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

The Making of an Anthology: Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence

Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence has been an anthology long in the making, and I want to share the back story of its creation. I am gratified that our anthology—which I co-edited with Sarah Cortez—has received some wonderful early reviews.

Publishers Weekly called it "an eye-opening collection of essays." Kirkus Reviews said, "Nightly shootings, kidnappings, robberies and the discovery of mass graves—all these and more have put an end to a once-thriving tourist industry and a rich cultural exchange between those living on either side of the boundary. Where there were once bridges, there are now high walls."

The Monitor from McAllen, Texas said, "Two of the more impactful essays were by the editors themselves. Sarah Cortez, a former law-enforcement officer, powerfully proclaims herself part of a group of individuals 'who stand against the wholesale execution of decent human beings by thugs for illegal gain, sanctioned by a government too weak or too dirty to act.' Sergio Troncoso closes the collection with a poignant sentiment: 'It was a better life than what we have today, and we understand that fact mostly in retrospect, as we often do, when we lose what we value before we had a chance to appreciate what it meant.'"

But what readers may not appreciate is the story behind this anthology: the cooperative efforts between two editors different in many ways, the vision and struggle to carry it out with writers across the country and internationally, the unexpected headaches, and the last-minute dramas. The creation of every book has a story behind it, often unseen, with good lessons for any writer, and the opportunity for the reader to glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak, where writers toil, argue, plan, adapt, and with a little luck, find solutions to create the work published.

In April of 2010—I checked my old emails!—I was on a panel at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Denver. Sarah Cortez had included a story of mine in an anthology she had co-edited for Arte Público Press, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery. Later that June, she would accept another story of mine for another Arte Público anthology she was working on, You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens.

The AWP panel was for the writers of Hit List, and when we got together for lunch I told Sarah that her next anthology should be on how the bi-national, bi-cultural life along the border had been so drastically changed by the drug violence. I told Sarah how I had spent so much time in "el otro lado" as a high school student in El Paso, how my parents had stopped crossing to Juárez, their hometown, because of the bloody orgy. A unique way of life, between two worlds, had been severed.

After accepting my story for You Don’t Have a Clue, Sarah proposed in June of 2010 that we work together on this new border anthology, which at that time we were thinking of calling ‘Border Cities Lost.’ I had never edited an anthology before, and I did not have a direct relationship with Arte Público yet, so I thought this was a great idea. We worked out the details of the book proposal that summer, and Sarah presented it to Arte Público in Houston late that year.

In the middle of the summer of 2010, I was also emboldened to contact directly Arte Público about a book of essays I had ready. This book became Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, which Arte Público published in September of 2011. I have had an excellent experience with Arte Público, and I think their staff has been consistently helpful, thoughtful, and even inspiring to me.

Sarah and I spent months conceiving this anthology, sending notices to ask for contributions from writers, reading the many personal essays we received for Our Lost Border, and then editing the accepted essays. It’s a long process, and you get to know your co-editor very well. We are at opposite sides of the political spectrum. Sarah is first a poet, and I am first a novelist. She lives in Houston; I am in New York City.

Despite these differences, we got along well, and I have only the deepest respect for her. We decided early on to check our egos at the door and to focus on the work on the page. That’s the way it should be, but I know from experience that it often doesn’t unfold that way. Emblematic of our working together was our editing of the final 300-page manuscript: after we had each separately edited the manuscript, and sent each other our respective edits, about ninety percent of our edits were identical! Instead of going mano-a-mano on the other ten percent, we talked about each issue practically, and easily resolved the matter. We get along, and that’s the mystery of chemistry when you put two (albeit different) editors together.

I was able to use my contacts in the Mexican literary scene to get Diego Osorno, Lolita Bosch, and Liliana Blum to contribute essential essays for Our Lost Border. In 2011, I had already appeared in an anthology edited by Lolita, Nuestra Aparente Rendición. Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos graciously translated Osorno’s and Blum’s essays into English, and we included all the essays from the Mexican authors in the original Spanish, as well as in the translated English.

I wanted Cecilia Balli to contribute an essay, but she had a work conflict and suggested an ex-student of hers, Maria Cristina Cigarroa. Later Cecilia would introduce Sarah and me at the debut of Our Lost Border at the Texas Book Festival in San Antonio on April 13, 2013. It was one of the most thoughtful introductions I have ever received. Good friends, and exceptional writers of the border, also contributed work: José Skinner contributed a marvelous piece of black humor, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith the incisive introduction. Luis Rodríguez introduced me to José Antonio Rodríguez at another AWP conference (the serendipitous meetings are always as important as the panels), and I asked José Antonio to contribute an essay after we re-connected at an annual meeting of the Texas Institute of Letters.

A week before the final manuscript was due in 2012, we discovered that we had overlooked the translation of Lolita Bosch’s essay! That day my wife had returned from the hospital after a surgery, but I agreed to translate the essay. I took care of Laura during the day, and I translated Lolita’s important essay at night. And I finished on time. In fact, I had enough time to send Lolita the translated essay electronically to Barcelona, for her approval. I was exhausted, but I wanted this anthology done. I was determined to do anything, and everything, to get the final manuscript to Arte Público. Sometimes being a bit maniacal about your work helps.

What lessons did I learn from working on Our Lost Border? Many people help you to create a book, from the publisher to friends and many others you have never met. Work well with them, if they are trying to help you. Another lesson: a real and practical team working toward the same goal can be created from disparate characters. But you won’t know that until you try to work together and solve problems together. It could work, or it could flop, but don’t prejudge the possibility of a team because the potential members look like an odd mixture. One more lesson: never give up, and you can do more than you imagine. Just punch through the difficulties, focus on getting the work done, and you will get there. Final lesson: knowing Excel is invaluable when you put together eight separate glossaries of Spanish words into one mega-glossary. Hint: use the alphabetical ‘Sort’ feature, and keep your list columns aligned.

That’s the odyssey behind Our Lost Border, which brings to light how the drug violence has impacted cities along the border and beyond, families in Mexico and in the United States. This anthology gives voice to those asking why and how this has happened, and what we might do to change in a direction away from the violence, despair, corruption, and fear. For me, this anthology is an example of why I write: not necessarily or primarily to entertain, but to open minds, to offer a perspective beyond the superficial, and to cause thinking that might lead to good action. I hope you will read Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence, and recommend it to your friends.

The Lost Border: Request for Submissions

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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(AT)gmail(DOT)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.

The Loss of Juárez

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?

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.