheeee Yankees win!”), I could hear the roar of the crowd, I could see the field, and I imagined I was there, but in a better way: I was playing it in my head with Sterling’s help. His infectious excitement and his play-by-play are really light years ahead of the plodding, inane, even boring commentary I too often heard on TV during the post-season. I understand now why my brother Rudy would turn off the sound of the TV and listen to Cowboy games with his favorite radio announcer.

Cashman, Steinbrenner, Girardi, please don’t let Hideki Matsui leave as a free agent. I know Matsui has bad knees, and I know he’s getting old, but can youth have as much character, professionalism, or focus as Matsui? How much are those worth on a team? How much is that example worth on a team?

Matsui was and is an enigma, and I like that. I have taught many Japanese students, and one point I find interesting, and have researched, is that for many Japanese talking too much means not thinking. For American students, talking, debating in class is to have a voice, to declare who you are. But for the Japanese, it’s almost like verbal diarrhea: if you are talking, you must not be pondering seriously the issue at hand. I have been given articles on the different cultural meanings of silence, for example, in Japanese versus typical American business meetings.

I am also not a schmoozer, I like to observe, and so I also liked when Matsui would say little on TV. Pretending he knew no English helped him to stay within himself, to be left a relative unknown to American baseball fans. I didn’t find him flashy, or confused emotionally, or a bad sport about his limited role as a DH. He did his job, and that was that. A sort of anti-hero in our overexposed, overstylized media world. Keep him in New York.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Is the Texas Library Association excluding Latino writers?

2009-11-02T19:03:00.024-05:00

I had a wonderful time at the Texas Book Festival, which was well-organized and full of lively literary parties. On Saturday, I walked through the white tents next to the state capitol, gathering handouts from commercial publishers, lit organizations, and university presses. My panel was not until Sunday, so this was my day to play.

But as I stopped at the Texas Library Association’s (TLA) table and perused a yellow handout entitled “2009 Tayshas Annotated Reading List,” a book list compiled by public and school librarians from the Young Adult Round Table (YART), I noticed precious few Latino authors or subjects. In fact, as I counted and reread the book summaries (later confirmed by studying the books online at booksellers), only three were by or about Latinos. Three out of 68 young adult books recommended by TLA.

This fact was disturbing enough, but then I walked to the panel on the Tomás Rivera Children’s Book Awards, with Benjamin Saenz (He Forgot to Say Goodbye) and Carmen Tafolla (The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans), and previous winner Francisco Jiménez. Saenz’s and Tafolla’s award-winning books are aimed at young adults. Both authors are from Texas. Both books are published in the time period covered by the TLA list, 2007-2008. And both books are excluded from the list. (Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree (a Newbury Honor book) and Oscar Hijuelos’s Dark Dude (Starred review from Booklist) are also not on the TLA list, and that's just a cursory look at 2008.)

As I sat listening to the panelists talk about fighting to have Mexican-American literature included in the canon of American literature, as I heard them talk about their struggles to reach young Latinos with stories that reflect their lives, I admired the careful words of Saenz, Tafolla, and Jiménez at the same time that I seethed at the TLA. What was going on here? The juxtaposition between what the TLA was peddling at their table and the Tomás Rivera panel was jarring.

My anger burst out during conversations at the Texas Book Festival, and I asked for explanations. One well-known Texas writer said it was the “morality police” mentality of certain Texas librarians, who enforced their morality more strictly with anything Latino, a sophisticated kind of ethnic discrimination. A Texas librarian said it had to do with the YART panel itself, who was on it, who recommended books, but even she was surprised the TLA list contained only three books by or about Latinos. “That’s pathetic,” she said.

Indeed, it is. Latinos comprise about half the current students enrolled in Texas K-12 schools. When we or the media decry the high Hispanic high school drop-out rates, are we also training school administrators to be bilingual? Welcoming non-English-speaking parents to become involved in the schooling of their children is essential. I know my mother did not feel, nor was she ever treated, like an alien when she went to talk to my teachers or the principal at South Loop School. Why? They spoke Spanish, even the güeritos who were not Latinos. But that was El Paso. What about Houston, east Texas, the Panhandle?

When we complain about low Hispanic high school test scores, are we also providing reading lists that inspire kids throughout their schooling, books that say the stuff of their lives is real literature? The School Library Journal said of Carmen Tafolla’s book: “This collection will be sought after by both teens and teachers looking for strong characters and an eloquent voice in Chicana literature. While regional appeal will certainly drive purchase of this book, libraries looking to diversify and modernize their story collections will also want to consider adding this worthy title.” But apparently not in Texas, if the TLA has any say-so about it.

The issue is not creating an ‘affirmative action’ literary list. That’s a great way to put down Latino literature while pretending to help it. We do have high quality literature, by any standard, by national standards, in the Latino community. We have writers who are craftsmen, who are highly educated, who are creating stories that win national awards and sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

So I am not asking to lower standards and make a new TLA list with 45.6 percent Latino writers. That’s ridiculous. But the effort has to be made to look at the new reality in writing and in Latino literature in particular, and to understand that there need not be a sacrifice anymore between diversity and quality. But to do that, we need open minds and their goodwill.

I don't want any librarians (from Texas or anywhere else) mad at me; I truly don't. El Paso public libraries changed my life and opened my mind to writing. I just want the Texas Library Association to think about what it's doing, and to consider a better way.

(Note: The TLA list did have three books about girls at “elite boarding schools,” and two books on Australian teenagers.)

www.ChicoLingo.com

Texas Two-Step

2009-10-28T17:45:00.009-04:00

I will be at the Texas Book Festival this Friday, to meet with friends (my real reason for flying to Austin), but also to read from and talk about new anthologies which include two of my stories: Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, and Literary El Paso.

Hit List has one of my newer stories, “A New York Chicano,” about a transplanted Texan in New York who decides to do something about the biased news against Latinos he sees on TV every night. Literary El Paso has the first story I wrote at Yale as a graduate student in philosophy, when I was deciding how to bridge the gap between my love of literature and my interest in philosophy. “The Abuelita” was what I wrote one night in Sterling Library.

It’s always a wonder when you see yourself in print, and every book, even when you are just a small part of it, gives you memorable experiences. For Hit List, it was meeting wonderful writers like Richie Narvaez and Carlos Hernandez and reading with them in New York. At the Texas Book Festival, I’ll be reading with Rolando Hinojosa, Lucha Corpi, and Sarah Cortez (editor, with Liz Martínez, of the anthology). Lucha is the only one I don’t know, but I can’t wait to make another new literary friend.

Literary El Paso was published this month, and friends (some más, others menos) are in it like Dagoberto Gilb, David Romo, Ramon Rentería, Alicia Gaspar de Alba (she’s also in both anthologies), Denise Chávez (la querida Denise!), Ana Castillo (loved The Guardians), Christine Granados, Bobby and Lee Byrd, Lex Williford, Daniel Chacón (kudos on the American Book Award for the Burciaga book!), Rich Yañez, Sheryl Luna, Ben Saenz, Ray Gonzalez, and Carolina Monsivaís. Man, my fingers are sore from all the name-dropping typing, but note, El Paso has plenty of talent. Editor Marcia Hatfield Daudistel has done an admirable job and produced a gem for my bookshelf.

But for me the most interesting Literary El Paso experience (so far) has been making a YouTube video reading parts of “The Abuelita.” I received an email from the El Paso Media group, asking authors to make a short video reading excerpts of their stories or essays. I decided to play with my iMac, sit in front of it for intimacy (like an online chat), record the video, add music, and most importantly, add a picture of my abuelitos, Doña Dolores Rivero and Don José Rivero. You can take a look at my video here: “The Abuelita.”

I became a writer because of Doña Dolores. She was a force of nature, a survivor of the Mexican Revolution who had shot and killed two men attempting to rape her. (“Mi’jo, there was no police, nada, in the middle of the desert. In el rancho, you had to defend yourself, or die trying.”) When I wrote “The Abuelita,” I wanted people never to forget Doña Dolores. Not only was I writing about her, but I was writing for her. These people, the salt of the earth, deserve their stories be told, deserve their voices be heard.

I have met many accomplished, wealthy, and famous people in Harvard, Yale, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, and Manhattan, but no one has possessed half the character of my abuelita. Look into those eyes at the beginning of the video, and you will see what I mean. If you lied to her, she’d know before you finished the sentence and she wouldn’t let you get away with it. I miss her every single day. Maybe in Austin I can find a musician with an acordeón to play a corrido in her honor.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Mysterious Creatures

2009-10-23T12:39:00.020-04:00

I have been reading a fabulous little book, The Mythical Creatures Bible, by Brenda Rosen, about dwarves, unicorns, Greek vs. Chinese vampires, Egypt’s Seth and Horus, Tibet’s wrathful protectors, Kachinas, Mayan Jaguars, and Quetzalcoatl. Perhaps I have done this intentionally, to get away from the idiocy of the healthcare debate, particularly on that paranoid cable channel, Fox News.

Yes, I tortured myself by watching a few hours of that alternate reality of mysterious and evil government plots, the grand wisdom and beneficence of big business, the machinations of the archenemy Obama, and blond, pithy talking-heads who know everything by knowing nothing. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about, but watching Fox News was indeed terrifying, while falling into the world of Child-eaters and Trolls was a delight. An ‘intentionally foxy, warped view of reality’ makes little sense, and is less fun, than a fantasy. The former attempts to fool me, while the latter edifies me about human nature.

As a child in El Paso, I loved the night. I imagined mysterious creatures lurking outside our doors, in the backyard chasing our German shepherds, Lobo and Prince, or perhaps on the roof emanating strange noises, afloat with the desert wind. I roamed the rooms of our house on San Lorenzo at ungodly hours, and my mother said I was a duende.

The darkest hours prompt the imagination of those ready to be prompted, and not already dead to the world of possibilities. I also think certain streets, houses, rooms, and corners elicit my impish as well as my wildest imaginations. It’s the darkness of a place, the absolute quiet that forebodes danger or the cryptic, and the remoteness of a situation, that you are alone and must rely on only your senses to escape if necessary. These characteristics transform places into fertile ground for the imagination.

Part of adulthood, the bad part, is when you stop looking for these places. Under a bunk bed with your child as you experience the magic of a good story. The reading light a small but steady beacon. The mind an unexplored country. The sore limbs of the street abandoned for a moment. This is one of the many things I cherish about my children, Aaron and Isaac: they have reminded me of being a duende, of seeing the world with unleashed curiosity and possibility, of wanting to learn about the struggle of heroes against demons.

After reading The Mythical Creatures Bible, in keeping with my current mood, I also reread Garcia Lorca’s lecture, “Theory and Play of the Duende.” Lorca talks about being possessed by an “authentic emotion,” within “dark sounds,” as when an artist or writer in a moment or a story ‘has duende.’ Different from a Muse or an Angel, ‘having duende or being with duende’ reaches into the artist’s blood, to take momentary possession of what calls you primordially. For Lorca: “The spirit of the earth.”

So I reread Lorca to think about the mysterious force he meant, even though he claims no philosopher can explain it. I believe him, but that doesn’t stop me from struggling with his words and possible meanings, from exercising my curiosity, and for a moment positing an answer I find worthwhile.

The process reaches deep within yourself, which I think Nietzsche advocated as well, to find a world, to experience your separation from the inanimate, to unleash the joy and heartache of being human, a place where skill and struggle meet ecstatically. I don’t know if that is where Lorca’s duende lives, but it is where I find I am alive.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Getting Ready For Winter

2009-10-12T21:36:00.007-04:00

As I write this tonight, my arm muscles are still twitching from the trauma. I was splitting wood this weekend, getting our firewood stack ready for the winter. Our woodpile, hidden behind two small maples in front of our house in Connecticut, has blackened, three-year-old wood. That’s where I started.

I carted one twelve-pound, double-faced sledgehammer to the woodpile. I have two, one is newer, and from the second, the one in my hand, the hickory had split just below the head. I taped it last year with duct tape, and it seemed to be holding. The newer one’s my backup. I also carried two two-pound black metal wedges. I made a second trip to the garage, for my Husqvarna chainsaw.

We need to burn aggressively this year. Already I have two dead trees on our property that will soon be added to our woodpile. We have two fireplaces and a wood-burning stove, and there’s nothing more sublime than the fall display of colors in Litchfield County and the smell of fireplaces keeping homes warm in rural Connecticut. It takes you back in time. It instantly transports you to the antithesis of the City. It saves on heating bills.

I removed the green tarps covering my woodpile, starting with the oldest wood. I know when and where each pile of logs was placed every year. I rolled old massive oak stumps, which had already been cut when we bought our property years ago. As I split these stumps, using the two wedges simultaneously and bringing the sledgehammer alternately on each wedge, the crack of the wood revealed a nest of termites. Hundreds of them. Two of the old stumps were contaminated, and I wouldn’t bring them into the garage, even though I sorely wanted to incinerate the vermin. I rolled the split, contaminated stumps away from the woodpile, into the forest, and let the termites have their feast.

The rest of the wood was termite free. I held a wedge on the flat wood, smashed it hard with the sledgehammer, avoiding pulverizing my wrist or fingers. Once the wedge stuck, I lifted the sledgehammer overhead, and brought it down on the wedge, often imagining the face of a critic or nemesis, literary and political, as the wedge. The adrenalin flowed, and I didn’t feel my muscles twitching until hours later. For each log, for each split (thick logs need to be quartered, instead of just halved), three, four, five times I brought the hammer down. It’s like lifting weights and doing squats at the same time. You feel it in your shoulders, arms, and legs, as you split the logs, carry them to the pile to go into the garage, over and over again.

My trusty chainsaw? I used it to cut longer logs in half. It’s a machine you need to pay attention to, lest you lose a finger or a toe. It’s a blast of noise in the quiet forest, and I prefer hearing the crack of split wood, but you need the machine once in a while. The chainsaw also determined when I stopped. When I became too tired and my muscles and reflexes stopped responding as they should, that’s when it was time to call it a day, before I made a bloody mistake.

Some people might think it’s crazy to spend a significant part of your weekend doing this kind of work. You can certainly pay somebody else to do it. Or you can drive to a supermarket and buy neat, shrink-wrapped piles of wood. My wife Laura has threatened to buy me a wood-splitter, but so far I have resisted. I like connecting with the wood. I like the exercise and being outside. I like doing things for myself, instead of being separated from what I need and what I need to do to achieve it. I’m not about to slaughter my own chickens, but I will split my own wood. Writing itself already separates me from the world; I don’t need another activity to divorce myself from preparing for the turn of the seasons.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Why We Are Not A 'We'

2009-10-01T15:17:00.023-04:00

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times is one of the most thoughtful newspaper columnists. Two days ago he wrote a piece about how the current political climate of the U.S. has taken a dangerous turn permanently delegitimizing the presidency and tacitly encouraging violence, particularly from the fringe far right: “Where Did ‘We’ Go?”

The Facebook poll asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” is the most recent example, but Friedman also mentions the crazy rhetoric of Lou Dobbs, whom I have repeatedly criticized on the pages of Chico Lingo, and too many other examples in the media, particularly in the blogosphere and cable news channels, which also hasten our downward spiral into a country no longer a community, but a country at war with itself.

But I believe Friedman does not go far enough in analyzing the ‘why,’ the reasons the United States seems more fractured than ever. Why do ‘we’ seem to be incapable of tackling problems affecting all of us without a descent into vitriol and even hatred of our opponents? What happened to compromise and practicality and giving each other the benefit of the doubt? Here are some interrelated whys:

1. We as a society do not have patience anymore. TV and visual images are in part to blame. Give your opinion in fifteen seconds, do it loudly, and that’s what we now call ‘debate.’ We have commercialized time on TV: that’s the reason for these ridiculous lightning-round debates that solve nothing, convince no one, and just end up reinforcing prejudices because that’s all the time you have on TV (the most pervasive, influential medium). Plato, eons ago, warned how the focus on images would degrade our ability to think and reason: The man or woman who focuses on images loses the highest form of the self, the thoughtful self.

2. We don’t read anymore. The market for serious books is dying. Just look at the publishing industry. In fact, what is published now is too often celebrity books, memoirs of scandal, books by pretty and famous people who have little to say beyond the adrenalin moment. Disposable literature. Our kids are not reading, but instead play video games. My kids are great readers, but it’s because I’ve kept them from turning on the TV whenever they feel like it; I’ve kept them from mainstream, materialistic American culture. “After you do your homework, watch TV for an hour, but that’s it.” I may be an anachronism, but my kids are excellent students and know who they are because of their own, real accomplishments.

3. We are a diverse culture, but now minorities possess growing power and responsibility and the traditional majority does not easily want to cede being ‘the standard,’ that is, being the face of America. Latinos, as we all know, have grown in number to become the largest minority, surpassing even African-Americans (who themselves are uncomfortable with perhaps not being the ‘official minority’ anymore). The Asian population has similarly increased. Soon, demographers predict that the traditional ‘white majority’ (comprised of families with English, Italian, Irish, German, and other European ancestry) will be the minority.

I can only imagine what these demographic trends have meant in, say, a small town in the Midwest or the South where new Latin American immigrants speak Spanish and bring strange customs to your town. The strength of New York City, where I now live, is that these cultural, religious, ethnic, racial interactions happen every day. You are not so easily susceptible to the TV or talk-radio smear that Latinos are this way, or Jews are that way, or Muslims are sinister, or strangers with accents are suspect, because you see these people every day. They may be your friends. Your kids go to school with their kids.

Prejudices based on abstractions, the raw meat of today’s dangerous political rhetoric, don’t easily take hold when you can see with your own eyes that excellent parents are in every culture, excellent friends may exist in every religion, brave characters with all sorts of funny accents ennoble you. But this is not a kumbaya moment. Irresponsible idiots also come in every shape, size, and color. But the point is that abstractions don’t work on you anymore when you actively seek out and live in diversity. You must judge the individual; you need to pay attention and listen; above all you need to have the patience to understand whoever might at first seem alien to you.

4. The United States is a mature economy, while other countries like China, Brazil, and India are gaining the kind of prosperity we took for granted. Fifty years ago, it must have been a heady time when we were unquestionably the most important economy in the world. But now that’s not true anymore. We are still the biggest, but many have caught up and surpassed our per-capita wealth. Others, the newcomers, have rapidly become significant sources of brain power, savings, and economic and military power. We can’t dictate terms anymore. Our companies have to fight it out to survive, and few have the unquestioned might of yesteryear’s behemoths. The world, most importantly, is moving away from an American-centered world economy, with negative implications for the dollar as a reserve currency.

We’ve also lost manufacturing jobs. The lowest skilled are the most vulnerable to this changing world. They are the most susceptible to zealots and slick-talking TV and radio gurus who appear to have all the answers. And many are listening, because over the years they have been trained to think ‘listening’ is just watching TV. It’s not. TV stupefies you. Period. Talk radio? Turn if off.

1, 2, 3 and 4 might lead you to think I’m pessimistic about the future of the United States. I’ll tell you how pessimistic I am. Last weekend, I went to Home Depot twice (about 30 miles total), because I had purchased the wrong-size American flag to hang next to our front door in Connecticut. Our three-year-old flag, which was faded and torn, I tucked away in my closet. I’m just gonna keep it. It fills me with pride to see our new flag fluttering amid the spectacular colors of autumn in the Litchfield Hills.

I am proud of my country. But let me give you some advice. Turn off the TV. Stop listening to Lou Dobbs, and see him for what he is: an idiot who wants to make money by making you watch him. Pick up a good book and read it carefully. Raise your children to be thinkers, to focus on their homework, to work hard. Make an effort, by picking up the phone or knocking on a door, to meet a neighbor vastly different from you, a Muslim, a Jew, a Mexicano who can barely speak English. Don’t just meet him once, but get to know the person, his kids. If his child befriends your child, and they marry (as Laura and I did nineteen years ago), work on understanding their family. Some things you will never understand. Other things you will uncannily see eye-to-eye. But no one will ever be able to tell you they don’t belong in your neighborhood.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Diario de Oaxaca

2009-09-22T17:19:00.011-04:00

This morning I was walking south on Broadway after leaving my son Isaac at school, and two familiar faces stopped me in my tracks. Peter Kuper and his daughter Emily. Peter, a friend, is the famed political cartoonist for Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. He gave me a copy of his new book, Diario de Oaxaca.

As I continued strolling down Broadway, I felt as if I had just won La Loteria. Right now, after you finish this blog, buy this book. It’s the best book I’ve read all year. Beautifully crafted. Well-written. Irreverent. Bilingual. The work of an artistic duende. ‘Reading’ is not quite the right word here: this book is an experience, into Oaxaca, political protests, bugs, Monarch butterflies, perros, and searching for the truth around and in front of you.

Diario de Oaxaca is Kuper’s sketchbook journal of his two-year stay in Oaxaca, Mexico to get away from George W. Bush, to seek peace of mind, to work. He and his family arrived when a teachers’ strike, for better pay and more funding for schools, was unfolding in the zocalo: sit-ins, barricades, marches, and eventually the response from the governor of the state of Oaxaca, which was to kill. October 27, 2006: three teachers and an American journalist dead.

The artwork of protest and death, buses aflame, bored soldiers occupying the zocalo, a woman carrying fruits on her head in front of a giant battering ram twice her size, the Day of the Dead ofrendas in Oaxaca commemorating those killed during the teachers’ strike. It’s breathtaking. It takes you to Oaxaca. It creates atmosphere in a way that prose cannot. Peter Kuper has created a remarkable eyewitness account of those turbulent times, which repeat themselves in Latin America’s version of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.

Diario de Oaxaca is visual micro-history: what Kuper experienced in Oaxaca, from the teachers’ strike to an earthquake, both of which he complains were wildly misreported in the media. How do you make sense of a world in which the ‘news’ is often not true, but mostly spin? How does your immediate world fit into the major currents of history, particularly when you have experienced what people are writing about, and the 'official reports' hardly resemble what you have seen with your own eyes? These are questions Kuper is asking about Mexico as well as the United States.

After the teachers’ strike was crushed by the government, Kuper turned his curious eye to entomology. Bugs and butterflies. His family traveled twelve hours to Michoacan, to the remote forests where millions of Monarch butterflies return to have sex and die, presumably a glorious death. Every night bugs invaded their home in Oaxaca. Scorpions. Black widow spiders. Unfathomable creepy crawlies. If only we could stomp on some of our politicians too!

Diario de Oaxaca is a remarkable book. On display is a mind that experiences the world in an astonished play that questions this world at the same time that it communicates its fractures, absurdities, and terrors. ‘Political cartoonist’ as a term to describe Peter Kuper, even though he uses it himself, does not do justice to the work. This is a book I will never give up. It’s curiosity in action. In words. In stunning, thoughtful artwork. It creates an unforgettable new world.

P.S. Take a look at Peter Kuper's show of original art from Diario de Oaxaca at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, and read a recent interview at Design Arts Daily.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Yankee Fan

2009-09-16T22:11:00.008-04:00

How and why did I become a Yankee fan? I watch almost every game on the YES network. I have gotten to know the players’ little routines when they come up to bat. Show me only a silhouette of a batter getting ready for a pitch, and I can tell you who it is in the Yankee lineup.

Jeter seems to signal a kind of “Stop” with one hand toward the umpire right before he settles into the batter’s box. Matsui looks at his bat up and down, his back becomes straight, and his shoulder muscles twitch right before he is primed for the pitch. Teixiera has the strangest stance: his neck juts forward, his back is rigid, and he seems almost off-balance. A-Rod reminds me of a coiled snake, his bat waving languorously behind his neck, ready to strike.

I used to be a more ambivalent Yankee fan. I had never been into baseball in Texas, where I grew up. Everything was football, and my team in El Paso, my brothers’ team, was and is the Dallas Cowboys. But I did go to dozens of games at Cohen Stadium to cheer the El Paso Diablos. But major league baseball? I didn’t care in El Paso as a kid; I didn’t care in Boston, even though I pulled all-nighters at Harvard College for four years and lived a jog away from Fenway Park for another year.

I moved to New York in 1990, and I still watched more football than baseball on television. The Giants were in the same division as the Cowboys. The Yankees were winning World Series then, in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. Yet even during those glorious years, I can’t honestly say I was yet a Yankee fan. I would watch the important games; I saw snippets of the parades in the news when they won another championship. But I hadn’t bought into the team with my heart. I didn’t know every player. I had never been to a Yankee game in person.

Probably two or three years after the start of the millennium, I made it a point to see a game. I think I was walking my kids to a store, a play or a movie near or around Times Square, and I stumbled into the Yankee Clubhouse. You can buy tickets here? How do you get to Yankee Stadium anyway? I had stupid questions; but thankfully somebody answered them.

From the Upper Westside, holy mole, it was so easy to get to Yankee Stadium! Just a short subway ride to the Bronx. Why hadn’t I done this before? The kids cared more about the hot dogs and chicken fingers than about that first game, which I think was against the lowly Devil Rays. For a few years in a row, I bought tickets for three or four games during the summer, and I got hooked.

I began to know the players, their habits. I started watching the Yankees more religiously on TV. I have never gotten to the point of hating the Red Sox, but I do want to crush them in the playoffs. When the Red Sox won their first World Series in a gazillion years, the next day I gave a friend of mine, a transplanted Bostonian who dies for the Red Sox, a bottle of champagne. I knew what it meant to him. I was a fan too, and I knew what it would’ve meant for me and my team.

We’re playing the Toronto Blue Jays tonight, and losing in the seventh inning, 4-2. Last night, a nasty brawl begun by Jorge Posada and some bald-headed pitcher for the Blue Jays, I forget his name, emptied the benches. The Yankees have to keep playing well; they have the best record in baseball right now. But is this the beginning of a slide, or just a blip in a great season? My heart’s into it now. It matters if we lose now. I can’t imagine missing a single game now. (Don’t trade Matsui.)

www.ChicoLingo.com

(Matusi hit a two-run homer in the eighth inning to tie the game, and Cervelli slapped a single to center to score Gardner in the ninth: 5-4, Yankees win!)

Investment Character

2009-09-09T18:37:00.005-04:00

I am reading the biography Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder, and thoroughly enjoying it. Years ago I read Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor; I teach parts of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis; each year I read Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report to understand some of what they are doing and why.

I would not consider myself a Buffettologist in the sense that I copy whatever stock investments Warren Buffett makes. But I do try to understand what he does and why, and apply those principles to companies and industries I am familiar with. Do your own homework, I say. Understand where your money is, and why it’s there. That’s the way to be an intelligent, independent investor.

As I’ve read this biography, I am not surprised to learn Buffett was/is good at math and calculating odds; I am not surprised to learn his friend Charlie Munger is much the same way. Ideas pour out from their heads; they are passionate about investing, and they believe they are right. ‘Didactic,’ is how they describe themselves. Other words that come to mind are ‘relentless,’ ‘iconoclastic,’ ‘anti-social,’ and ‘obsessed with details.’ They are also honest, self-critical, and loyal to those whom they think deserve loyalty.

When I have taught my summer course on Investment Analysis, I have always argued that number-crunching is only half the battle to becoming a good investor. The other half, and maybe even the most important part, is having the right kind of character to be a successful investor. I think you can train someone to understand and calculate the right figures from annual reports, 10-K reports, and 10-Q reports. I think you can teach someone to use discounted cash flow analysis to get a sense of whether the current stock price correctly values, or undervalues, future earnings.

(I’m not surprised Ben Graham did not give much weight to future earnings, because I also believe projections into the future are dicey figures easily manipulated to prove whatever you want to prove. Understand the nature of the business at hand, and how it can remain profitable forever, or be easily susceptible to margin pressures, inflation, taxation and so on, and that’s how you can truly value ‘future earnings.’ You won’t get an exact number, but you’ll get a sense of whether this business is worth owning. It’s better to be approximately right than exactly wrong. I think Buffett said that.)

But my point is that while number-crunching is largely teachable, having the right investment character is for the most part not. I don’t care what anybody else thinks, and I don’t look for others’ approval of my investment ideas, nor for my clothing, nor for my unorthodox political positions, nor my blog entries. I have always been that way. As a toddler, my mother called me ‘viejo Josisah,’ which was the name of a crotchety old man she once knew in Chihuahua. I was grumpy; I loved being alone; I was, in a word, ‘didactic.’ Now I am a rumpled, ornery man on Broadway, with what I consider to be a plain look on my face but which my wife Laura says looks like a permanent scowl.

That kind of investment character makes it easy to go against the crowd, to not panic when others are decrying the end of capitalism as we know it, or to not join the party when the champagne corks fly to the ceiling because of Internet stocks, China, or whatever the next new fad is. I also don’t like debt. I try to keep things simple. I try to see things as they are, not as I wish them to be, at least for my investments. The recent market meltdown, although painful, was not enough to change my ways; I had enough liquidity to survive.

So ‘Know Thyself,’ that Socratic maxim, is so important to me as an investor. If you know you don’t have the right kind of investment character, then lowering your costs with an index fund is about the smartest thing you can do. If you think you have the right math skills and character, and you start running your own individual stock portfolio, and then you panic when others head for the hills, or you slavishly follow the momentum of euphoria, then learn from that. Those that learn from clear-eyed self-reflection and analysis will be winners on Wall Street. Those that don’t will embody Mr. Market’s schizophrenia.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Half-mud, half-dead

2009-08-31T23:33:00.007-04:00

It has taken me about a week to recover from our Costa Rica vacation. We arrived at one in the morning on Monday night/Tuesday morning. I woke up with a severe head cold, and my back was killing me. The zip-lining near the Arenal Volcano was fantastic, but now I was paying the price.

I have always acted differently when I am sick. When I was younger, I ignored any ache or cold, but if my sickness truly debilitated me I either lashed out at whoever was near me or I sunk into a temporary depression. This week, barely able to walk, my head, eyes, and nose gushy with fluids, I slept. I slept until I couldn’t sleep anymore, and I kept quiet and observed everyone around me, Laura, Aaron, and Isaac going about their business without me.

It was a strange experience not having almost any reaction to my week-long illness; I was probably feverish. I wanted to recover. I thought about my father and his chronic back problems, which eventually reduced him to a walker in his mid-70’s. I really did not want to become my father. I lay in bed, wincing with pain, not quiet able to breathe right, and I felt like part of the bed, as if I were sinking into the mattress itself. I imagined I had been abandoned in a mud pile. I was now half-mud.

It’s not bad being half-mud. You have no responsibilities. You lie in bed, or mud, and look at everything. Conversations occur around you, about you, but you are not a part of them. A crash in the other room? Somebody else rushes to see what it is, to clean it up. For me, for that week, there was no drive within. That was the fascinating part. No anger. No self-loathing. No urge to do. The kids needed to get ready to go back to school? This pain-in-the-ass was the ultimate observer. ‘Action Bear’ (Laura’s oft times moniker for me) was in hibernation. Half-asleep. Probably delirious.

There was a point, later in the week, when the bed felt too soft, when I stopped thinking about the strange colors in front of my eyes, when I thought about what bills needed to get paid by the end of month. That’s when I knew I was better. I missed being half-mud, half-dead, and I even wanted to go back. I imagined for a few hours before I rose like Lazarus from the dead why Lazarus would even want to get up from being dead. I mean, if you could be half-dead, looking at the world but nothing else, that would be the ticket.

As I hobbled to the mailbox and to Broadway Farm for pounds and pounds of California yellow peaches, nectarines, and a watermelon the size and weight of a bowling ball (Do all young teenage boys eat this much fruit?), I missed my half-mud existence. Zabar’s. Dry cleaning. The mailbox again. Returning emails. Filling out back-to-school health forms. My back was killing me. But I could more or less walk now. I said to Isaac, as he watched me grimace on the sidewalk, “It feels as if a crazy carpenter has driven nails into my spine.” But yeah, I was getting better.

By this weekend, I was back. My back had but a hint of my previous torture, and what was left of my cold was a weak cough. Gone was the Pumpkin Head of the half-mud man. Did you have the swine flu? somebody asked me. No, I don’t think so, I replied. But perhaps for one week I did live the strange and sweet existence of a Pig Man in the Half-Mud.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Costa Rica

2009-08-20T12:04:00.018-04:00

We have been trekking through Costa Rica, a lush and spectacular country. We arrived in San Jose, stayed one night, and the next morning traveled for five hours by buses and boats to remote Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast. It did not rain a single day during our three-day stay, a miracle in the rainy season.

On an expedition through the canals of Tortuguero we saw white-faced monkeys, spider monkeys, two sloths, crocodiles slicing through the muddy water, baby blue herons, howler monkeys, toucans, caimans, small, shy turtles on logs, and half-a-dozen iguanas. Laura, Aaron, and Isaac have been enthralled by the stunning variety of nature on this isthmus, and so have I.

Our second night in Tortuguero, we joined another eco-expedition to witness the giant sea turtles laying and burying their eggs and dragging their massive bodies, the size of Smart cars, back to the sea. In the pitch black, our guide, Carla, told us last year jaguars had eaten about 200 of these sea turtles, the flippers and the heads, and abandoned the bodies in their shells on the beach. As we walked through the jungle in the darkness, with only the guide’s small light ahead of us, I wondered what it would be like to be eaten by a jaguar.

The next leg of our trip was to Arenal, and we flew from Tortuguero in an Australian single-propeller plane. That was an experience. The plane barely seated seven people and their luggage, and I was in the co-pilot’s seat. We flew over mountains to get back to San Jose, the ride was smooth, and I was as fascinated by the busy panel of instruments as by the breathtaking 360-degree view of eastern Costa Rica.

After traveling on more rough, winding roads for hours, we arrived in La Fortuna, to the Hotel Nayara. Our room overlooks the Arenal Volcano, has hot water and a Jacuzzi, Internet service, which is how I can write this blog, and air conditioning. The kids: “Can we build a house just like this hotel?” I have also marveled at the construction details of this hotel: richly dark hardwood floors, an open air restaurant with friendly macaws and parrots, deliciously comfortable beds, rough-hewn exposed ceiling beams interlaced with bamboo. The Hotel Nayara is an oasis.

Yesterday we zip-lined over and through the rain forest canopy at the foot of the volcano, dangling hundreds of feet in the air on a cable, zooming through the forest from platform to platform, in the same moment terrified and thrilled.

The best was a zip-line of 760 meters (2490 feet, or eight football fields). At that moment, a cloud enveloped the forest as we stood on a platform next to the treetops. You couldn’t see the other side of the cable. The guides strapped us one at a time onto our pulley and harness, and when the line was clear and we were ready, pushed us into the white oblivion. Laura and the kids screamed with delight as they raced into the clouds. I felt like a giant cannon ball shooting through the whiteness. As openings appeared in the clouds, I marveled at the forest below and how lucky I was to have said yes to this experience.

Last night we visited the closest observation point for the Arenal Volcano. In the evening, strips of lava dribbled down the mountainside, the volcano continuously smoking. In 1968, the volcano had a massive eruption, devastated six square miles of land in minutes, and 78 people died. The last major eruption was in 2000, with minor eruptions occurring as recently as last year. Why are we fascinated by this awesome power? I have been to the volcanoes in Hawaii, and Arenal, perhaps because it is younger, pointier, and closer to human habitation, is as beguilingly ominous.

Next we travel to the beaches of Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific Ocean. I can’t wait for that adventure.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Reaching Back In History To Stop Thinking

2009-08-11T12:32:00.019-04:00

I read an Op-Ed article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “Our Unconstitutional Census,” by John S. Baker and Elliott Stonecipher, which reaches back to a selective version of the U.S. Constitution to argue illegal aliens should not be counted in the 2010 Census because counting them undermines the equal representation of certain states and their citizens. That is, states with large populations of undocumented workers get apportioned more House members and electoral votes than states without. The current census, as authorized by Congress, counts everybody, legal or illegal.

The authors wrap themselves in the Constitution and even the first 1790 census, which counted all inhabitants, to give legitimacy and authority to their argument: “The census has drifted from its constitutional roots, and the 2010 enumeration will result in a malapportionment of Congress.”

But the article fails to mention one fact that undermines their argument: the first 1790 census counted slaves. African slaves, who did not get the right to vote until 1870, eighty years after the first census, not only were counted as three-fifths of a person (enshrined ingloriously in the Constitution), but Southern states benefited by having more electoral votes and more representation in Congress per voting citizen, to the loud complaints of Northern states, for the selfsame eighty years.

The authors of the Wall Street Journal article also perform a sleight of hand, probably unnoticed by the casual reader, but certainly noticed by this one. They take the word ‘inhabitants’ as the correct mandate of the 1790 census, but instead of mentioning that inhabitants for George Washington and his census included non-voting slaves (he was a Founding Father, wasn’t he?), the Wall Street Journal authors use the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of ‘inhabitant,’ as a bona fide member of the State, entitled to its privileges. Did African slaves have all the privileges of the State in 1790? Could they vote? Of course not.

What is important to note is not only how this article reaches back selectively to its version of the Constitution, but how much harsher the current authors are on non-voting inhabitants than George Washington and other Founding Fathers. Baker and Stonecipher want undocumented workers to count for zero in the 2010 census. At least, and it’s not saying much, George Washington wanted each slave to count for three-fifths of a person in the 1790 census. Perhaps the Founding Fathers had some empathy for the downtrodden, or for the businesses dependent on the downtrodden.

Many would persuasively argue that today’s undocumented workers are analogous to Washington’s and Jefferson’s slaves. Immigrants work menial jobs, often in agriculture, and suffer violence and discrimination, living outside of society and blamed conveniently for all manner of social ills. African slaves were of course forced to come to America and subjected to brutal, systematic violence. But is there any doubt that if slavery were still legal in the United States that we would be capturing our slaves from the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the Third World, including Latin America? What is the same now as before is the need for American industry and society to prosper, often on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable, and for these workers to be used to the maximum while keeping them as marginalized as possible. We win; they lose. It’s not more complicated than that, but perhaps it’s not the kind of reflection in the mirror Americans want to see.

Reaching back to ambiguous and even contradictory standards, such as the Constitution, often seems to bolster certainty and conviction, until one takes a more careful look. This reaching back is the problem. It is done to stop critical thinking and gain acceptance of a viewpoint that may have hidden biases having little to do with that ‘historic standard’ held so high. Anyone telling you there exists a pure beginning we should return to is asking you to stop thinking and march in lockstep behind them. Readers, think and analyze. That is the true measure of a good citizen.

www.ChicoLingo.com

When Ideology Trumps Practical Reason

2009-08-05T18:22:00.011-04:00

It’s a long, hot August, and the vote on Sotomayor nears. Why does it matter? She will win confirmation, so why does it matter if some, or a significant amount, of Republicans vote for Judge Sotomayor? It matters because it is a vote about fairness and objectivity. Do such concepts exist in American political discourse anymore?

The Republicans should have investigated Sonia Sotomayor aggressively, and they did. But the majority of Republicans, at least from their stated positions in the media, have not judged Sotomayor’s qualifications as a judge for the Supreme Court. That is their mandate. Instead of zeroing in on her judicial record, they focused on her off-the-cuff speeches. If you want to judge the qualifications of a judge, you look at how she decided cases, you look at her written opinions, you look at her legal experience, and you look at her education.

The problem, of course, for those ideologically-obsessed Republicans is that they had nothing ‘official’ to work with. They had prejudged her, and they couldn’t get the facts to fit their pre-conclusions. Sotomayor was a Phi Beta Kappa student from Princeton and graduated from Yale Law School. After hearing her in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have little doubt she is smarter and more practical than the senators from both sides of the aisle who questioned her.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, and there are thousands which are part of the record of the Second Circuit, Sotomayor voted with Republican judges who sat next to her on the Court of Appeals. When you look at her judicial record, there is little evidence of ideology, but plenty of evidence of practicality and following legal precedent.

But facts don’t matter to ideologues. Facts don’t matter to those without a spine to publicly rebuke Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Ralph Reed. Facts don’t matter to those who have decided they don’t like you because your name is ‘Sotomayor’ and you are a Latina. The facts, which are used to judge a nominee’s qualifications for the Supreme Court and not how she will decide specific cases, support a unanimous or near-unanimous vote in Sotomayor’s favor. But she won’t get it, and that’s the current state of the Republican Party. It’s trapped in its ideology.

Before Democrats get too cheery about themselves, it has happened to them too. No political party escapes the tug of ideology, and as a party succeeds and stays in power it begins to think that somehow it should always be there, it deserves power, and it is historically destined to win. Power corrupts, and it corrupts through ideology.

But when reasonable practicality erupts and interrupts, the country is better for it. Obama is now funding charter schools at unprecedented levels. This was a Republican cause. But perhaps this is a way to improve the education of our children, while giving parents a choice. Moreover, we need more Republicans like Lamar Alexander and Lindsey Graham, who declared they intend to vote for Sotomayor based on her qualifications to be a judge, not on her likelihood of being a Republican puppet on judicial matters.

I don’t know what happened to reasonable political discourse, the middle ground of give-and-take, the focus on making things work. I in part blame our current political discourse on the flash media of ten-second opinions. This show is for entertainment, even when it is labeled ‘news,’ not for edification.

I also think another problem is the discomfort the white majority feels about this country becoming more Latino, more Asian, more African, less Christian, more Secular. We are becoming a reflection of the greater world, and the United States, economically, is also becoming a smaller portion of that world over time, as the rest of the world develops by leaps and bounds. Some will exploit these inexorable trends and the discomforts they cause, for money and power, while others will try to make our community work together as one. If this American experiment is to keep succeeding, practical reason must triumph over ideology.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Business News Blather

2009-07-29T11:41:00.008-04:00

I used to watch the TV for business news. But now Kudlow’s and Cramer’s shouting leave even more ringing in my ears than the express trains zooming past the local subway stop at 86^th Street. I have read the Wall Street Journal for decades, but I have noticed that after Murdoch took over more news stories have political slants and headlines are unnecessarily more pessimistic in the age of Obama.

I don’t get the parade of blond people at Fox News. Are they really trying to be that obvious about who is in their camp and who they could care less about? The CNN anchors who read Twitter responses: are they serious about that? That isn’t democracy, but stupidity, on display for the world to see.

I have become a full-fledged media skeptic. I do think that many of the quick and easy responses encouraged by modern media are often nothing more than rants. That’s one of the reasons I have not allowed comments on Chico Lingo. I read other blogs for years, and still do, and the comments are rarely thoughtful or interesting. I figured if someone wanted to comment on what I wrote they could send me an email, and I have received dozens. Or they could start their own blog.

I know I am in the minority, in more ways than one, on turning away from the flotsam of the news cycle. My only use for democracy-as-hyper-mediocrity is that I try to take advantage of the paranoia or euphoria through my investments. I ignored the doomsday scenarios of March, and kept my investments exactly the way they were. So I have benefited from the recent run-up in stocks. New money I have added to my short-term bond portfolio, simply to have more emergency reserves in case we return to the brink of depression. I am also paying off debt in advance, even if my debt levels were relatively small compared to my net assets.

I watch the crazy flamingos of speculation, the fast money, the lightning rounds, and I am happy to be patient and contrarian and independent. Investors should do their homework, and this knowledge will allow them to ignore the garbage advice that washes up on their shores.

One of the reasons, as I pointed out to my wife Laura, that I did not panic after the recent vicious bear market was that my mutual fund and individual stock positions were still mostly in the black, or with slight losses, at the bottom of the precipitous drop. I have invested patient money, for decades in some cases, and so a downturn cuts into my gains, but isn’t deep enough to even put me in the red.

Too often I hear of friends who invest to get rich quick. To me, that’s not investing, but speculating. I even had a close friend who would invest for a major appliance, for a month or two, score a quick profit, and buy the refrigerator he needed. It was ridiculous to me then, and is ridiculous to me now. But most media outlets encourage this kind of behavior. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, oil traders who invest in oil futures for quick bucks were labeled “investors” in paragraph after paragraph. That’s editorializing in news stories, and makes the point against Obama that he is against “investors” in this market when he or his administration considers putting limits on oil traders.

I don’t think we should expect much from CNBC, the Wall Street Journal or Fox Business News in terms of investigative journalism. They are promoters of Wall Street, and sometimes that’s good and too often it’s horrible. The best single article I have read about the current shenanigans in the finance industry came from the New York Times, about how subprime brokers have resurfaced as dubious loan fixers, by Peter Goodman.

The individual investor has to protect himself. But ‘Caveat Emptor’ only works if there is full disclosure in plain English, if abusive behavior is eliminated and illegal behavior prosecuted, if you are not lied to by whoever is selling you stock in a company, a bond, or a mortgage. That’s the proper role of government and what George W. Bush could never understand.

www.ChicoLingo.com

America in Retrenchment

2009-07-22T13:52:00.010-04:00

I have the sense, as I have read disparate news items from Apollo 11’s moon landing forty years ago to the healthcare debate, from Henry Louis Gates’ arrest in his home near Harvard Square to the Republicans’ petty delay on voting for Sotomayor, that the United States as a country is getting smaller and meaner, instead of more ambitious, experimental or collectively enthusiastic and purposeful about the future. I may be wrong. But I see a country fighting to keep what it has, rather than solving its problems and moving toward opportunities.

It is always dangerous to abstract and claim any country seems like this or like that. We are a collection of 300 million individuals, from different backgrounds, religions, races, and classes. And what you understand is often what the media wants you to see and hear, through their weird prism where glib contradictions, petty arguments, and the scandals of celebrity culture attract eyeballs and ears to TV sets, radios, and newspapers, the point of any media empire however big or small.

But those caveats to my impressions of America’s retrenchment have always been there. Either we have had leaders who overcame our personal or collective pessimism about the direction of this country, or optimism was truly a part of society, for whatever economic or political reason. So I think the United States may truly be changing from what we used to be.

The fortieth anniversary of the moon landing exemplifies, for me, how far we have fallen in our space program, not how much we once accomplished. We should be going to Mars and beyond. Where is the enthusiasm to explore a new world? Where is the collective will, along with the nuts-and-bolts practicality, that embraces the challenge, the technological breakthroughs, and the sacrifices of such missions?

‘We don’t have the money,’ many might say. ‘We need to fix our country before we can represent the human race in space again.’ Yet many of our economic problems were self-inflicted. We chose a laissez-faire capitalism, particularly during the disastrous Bush years, that destroyed limits on risk-taking for banks, that unleashed profit predators on hapless, uneducated consumers of mortgages, and that fueled a society of pointless consumerism.

Meanwhile, our children watched too much TV, played too many video games, and were rarely encouraged to read. I am not surprised that the biggest group of foreign students in one of my classes is Chinese. These students are invariably polite, hardworking, aggressive, technically capable, and fluent in English. I see the future in my class every day. What happened to our work ethic? What happened to the peddle-to-the-medal desire to rise from the dirt and make something of yourself? My father and mother were like that; the Ukrainian woman I met on Broadway, who works several menial jobs so that her daughter can finish dental school at NYU, is like that. But I feel they are aberrations in contemporary America.

Part of the problem is the United States became too developed. You see this size problem when investing in companies. It is easier to grow a $100 million company by 20 percent, than a $100 billion company. America is not a growth story anymore, but a story of fixing devilishly persistent problems like the uninsured, high infant mortality rates, swaths of our society still disenfranchised and in poverty, and racism. The problems of race are not what they were in the 1960’s. I believe we have made progress. But I also believe it is foolish to think we don’t have a problem anymore, or that racism and ethnic discrimination will not take different, unexpected turns like African-Americans and Anglos closing the doors on Latinos.

Which brings me to Professor Gates and Judge Sotomayor. It was one thing, in the early years of the civil rights movement, to be a liberal by giving minorities the chance to educate themselves and to compete equally for jobs, local political offices, and so on. But that’s not where we are anymore. Many from the traditionally disenfranchised classes don’t want just a break anymore; they want and deserve the keys to Harvard and the Supreme Court. Barack Obama already has the keys to the White House.

I am sensing further retrenchment in America to the progress of the disenfranchised. It is one thing to be patronizingly liberal, to grant an opportunity to someone you still may look down on. It is another for someone to replace you at the highest levels of power. Perhaps what I sense is this unease in parts of America that are white and non-Hispanic; you certainly see it in a wing of the Republican party. They are unwilling to concede Sotomayor is exceptionally qualified to be on the Supreme Court, even after she handled the hearings well, even after her judicial record was scrutinized and determined to be moderate. Her detractors will not be convinced by anything reasonable. They have prejudged her, or are careful never to counter the smears of Limbaugh in front of their constituencies. These senators are digging in their heels.

What I hope will counter America’s retrenchment is having leaders and cultural educators strive to make the United States as one again. One nation about freedom. One nation that is bold, yet tolerant. One nation that focuses on problems to solve them. One nation that corrects mistakes, instead of repeating them. A nation more about the future than the past.

www.ChicoLingo.com

A Really Long Commute

2009-07-16T20:51:00.006-04:00

This week I have been waking up at 5:15 every morning to be behind the wheel of my Honda Pilot by 6, so that I can be at Yale by 8 to get ready to teach my morning class at 9 a.m. I’m wiped out and my brain’s fuzzy, but it’s Thursday and this week is almost over.

I do love teaching, but I love it only if I can do it intensely for a short time, whether it’s writing workshops in Missouri or an investment analysis class at Yale. I have taught semester-long courses, and I end up throwing myself into them too, but I know I also don’t do much writing, or much of anything else for that matter, because I think students deserve a great experience in my class. It’s what I owe them as a teacher. So I teach, but only in short bursts, and then I return to my life.

What has kept me going, 81.5 miles from New York to New Haven in the morning, and 82 miles back to Manhattan in the late afternoon, besides hearing how well Sonia Sotomayor has handled the endangered, antsy white men of the Senate Judiciary Committee, besides my gulps of java, besides NPR, 1010 WINS, CBS News Radio, besides the occasional deer a few feet from the asphalt of the claustrophobic yet verdant Merritt Parkway, has been the speed of the car itself. That is, my going has kept me going.

I have pondered this phenomenon in my writing as well. I begin a story, and at a certain moment, which could be an early draft, the story itself begs to be told the right way, the story demands that I finish it, a certain movement has been created, by me, and it must be finished. Or else, what? I’m not really quite sure. Or else I don’t live up to what I expected of myself or the story, or else I don’t live up to what I wanted in my brain. Or else I created something, but only half-created it, so that it doesn’t have a life of its own. When something I started is not completed, the story, the task, and I are not fulfilled.

One lesson I have learned about myself is that I must be careful what I start. If I start the drive to New Haven, I will finish it. If I commit myself to teaching this class, then I must finish it. If I create characters in a novel and they reach a point where they are speaking to me on the page, but in garbled language and confusing situations, speaking yet not being heard clearly, then I must finish this story. I must rewrite it. I must make it so that these proto life-forms can reach their fruition. When these characters can be heard, somehow, in them, I will be heard too. ‘Heard’ does not mean what the characters are saying is ‘obvious.’ What ‘heard’ means is that the characters are true to themselves. The best characters for me say many things to different readers.

I perhaps say many different things to many different readers with this blog. I am not trying to be obscure; I am just trying to be real. Why we extol the personal experience of Alito as a judge, yet demand Sotomayor distance herself from her personal experience as a judge, why movies nowadays must always have good endings, why politicians never admit mistakes and change their policies publicly, and why news reporters believe pointing out glib contradictions is the epitome of free expression, and not the death of it, I don’t know. I don’t know these things; they don’t seem real to me. I am just driving to New Haven every day and watching the road. That’s real enough for me.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Our Children in the World

2009-07-08T11:45:00.014-04:00

Today I was teaching twelve-year-old Isaac to get to school by himself, on the New York City subway. This past school year he came home by himself on the bus, about 30 blocks, without a problem. He has reached these thresholds slightly earlier than Aaron, who at fourteen, now gets everywhere he needs to be by himself, and safely. As a parent on Manhattan’s Upper Westside, I have to worry about many more potential dangers than my mother did on Ysleta’s San Lorenzo Avenue. I don’t think I will ever stop worrying about my children in the world.

San Lorenzo was three short blocks to South Loop School, and my old neighborhood did have a few gangs, but they weren’t the real danger as I walked to and from school as a child. Dogs. I hated the Doberman pinscher that once lunged at me from the bushes of the house across the street. We had our own ferocious guard dog, Lobo, who had bitten many passersby straying too close to our fence or unlucky enough to be on the street when Lobo managed to vault the chainlink. And cars. The souped-up low riders and pickups never stopped, for there wasn’t even a crosswalk painted on our dirt streets. I remember seeing Reuben, a neighborhood kid, tumble underneath a pickup as it ran him over during our baseball game on San Simon. Reuben survived with only a broken arm.

In New York, cars are also dangerous, but in a different way. At crosswalks, even when pedestrians have the ‘Walk’ sign, cars do not stop. This happens every day on Broadway, and it’s a particular problem on two-way avenues. You get the ‘Walk’ sign on Broadway and you walk across the two-way avenue, but by the time you get to the other side, impatient drivers on the cross street have begun turning into the avenue, challenging pedestrians to get out of the way. The worst offenders are invariably taxis, livery cabs, city buses, and delivery trucks. Those on a schedule, a match up their butts. I have lost count how many times I have heard that awful screech of rubber on asphalt to avoid metal smashing into flesh at the crosswalk.

Less frequent dangers on Broadway are cars missing the red light entirely and zooming across the intersection and cars screeching to a halt at the crosswalk as their drivers realize they have a red light. If you jump into the crosswalk the instant you have the ‘Walk’ sign, you may be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After you have the ‘Walk’ sign, I tell my children, make sure the cars have actually stopped. Not only do you not have to make mistakes, but you must often catch the mistakes of others to be safe.

Bicycles, of course, never stop at the red light. Messengers, take-out delivery guys, Lance-Armstrong-wannabes. They’re even on the sidewalks.

Parked cars you’re standing next to often lurch backward without their drivers glancing into their rear view mirrors.

SUV-like strollers are battering rams deployed by harried mothers with a passive aggressive smile on their faces. At worst, your toe or shin will be bruised. It’s happened to me twice.

And I haven’t even gotten to the aggressive beggars on the street who follow you for a block, even after you have politely turned them down. The shifty-eyed losers who strike up conversations with young girls alone. The crazed woman I once met on a Number 1 train who, out of the blue, threatened to gut everyone in the car “like a fish.” The wild high school kids who, as four cops stand at the subway platform, push each other at incoming subway cars with snorts and guffaws.

I will do my best to train Aaron and Isaac for this New York City world they must navigate on their own. I will train them by being tough, by teaching them to be resourceful, by being available in case they need me, by going over scenarios with them, by watching them and not saying a word, even if they are making choices I would not make. I will do my best, and I will keep my fingers crossed and hope they learn from experience. The buzz of the doorbell, when they are home, is the sweetest sound of my day.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Why I Write Simply

2009-06-29T14:57:00.013-04:00

My prose tends to be simple and direct. I don’t use words like ‘ideation,’ ‘deconstructing dynamics of power and authority,’ and ‘synthesizing structure.’ Perhaps when I was at Yale as a graduate student in philosophy, I may have written like that, but I made it a point of eschewing such language forever. I still however use words like ‘eschewing.’ I can’t help it. Why?

When I started writing fiction, which was late in life for a writer, as a grad student, I wanted to get away from the meaningless abstractions of philosophical seminars. This linguistic pretension removed me from my community, from my father and mother, from my abuelita. The first story I wrote, “The Abuelita,” was specifically for readers to remember who my abuelita had been, and to criticize my study of Heidegger and Nietzsche at Yale, for its isolation, for its anti-humanity.

For in classrooms within the Gothic fortress of Yale’s Old Campus (and I suspect at many of the seminars in academies across the country), a human being is a mind, first and foremost. But in Ysleta, my home less than a mile from the Mexican-American border, the human being was, and is, feet. Feet in pain. Callused hands. Adobe houses built by those hands and feet. La gente humilde of Ysleta.

At Yale I was reacting against the elitism of the academy, an elitism that is hard to overcome when you can immerse yourself in books and forget the workers who make that world possible. I was also reacting against myself. I loved reading German and Greek philosophers. They did provide unique, unconventional insights into the human being. I had become an Ivy Leaguer in many ways. I was torn, between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.

I also noticed that many of the practitioners of academic fancy language, as I’ll call it, were individuals who treated people poorly. Their education and facility with argument and power encouraged lying, deception, and manipulation. The nature of truth, the pursuit of abstraction in universities, was a passive aggressive violence. Eliminate your opponent, not by killing him, but by warping arguments to win at any cost, by murdering his mind. The nature of truth was hate.

When you view human beings as abstractions, then it is easy to abuse those abstractions without guilt. Judging a person as a category is the root of racism; it is the root of cruelty. Moreover, writing about the world of people is an exercise in abstraction, and explains my deep ambivalence about being a writer. Too often my writer friends forget themselves in their world of words.

So I took a different tack with my fiction. I wanted to write so my father and mother could understand me. I was writing for them, and to give voice to those from Ysleta. I wrote simply. I also wrote prose obsessed with details, personal stories, to give meat to those understanding my community outside the mainstream. I used myself as an example to provide a meaningful character struggling with complex issues, within the murk between right and wrong.

Yet I also wanted to explore the ideas from Yale, and beyond, which I thought were worthwhile, so I wrote philosophical stories questioning the basis of morality. I wrote stories that asked whether murder was always wrong, or belief in god always holy, or success the root of moral failure. Most importantly, I believed the people of Ysleta had a lot to teach the people at Yale about being good human beings. I still believe that.

But this effort to be clear and direct about difficult questions has sometimes condemned me in academic circles or among those who prize the beauty of language above all. I am also condemned by those who never think beyond the obvious and popular, because I write philosophical stories. You will never find my fiction at Costco.

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It’s a borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Show-Me State

2009-06-25T00:39:00.007-04:00

I am in Independence, Missouri, the home of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the U.S. Indeed, I am staying at this wonderful place called the Inn at Ophelia’s, across the street from Clinton’s Soda Shop where Harry, as a young teenager, was a soda jerk. This is my second visit to Independence and the greater Kansas City metropolitan area to teach writing workshops, and I can’t get enough of the Midwest.

A different sensibility exists here, which reminds me of Ysleta, the colonia on the outskirts of El Paso where I grew up. It’s a genteel quality, without the naiveté of the small town. People open doors for each other. Seldom are voices raised. And there is a preoccupation with chatting about life and neighbors, the ordinary and everyday, which I believe strengthens that invisible social fabric that communicates ‘we belong together on these plains.’ Of course, here ‘la hora social’ is not in Spanish, as it is on my parents’ porch in Ysleta, but in a deadpan, measured, humorously ironic version of English.

My friends who have invited me to Missouri warn me the other side of this genteel friendliness is that people will talk behind your back. In New York, I counter, people say whether or not they like you to your face. I’m not sure which is better, but I do know both are façades. The forced smile goes away, and becomes easy, once you initiate a conversation and volunteer a bit about yourself to a stranger in Missouri. On the Upper Westside, or anywhere in New York, the hard outer shell might soften too, once you show people you don’t want anything, you will gladly help them, yet you’re not a dupe.

I also noticed that my slow-talking, which aggravates my wife in New York, is not slow at all in Missouri. Perhaps this is a function of growing up in a semi-rural corner of Texas, where you weigh your words carefully before saying anything. Too much talk reveals too much of who you are, and I prefer to keep some of my self to myself. Who I am is not revealed by blabbing. I prefer to listen, absorb the situation and the people, and understand them. That internal life reveals as much, or more, about who I am as whatever comes out of my mouth. Is that a small town mentality? A Western one? Or the shyness of being an outsider in the world?

The reason I came to Independence, Missouri was Ron Clemons. I met Mr. Clemons in 1978 when I was a teenager at the Blair Summer School for Journalism. It was a seminal trip for me, because it was the first time I lived away from home. Pearl Crouch, my journalism teacher at Ysleta High, had encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to Blair, and I won it from Gannett and The El Paso Times. I was terrified, but I also wanted to become a writer, maybe even a journalist.

At Blair, I met this funny and tough man, the assistant director at Blair, Mr. Clemons. I didn’t have him for a teacher, but I listened to his stories, the humor as well as the lessons about life. When I was accepted to Harvard College a year later, he sent me an inscribed hardback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, which I still have on my shelf.

Thirty years later, I had dinner with Mr. Clemons again. Molly Clemons, his wife and a great educator herself, was also with us. Mr. Clemons was still telling stories.

One he told tonight was about a woman who wrote to him years after she had had Mr. Clemons as a journalism teacher in Independence, Missouri. He taught at Truman High for thirty-seven years and is a legend in high school journalism. Mr. Clemons recounted how one day he received this letter. The writer wrote about how Mr. Clemons had singled out and read an excellent lead she had written to the class. It was a small thing, Mr. Clemons said at the dinner table, the kind of thing you don’t think about as a teacher. He remembered the woman as a good writer who was exceptionally quiet.

It was the first time, the woman continued in the letter, someone had singled her out in school. It made all the difference in the world to her. Meanwhile at home, this woman had been abused. She escaped her troubles, earned a college education, and became a mother. As she wrote to Mr. Clemons, “I’m not one of your famous students. I’m just a mom and I have a job, but I’m happy. You may have forgotten me, but I have never forgotten you, Mr. Clemons.”

As Mr. Clemons retold this story tonight, he took off his glasses and wiped the tears from his eyes. “This letter got to me. It was such a small thing I did. . . .” he said, his voice trailing off, and turned away. What I thought over dinner was why don’t we have more high school journalism teachers like Ron Clemons.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Henri Poincaré

2009-06-16T20:09:00.005-04:00

Henri Poincaré: “To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

I saw this quote on a New York City subway one week ago and have not stopped thinking about it. After I pick up The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal from my front door every morning, I read about the same world, from different ideological perspectives. What’s true anymore? This or that side? Does it even matter? Are we talking to each other anymore, trying to convince the other of our point of view? Or are we just pontificating?

This week The New York Post also ran a story about life inside our media bubbles. Yes, incredibly, I read the Post, as well as about a dozen other online news sources, from the BBC to The Kansas City Star. Fox News or MSNBC? Conservative or Liberal? Hate Obama or love Obama? That’s our opinionated, but not necessarily enlightened world. We live in self-selected bubbles that reinforce what we believe already.

So what happened to real thinking? What happened to pondering the other side’s perspective, to listening, to proffering careful to-the-point arguments, and to occasionally changing our minds due to reason and discourse? We live instead in an intellectually small world. We react. We don’t give each other the benefit of the doubt. We judge by appearances, and later fit the facts to our prejudgment.

As I learned long ago at Harvard and Yale, you can choose the same set of facts to support radically different arguments. So is all discourse rhetoric? Do we inhabit a Nietzschean world where the nature of truth is murder? I think certainly in the public arena, among the politicians and pundits on TV and radio, the exchanges are little more than fifteen-second rants. The proof of your argument (i.e. whether you ‘killed’ your opponent or not) is a successful election, or passage of a bill into law, or defeat of a proposal or Supreme Court justice nominee. The proof is not whether your argument is right, but whether you gained power in the exchange.

Why is the public arena of discourse so pathetic? One reason is the lack of time to argue, in large part because time is money on TV and radio. Another reason is the focus on appearances in the media, not on substance or nuance. But something subtler is also happening to us: we are beginning to forget that life was once otherwise, not media-saturated, not celebrity-infatuated. At what point will our brains devolve to where the corpus of James Joyce is unintelligible? Perhaps we are already there. But at least we will be oblivious to what we have lost.

If you are like me, the private arena of your family is where the real arguments occur. Why? For one, your opponents live with you, and can keep responding for years, and so you need to sharpen your arguments and reasons. There is no cut to a commercial. Second, you care about your opponents, and you’ve seen them at their best and at their worst; you know them as complete human beings. It’s not easy to smear someone like that. Finally, with your family you can experiment with positions, follow the consequences of your conclusions, retract, and renounce. They will still love you.

Those of us in the Poincaré middle, who may doubt and believe different parts of one argument, are not indecisive. The truth is that in the private arena our families have given us a strong enough sense of self to doubt and believe as we see fit, even against the crazy mobs of the public sphere. We have been taught to think for ourselves. There is no better gift.

www.ChicoLingo.com

The Last Day of School

2009-06-09T23:26:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow is the last day of school for my sons, Aaron and Isaac. For Aaron, it will be his last day at the Bank Street School for Children as a student: he graduates from the 8th grade and begins attending high school next year. Eons ago I also attended a K-8 school, South Loop in Ysleta. Recently, on a radio show from El Paso, I even sang the South Loop Eagles fight song. I remembered every word.

Why do K-8 schools hold this special place in our hearts? For one thing, you are old enough, when you graduate, to remember many details of your childhood school experience. I remember vaguely what happened in 4th and 5th grades, but I remember almost everything about 7th and 8th grades.

Interestingly enough, I don’t remember a single day of freshman year at Ysleta High. I think I was in shock. I was suddenly surrounded by older, more sophisticated high school kids. The girls were sexy, but I was intimidated. The boys were bigger and tougher than me. I just didn’t want to make a fool of myself. I looked like a Mexican Donny Osmond. Remember, it was 1979.

But at South Loop the previous year, I had been an eighth grader, at the top of the heap. I knew what was what. I also did not face the social pressures I would later face at Ysleta High. I think this is one great advantage of K-8 schools. The kids, especially in the latter grades, are protected for two extra years from pernicious high school influences.

At Bank Street, I believe, Aaron has had that extra time to develop his own sense of self. He will be ready when he is tested in high school, and I don’t just mean by his more difficult academic workload. In high school, if you know who you are, if you have a sense of what you want and what you don’t want, you will be more likely to have and keep the right priorities.

My walk to South Loop was two blocks, over a canal, and briefly into the neighborhood Calavera before entering the school’s gates. Aaron takes the uptown No. 1 subway in front of our building on Broadway, three stops, before he walks into Bank Street. He has faced more immediate dangers than I ever did, from taxis which zip across the intersection heedless of the red light to incoherent, disheveled men screaming at phantoms only they can see.

Aaron is a responsible young man, and he has managed New York City well. His high school is but eight blocks from our house, so his commute will be a breeze next fall. He will encounter a strange new world. But I know we have given him the skills and encouraged him to be independent so that he will be able to solve his own problems. Whatever he cannot figure out, we will solve together as a family.

My younger son Isaac began to come home from Bank Street by himself this year. Minutes after 3:00 p.m. every day, I look at my cell phone and wait for my boys to call me, to tell me they are on their way home. I anxiously await the buzz of our doorbell for their arrival. The sound for me means another safe journey through the streets successfully completed. Perhaps another good practical lesson learned for the future. Another day of skill enhanced by good luck.

Even after their school days are only distant memories, I will never stop worrying about my boys in the world.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Investment Analysis

2009-06-02T19:46:00.006-04:00

I am updating my syllabus and preparing to teach Investment Analysis at Yale this summer. I am an oddball who writes fiction and teaches investment strategy. I was an economist for a short period; I love writing short stories and novels and even teaching the occasional short-story workshop. Yes, perhaps I am a bit schizoid. But I became interested in investing the few dollars I had during and immediately after college, because I had relatively little money and I wanted more. I didn’t want the riches; I wanted the freedom. I love being my own boss, and that’s exactly what a fiction writer is, as well as an individual investor. I also love numbers. Go figure.

In my course on Investment Analysis, I have students read favorite investment practitioners like Ralph Wanger, John Bogle, Jeremy Siegel, Benjamin Graham, David Swensen, and of course, Warren Buffett. The Essays of Warren Buffett is perhaps my favorite book. I teach my students how to analyze income statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets for different companies, by looking at actual 10-K reports and annual reports.

I believe in learning by doing. The more actual companies you look at, the better you will understand the industry, and which companies are well-run, and why, and which waste the company’s capital, your money. If you keep looking at companies year-round, when the right opportunity comes along, you can analyze it at lightning speed and make a decision about investing in it. ‘Toochis ofn tish,’ a Yiddish phrase for ‘ass on the table.’ Skin in the game. Put your money where your mouth is. These all mean the same thing: if it’s your money, you will take the risk and you will have the responsibility for the decision.

There is one way in which literary writing and investing are similar. The more you write, the more you can write. The more you live in the writer’s world. The more a certain type of focus becomes your normal state, rather than a special state for the weekends, for example. Paradoxically, the less you write, the less you will be able to write. The less you will be able to pounce on a set of ideas when they strike you, at the oddest moments. So writing, like investing, is learning by doing. You have to practice both to become adept. That’s one of the reasons why I started this weekly blog, to keep my literary motor hummin’.

I tell my Investment Analysis students that, yes, you need to love the detail of financial numbers, and you need to be infinitely curious about companies, their stories, why someone would take such a risk, against all odds, to survive and thrive amid brutal competition. But beyond having abilities in number-crunching, I tell them, being a good investor is also about character.

Certain character traits are excellent for an investor. Other traits work against you. You need to be an independent thinker, and not give a damn what the crowd thinks. Particularly the Wall Street crowd. You need to be able to check how you react emotionally to money, not too excited when your stock is going up, and not too depressed when it’s going down. This emotional distance is crucial for taking advantage of opportunities. Buffett: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

People who invest in the stock market and are not self-aware, or acutely aware of what the crowd does and why, will be fools soon parted with their money. Crotchety. Detail-oriented. Fiercely independent. Industrious. Relentlessly curious. That's the makeup of a good investment character.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Sotomayor, Empathy, and Intellect

2009-05-26T13:11:00.013-04:00

I watched today as President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the United States Supreme Court. Official America, yes, is changing, and better reflecting what real America has been for years. I believe Judge Sotomayor is excellently qualified for the highest court, not because she’s Latina, not because she’s a woman, but because she possesses an intelligent, incisive legal mind. What struck me were the comments in the media that perhaps Sotomayor didn’t have the “intellectual gravitas” or “judicial temperament” to be a Supreme Court judge. When will accomplished Latinos get their due? Perhaps it’s time again to kick down these walls of prejudice, to expose glaring double standards for Latinos. Let me tell you some of my stories.

You can have a handful of Ivy League degrees, you can have books published by wonderful presses, and you can even be somebody’s boss, yet that somebody may still stereotype you, for their advantage. That’s what happened to me when I served on the board of directors of a literary organization for many years. A few tidbits. I pointed out financial mismanagement when other board members did not bother to study financial reports. I was labeled a troublemaker, a loose cannon. Or I questioned the cozy management practices of cronyism, practices that cost our organization valuable dollars needed for our survival. I was a hot-headed Latino.

After many years of struggle, I won this war, as my nemesis finally left and we hired a terrific, open-minded leader for our organization. But what struck me as I analyzed the many battles I had fought and the scars I lived with, was how often polite niceness, even if it was prejudiced, and the glad-handling of fake smiles won over passionate arguments and blunt, to-the-heart criticisms. My lesson: lie, speak in half-truths, and even stab people in the back, and you can get away with it for years as long as you don’t yell or ever frown. I instead wore my heart on my sleeve. If I saw something wrong, if I caught a contradiction, if I smelled a power play, I would say something about it. After board meetings, in whispers, this righteous attitude was too often turned against me.

Wearing your heart on your sleeve does not mean you are not thinking. Quite the contrary, what you are thinking is Aristotlean. That is to say, what you are thinking is that if you don’t do anything and you know it’s wrong, then you will denigrate what thinking is. Thinking is about doing. Thinking is assessing the situation and doing something about it. Thinking something is wrong, and doing nothing about it, is thinking as a cop-out, as an escape into the head (Plato), what polite society does every day. I am not polite.

When Sotomayor is criticized for not having the right judicial temperament, is she being criticized for being outraged when she sees someone being shafted? In the Bronx, I’m sure she learned to be Aristotlean. Being calm or even pleasant when you see an injustice is not a sign of a good temperament. It’s an indication of a coldness to humanity and human suffering. It’s a sign of using your intellect to escape from the world, to avoid changing it. The worst atrocities in the world have been justified with such a temperament.

When Sotomayor is criticized for not having intellectual gravitas, is she being criticized because she doesn’t argue calmly, because she’s blunt? Being serious, evasive, and mathematically abstract is not a sign of intellectual gravitas. It’s a sign of an intellectualism that lives by itself, that pleases itself, that thinks the human being as only an abstract idea. Our Founding Fathers knew better; that’s why they set up a series of checks and balances with the separation of powers in government.

A Puertoriqueña from the projects and the South Bronx. Summa cum laude at Princeton. Yale Law School. Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Appellate court judge for over a decade. That’s the kind of Aristotlean intellect-in-action we should have in the Supreme Court.

www.ChicoLingo.com

East Harlem Cafe and Hit List Reading

2009-05-18T14:37:00.009-04:00

Last Thursday I read at a place I am still entranced by, the East Harlem Café owned by Michelle Cruz, at 104th and Lexington in El Barrio. Two other authors from Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, read with me, Carlos Hernandez and Richie Narvaez. A few hours before, Richie and I appeared on the Victor Cruz Show, a radio talkfest from Brooklyn. Man, did I have a good time. This is the thing about getting out there, reading and talking to people about your work. You meet new people who wow you, you get to discover what they have created, and you feel lucky. Let me count the ways.

After you read this blog, turn off your computer or Kindle, and visit the East Harlem Café. I walked in, a few minutes early to the reading, and I was in coffee heaven. The place has these stylish mosaics on the wall, comfortable seating, and a long bar to order your café and pastries. I wish we had a place on the Upper Westside as welcoming, as cool as the East Harlem Café. Starbucks is not in the same league. That a young, savvy Latina was la jefa was just icing on the cake for me. These entrepreneurs who take risks to make a difference in their neighborhood should be enthusiastically supported, especially when they’ve created something special.

Just before the reading, I had been roaming Brooklyn looking for Jay Street and the studio of the Victor Cruz Show. I stumbled over the cobblestone and was almost to the Hudson River when I found it, a warehouse-like building whose elevator led me to a floor of indie film offices and Victor Cruz. I was met by this red-headed Puerto Rican with hundreds of freckles who seemed at the brink of laughter. Victor, his friend Gil T, Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore, and I had a freewheeling conversation about Latino Lit, Mexican-American border politics and history, Mariachi Plaza in the Boyle Heights district of LA, and fighting for the Latino voice in the arts. I kept thinking, as I listened to my new friends, we’ve got the brains, the talent, the drive, the laughter. We should be taking over the world.

On this special day, the two people I got to know the best were Richie Narvaez and Carlos Hernandez, the other authors in the Hit List anthology. Richie is this sharp Nuyorican who read from his story, “In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino,” about an “enterprising woman” named Iris. Carlos read “Los Simpáticos,” about the producer of a TV show “A Quien Quieres Matar?” I couldn’t stop laughing. Carlos, like his story, is mischievous and laugh-ready. I’ve always been too serious for my own good; it’s my nature. But I love it when people make me laugh.

Liz Martinez, one of the two editors of Hit List, also read a story, by Mario Acevedo. Thank you, Liz, for saying you loved my story, “A New York Chicano.” For a sourpuss like me who is all-too-ready to tear himself apart, kind words help get me out of my little world. This whole day got me out of my world, and I am happy I said yes and took the chance.

This Thursday, May 21st, Richie, Carlos, and I will be reading at the Mysterious Book Shop at 58 Warren Street in Tribeca. The reading will be from 6-8:00 PM. A free book to whomever makes me laugh so hard I pee in my pants. See you there.

www.ChicoLingo.com

Bertha E. Troncoso

2009-05-12T14:46:00.009-04:00

I should have written this on Mother’s Day, but I was traveling. I did phone my mother, Bertha E. Troncoso, the E for Estela, on the day, and my wife Laura and I did send her flowers. My kids, Aaron and Isaac, created cards for Laura, our tradition of preferring handmade drawings to anything store-bought, and our family had a delicious brunch at G.W. Tavern in Washington Depot, Connecticut, the GW for George Washington. My mother has been my family heroine for a long time. Here are snippets of her story.

She was born in a rancho near Chihuahua City, and anytime I whined in El Paso about throwing out the trash or hosing down the trash bins she would remind me of not having shoes until she was ten-years-old. She had a beloved dog named Sultán, and a mother, my abuelita, who was tough and sometimes cruel. Doña Lola was a single mother before she married the genial man I would know as my grandfather. She survived the Mexican Revolution, machos in el rancho, and grinding poverty, so maybe my abuelita had reasons to be la generala.

My mother’s family moved to Juárez when she was a teenager, and Bertha Estela was so beautiful that she began to model clothes for local department stores. I have seen pictures of my mother in her wedding dress, particularly a close up my father has enshrined in our living room in Ysleta. My mother looks like a Mexican Jane Russell.

As my mother recalls, she met my father at a plaza in Juárez, and when they married she had saved more money than him. My father Rodolfo was a poor student studying agronomy, and my mother had a steady job as a saleswoman. When my father is feeling nostalgic, he retrieves old newspaper clippings of my mother modeling the latest post-war fashions.

I remember my mother being the strictest mom on San Lorenzo Avenue. Doña Bertha, as the neighbors called her, definitely inherited the steel from her mother. Mamá would never allow us to play at neighbors’ houses; our friends had to play at our house, under her watchful eye. And on weekends and after school, boy, did we work! Polishing furniture. Cleaning up after our dogs. Painting the house. Pulling weeds from outside our fence next to the canal. I was head of Sanitation. Our neighborhood, a colonia next to the Mexican-American border, had gangs, Barraca contra Calavera, and drugs, so in retrospect perhaps my mother had a point. As my friends in New York have said, I grew up in an “at-risk neighborhood,” and how you gain the drive and discipline to succeed with that beginning is to have parents who are as tough as nails.

As I grew older, I began to notice how intelligent my mother was, yet how she confined herself to the role of dutiful wife. Mamá still has dozens upon dozens of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory. Once, before I left for Harvard, I tried an experiment with her. I said a friend’s name, and she would give me their phone number. We got up to 36 before we stopped. She made thousands of dollars as a manic Avon lady in Ysleta, enough to buy a sleek Buick station wagon with a tinted moon roof, which I used on hot dates. My mother was and still is a voracious reader of everything from Selecciones to the Bible. I buy her a yearly subscription to The El Paso Times, which she reads from front to back.

Yet she was happy to first take care of my abuelitos when they became infirm and had to live with my parents. My mother fed and bathed them until they died in an apartment my father built in our backyard. Now that my father can shuffle but a few feet without his walker, my mother is taking care of him. They are the same age, but my father is weak and insular while my mother is indefatigable, funny, and quick to ask when my next book will be published.

I don’t know how she does it. Bertha Estela could have done anything she wanted, but she chose to take care of her family; she chose love and sacrifice over personal accolades and accomplishments. Now you know why she is my heroine. I hope I will always follow in her footsteps.

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