Brad King Interviews Sergio Troncoso on Nobody's Pilgrims

The Downtown Writers Jam's Brad King has a lively conversation with Sergio Troncoso about his new novel, Nobody's Pilgrims, what advice he would give his younger self, what it is like to be a writer, good advice he received from others like Professor John Womack at Harvard, meeting George W. Bush at the Texas Book Festival, and a story about his childhood when he refused to work for his father because he wanted to focus on school. And the family fight that followed.

https://thewritersjam.com/after-party-episode-9-sergio-troncoso/

"Dust to Dust," by Sergio Troncoso, Texas Highways

Here's my essay "Dust to Dust" about growing old in Ysleta, my mother, the struggles and hopes of immigrants, and the values they shared in this country. In the August 2021 issue of Texas Highways magazine.

"Ysleta with a “Y” is where I grew up, where I went to Ysleta High School, and where my heart always returns when I need to heal, when I want to hug my mother. Ysleta is a first principle for understanding my soul—or as Aristotle would define it, a basic proposition that cannot be deducted from any other proposition. Ysleta is where I began, where I was formed. This community is at the edge of the edge of the United States, and I became an outsider and iconoclast in this country because of it. My mother belonged to the desolate landscape of Ysleta, yet she yearned to go beyond it. I admired her, yet when I left home, I knew I was traveling farther physically as well as philosophically than she ever could."

https://texashighways.com/culture/people/essay-growing-up-and-growing-old-in-ysleta/

 

Behind the Pages Interviews Sergio Troncoso

Diane Goshgarian of Behind the Pages interviews Sergio Troncoso at 22-CityView in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November of 26, 2019. They have an in depth discussion about A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, particularly the first three stories, "Rosary on the Border," "New Englander," and "A Living Museum of Love."

https://youtu.be/NFn6fTS8ncU

Writers Corner Live TV Show Interviews Sergio Troncoso

Thank you to Bridgetti Lim Banda (Cape Town) and Mary Elizabeth Jackson (Nashville) for our discussion yesterday on Writers Corner Live TV Show. Just loved chatting with both of you about A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son (Cinco Puntos Press) and the continuing literary influence of my maternal grandmother, Doña Dolores Rivero, who is never far from my thoughts.

 

https://youtu.be/4Kxo-Mv_-Lg

Kudos from Kirkus: A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son

Hey, Kirkus Reviews chose A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son as one of the "30 most Anticipated Fiction Books for Fall." Thank you, Kirkus! Jeez, I'm with Zadie Smith, Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, Attica Locke, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ann Patchett, and Angie Cruz. I feel dizzy... and grateful.

If you do read my book of linked stories on immigration, please use the table of contents as a guide. The stories are in groups for a reason and relate to each other within their groups. Think of this as a cracked mirror, perhaps, from one angle it may look like a fragment of your face but from another angle you might see a stranger, a monster, even a hero.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/lists/30-most-anticipated-fiction-books-fa/a-peculiar-kind-of-immigrants-son/

Interview in Lone Star Literary Life

A new interview in Lone Star Literary Life. Thank you, Michelle Newby Lancaster.

"The family values I learned in Ysleta: work until you are exhausted and get up and do it again the next day; help yourself by being disciplined and honest and good for your word, and then turn around and help others; be proud of your Mexican heritage, but don’t be afraid to change it, to make it better, to morph it into a new “Mexican American” heritage from the border. These are quintessentially the American values of immigrants who have come to the United States from different cultures and different nations."

Lone Star Literary Life: Interview with Sergio Troncoso

CNN Op-Ed: My family's El Paso story is quintessentially American

My family's El Paso story is quintessentially American
By Sergio Troncoso

"I am and always will be the proud son of Mexican immigrants from El Paso. My parents came from Juárez, Chihuahua, to the United States in the 1950's, newlyweds with only a few dollars in their pockets. In the east side neighborhood of Ysleta, they built an adobe house that at first had no electricity and an outhouse in the backyard. Yes, in Texas. They followed other Mexican immigrants who had been coming to the United States for decades. They followed even some Mexicans who were already in the state before Texas was ever Texas. These Tejanos didn't cross the border; the border crossed them.

August 3 will always be one of the saddest days of my life. I love my hometown of El Paso, Texas. Many times in a typical trip home, I have shopped at Cielo Vista Mall and that Walmart where the mass shooting unfolded. This mass murderer from Dallas (Plano, actually) knew nothing about how great this community is and the values practiced by many there."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/07/opinions/el-paso-mexican-american-family-story-troncoso/index.html

My brother in Afghanistan

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.

The Consumer Used and Abused

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.

Viejitos

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.

Harold Hernesh

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.

Christmas Tamales in Ysleta

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.

Latinos and Jews on Hanukah

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.

Radio Yankee Baseball and Hideki Matsui

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.

Texas Two-Step

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.

Half-mud, half-dead

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.

Costa Rica

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.

Easter in El Paso

I am a few hours late with my blog today, because I have been having too much fun in El Paso, Texas, my hometown. Every morning my father, mother, brothers, Laura, Aaron, and Isaac have sampled my parents’ favorite breakfast joints, so far Elmer’s near Bassett Center and the Bronco Restaurant not far from Ysleta High, my alma mater, on Alameda.

Chilaquiles, chile rellenos, huevos rancheros, frijoles con queso, menudo (I prefer to pick out the panzas and just eat the pozole), enchiladas, gorditas. On our first night, my brother Oscar bought fresh, mouthwatering asaderos from Licon’s Dairy in San Elizario. It really is good to be back home.

My sons asked me, “Why is the food in El Paso so much better than the food in New York?” I tried to explain how there are no warm-fresh asaderos in New York, and how Manhattan’s Mexican food, except for Gabriela’s on Columbus and 95th Street, isn’t even close to the real deal. I tried to tell them there’s a world of difference between the tostadas from Las Cruces, and the prepackaged ones from New Jersey at Gristedes in our building on Broadway.

The pastel de tres leches my mother brought for my son Isaac’s birthday celebration was the coup de grâce. My kids adored it. I gave up trying to explain anything anymore, and I just told them, “It’s just better here. What can I say?” Aaron and Isaac glared at me for a second, as if I have been mistreating them for forcing them to live in NYC, and begged their abuelita for seconds of the pastel.

To work off this glorious gluttony, we went to Album Park near Yarbrough for Easter, to walk around, to run, to chat more about how beautiful the weather is this time of the year. The scene at Album brought back many memories and comparisons of how our family spent each Easter in El Paso, and how these get-togethers always brought us closer to each other.

For us, Easter meant, after church, a mega-barbecue. An all-day affair of eating, playing baseball and football with other families in the park, making new friends, searching for Easter eggs, which were painstakingly prepared weeks before, and ambushing everybody and anybody by smashing our confetti-filled ammo on their heads. By nightfall we were dirty and exhausted, and we didn’t want to say goodbye to this little community we had formed for one day in the park.

I noticed that at Album Park Easter today is the same and different than it was when I was a kid. Extended families, from abuelitos to niños, still gather together under the sun and trees. But now a few families had fancy Coleman tents and even gas-powered generators. I also saw many more volleyball nets and soccer games than in my time. All the dogs are on leashes too.

But this unofficial micro-history, what may seem trivial to many, is what we should savor. This history about what families did for Easter, how they stayed together on the Mexican-American border, what this togetherness meant not only for your bonds with your father and mother, but also for the bonds you try to recreate with your family in as far flung locales as New York City, this is what stays with you forever and becomes who you were and who you always will be.

Sanibel Island

I am on vacation on Florida’s Sanibel Island for one week. It is a trip we always take after visiting my family in El Paso, and it is a trip that Laura’s family has been taking for over forty years. With champagne held high in my plastic cup, I have celebrated only eighteen New Years in Sanibel, so I am a relative newcomer to this family tradition. Yet over the years, Sanibel has truly become my family tradition as well. Laura, Aaron, and Isaac could not live without our spending time together on this island, and neither could I.

How do you metamorphose from an outsider, cautious and even suspicious of the family you are adopting by marriage, to an insider, a member of the family, someone who belongs in the most intimate moments an extended family can share? I think one answer to this question is persistence. If you don’t leave, if members of your wife’s family see you act and react in many different situations, and grow to respect how you do things, what you think, how you hold your own in an argument, then perhaps over many years they begin to accept you.

For in Sanibel, I was adopting my wife’s Jewish family. I remember my first year in Sanibel; it was a bit overwhelming. It is basically a hothouse, in which Laura’s parents, sister, brother, aunt, and cousins, and their extended families, are all in adjacent rooms at a small hotel on the beach, many often sitting together at the pool, or barging in and out of your room to make dinner plans. Each night we take turns cooking dinner in our rooms, which are meant for two adults, but into which we drag chairs and extra tables and cram as many as eighteen people for a free-for-all dining experience. Grandparents, babies, children, teenagers, middle-aged adults. In Sanibel you press the flesh to the max, and there is no place to hide.

Over the years, as I grew to know the different personalities in my wife’s family, as some became truly good friends, I became more relaxed about going to Sanibel. Everybody had successes and failures over the years, just as we did. We gossiped about each other, we asked for advice, and we argued politics, sometimes bitterly. Often old family squabbles, which predated my arrival into the Sanibel scene, erupted out of nowhere. Yet every year, almost everybody returned to Sanibel. This year we have a full house.

Is this a family then? When you don’t leave whom you are with, even after the bitterest of fights, or even after your fortunes may have diverged dramatically over the many long roads of the past? You could ask why do we return here, why with these people? No doubt, there are selfish reasons to return to Sanibel: the gorgeous beaches, magnificent shelling, biking to Captiva, the simple pleasure of walking on the white sand at dawn.

But no, those are not the reasons why I come back. I come back to remember who I am; I come back to see who I might be; I come back to be with the people I miss all year. Yes, sometimes a few of them rub me the wrong way, but not always. I myself, as my wife has often reminded me, possess a prickly pear cactus of a personality, and so perhaps I am lucky to have found this family whose appearance may seem forbidding, but whose insides contain the sweetest of rewards.

An Ysleta Christmas

I arrived in El Paso, Texas yesterday, my hometown. For Christmas. To visit with my mother, and to see my brothers and their kids. Laura and my kids have always relished this holiday visit, a trek we have made since we have been married. It releases Laura's inner shopper, and for a week before Christmas she gets to pump prime the economy at El Paso’s bustling malls. Aaron and Isaac love their cousins --they are similar ages-- and they have spent the first two days playing New Yorkers against Texans (their version of Cowboys and Indians) and exploring the irrigation canal behind my parents’ house.

For the past three years, however, this visit has been an awkward one for me. Three Christmases ago, I had a vicious argument with my father, ostensibly over something trivial, but in reality over old, deep resentments and that bitterness that can sometimes build between a prideful and headstrong father and a son with the same blood in his veins. For three years, my father would not speak to me whenever I called from New York. Instead, at the moment he heard my voice, he would pass the phone to my mother. For three years, even after I apologized for my harsh words to him, my father would not forgive me, and he would not say hello or goodbye whenever I saw him at Christmastime.

I thought about so many things during those three years. I thought about the argument, and why it happened, and even wrote an essay about it, which I called, “This Wicked Patch of Dust.” I thought about how I had hated my father’s macho personality as a child, his domineering control over my mother throughout the years, his bad decisions made by fiat. I thought about how I hated my own temper, and why I did not roll my eyes behind my father’s back, as my brothers did, but instead confronted my father, challenging him to a fight. I thought about how my mother agonized over our family's rift, my mother the avid reader, my mother who is relentlessly curious about the world, my mother whom I have always believed deserves to stop sacrificing for others, and do more for herself. I thought about my father’s deteriorating body, how he cannot walk more than six feet at a time and is now totally dependent on my mother, and how he cannot stand to be so weak when throughout his life he was indefatigably strong.

Indeed, my father was a good father. Yes, he was tough and occasionally mean. But he did push us to work hard for our family, for ourselves. In Ysleta, my father was there to help me make posters when I ran for Sophomore Class President in high school, to fashion an intricate puppet theater for a play I wrote for an English class, and to teach me how to handle the stick shift of our Volkswagen Beetle. He had to compromise in his life, primarily by adopting a country in which he could speak the language, but with an accent that still embarrasses him. My father truly loved Mexico, but he knew his family would have a better life in the United States. He gained the possibility of a better future, but he relinquished his voice. He cannot stand how his beloved hometown of Juarez, which he visited with my mother every week for decades, has descended into an orgy of drug violence in 2008. Their loss: they have not crossed the border all year.

So as Laura, Aaron, Isaac, and I arrived in Ysleta yesterday, I expected, again, just to make the best of another awkward Christmas. But my father surprised me. As soon as I stumbled through the door with suitcases in both hands, he reached up from his chair --he can’t easily stand without his walker anymore-- and hugged me. At the kitchen table, we talked for a precious forty-five minutes, exchanging news, before I finished bringing in our luggage. I thought perhaps this was a first-day aberration, a momentarily lapse in his anger at his prodigal son. But today, again, my father and I have talked, and we have even laughed together, and although we have not yet uttered the words to each other, we have finally forgiven each other for being Troncosos.