Sergio Troncoso: 2020 Graduation Message

El Paso Matters asked author Sergio Troncoso (A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, Cinco Puntos Press) to record a short graduation message for all students graduating in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. He believes in always encouraging the next generation, especially from his hometown of El Paso, Texas.

https://youtu.be/HPb5ql32ZBg

Virtual Book Groups: Sergio Troncoso

If you are reading A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son or any other of Sergio Troncoso’s books, he will meet with your book group by Zoom for an hour or two. Zoom is easy to use, and the host (Sergio Troncoso) sets up the meeting and emails all participants with a link, which they click to enter the ‘virtual meeting.’ Sergio will be able to see and hear all the participants on his computer, and they will be able to see and hear him on their computers too. You can talk about any book by Sergio that the group has read, ask him questions about his novels, stories or essays, and discuss the craft of writing with him as well. Each month he will only do a few of these Virtual Book Groups as his time and schedule permits.

Write to him at SergioTroncoso(AT)gmail(DOT)com and tell him about your book group, and he’ll let you know quickly about his future availability. It’s easy to schedule, and Sergio loves talking to his readers.

https://sergiotroncoso.com/virtualbookgroups/index.htm

Winners of 2019 Troncoso Reading Prizes

Thank you Suzy Marrufo, branch manager, and the entire staff of the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library for your work on behalf of the annual Troncoso Reading Prizes. On December 18th, we held the ceremony to present the winners with certificates of achievement and gift cards from Barnes and Noble. I also gave each student a signed copy of one of my books.

The newly renovated Troncoso Branch Library looks beautiful. I arrived to an expanded parking lot, gorgeous light from the sunset coming in through the windows, and library patrons quietly reading books and magazines on the new furniture. The circulation desk was also redone. Bravo, City of El Paso, for investing in our local library! Even the reconstruction and widening of Alameda has been finished, so now the road to and from the library is also in great shape.

The 2019 winners of the Troncoso Reading Prizes are: Mirayah Arleene Flores and Anthony Morelos (1st place); Jocelyn Soria and Sofia Aguirre (2nd place); and Isabella Guerrero Cortes and Celine Guevara (3rd place).

I loved chatting with this year's winners and their parents about growing up in Ysleta, education, the importance of reading, and creating a reading culture at home. They asked many questions, and I was happy to have great conversations about how reading can foster concentration, self-worth, and a sense of self that helps you achieve your goals. The El Paso Public Library was where I learned to satisfy that intellectual hunger for ideas and stories, and I could see that hunger and focus in all of these students. Each of them reminded me of who I was many years ago. I love this community, and I will keep returning to Ysleta to award these prizes every year and to talk to families about how they can educate themselves and their children to gain a voice, to reach their goals, and to return and help others.


Every year, we award prizes for students who read the most books between September 15-November 15. The prizes are awarded only to students within the geographical area covered by the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library.

First Place receives a $125.00 gift card.
Second Place receives a $100.00 gift card.
Third Place receives a $75.00 gift card.

All prizes are gift cards from Barnes and Noble Booksellers. A total of six prizes are awarded.

Librarians at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library register readers during the eligible period of the prizes. The library staff administers the prizes and makes final decisions on all the prizewinners.

If you have any questions or to register for the 2020 prizes, please contact the library staff at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library, 9321 Alameda Avenue, El Paso, Texas, 79907. Telephone: 915-212-0453.

Austin Public Library recommends A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son

A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son (Cinco Puntos Press) makes the recommended list by librarians at the Austin Public Library. I love public libraries, and on Wednesday (12/18) I'll be at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library in El Paso to give out the Troncoso Reading Prizes. So happy and grateful that librarians in Austin like my book. Support and fight for public libraries!

Austin Public Library: Recommended Titles

C. M. Mayo Interviews Sergio Troncoso

C. M. Mayo: "Sergio Troncoso is a writer and literary activist whom I greatly admire. It so happens that we were born the same year in the same city: El Paso, Texas. And both of us lived our adult lives in cultural environments vastly different from El Paso: I went to Mexico City; Sergio to Harvard, Yale, and many years in New York City. Sergio’s works offer a wise, deeply considered, and highly original perspective on American culture."

 C.M. Mayo: What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another writer who is just starting out? And, if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty year-old self?

SERGIO TRONCOSO: Read as if your life depended on it. Read critically in the area you are thinking of writing. Don’t be an idiot: seek out and appreciate the help of others who are trying to help you by pointing out your errors, your lapses in creating your literary aesthetic. Get a good night’s sleep: if you do, you’ll be ready to write new work the next day. And if you fail, you won’t destroy yourself because you did. You’ll be ready to sit in your chair the next day.

https://madam-mayo.com/q-a-sergio-troncoso-author-of-a-peculiar-kind-of-immigrants-son-on-reading-as-if-your-life-depended-on-it-emily-dickenson-the-digital-revolution-and-the-texas-institute-of-letters

Colorado Public Radio: A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son

Maeve Conran interviews me about A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son on Colorado Public Radio's KGNU. I discuss how reading expands your empathy when you read stories outside your community. I also emphasize why this matters after so much anti-immigrant rhetoric is dividing our country and its many communities.

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/sergiotroncoso/episodes/2019-10-14T16_05_55-07_00

Literarity Book Shop in El Paso

I was interviewed Robert Holguin of KFOX14 at Literarity Book Shop in El Paso. Thank you, Robert. What a wonderful experience at this independent bookstore, my inaugural reading for A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son.

“Anybody traveling, crossing these borders, going beyond El Paso and coming back, has to deal with these kinds of questions of where do I belong, how do I belong, what part of El Paso values do I take with me and how do I adapt those values when I’m in a place that’s very foreign or very different from El Paso like Boston or Harvard or Yale," said Troncoso. "And so I think that’s why the book is valid and why the book should matter to people.”

“We need to be helping independent bookstores," Troncoso said. "Independent voices all over this country and independent publishers like Cinco Puntos Press and so Literarity is part of that.”

https://kfoxtv.com/community/built-in-the-borderland/indie-bookstore-works-to-improve-quality-of-life-in-el-paso

Winners of 2016 Troncoso Reading Prizes

Yesterday the staff of the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library and I presented the winners of the 2016 Troncoso Reading Prizes with certificates of achievement and gift cards from Barnes Noble. The winners also received a signed copy of one of my books, and we read their individual essays on their favorite books. I was so proud of all the winners.

Here are some pictures with parents, teachers, and school administrators who attended the event at the library. I can't wait to do it again next year.

Winners of 2016 Troncoso Reading Prizes:

9-12th grade category:
1st Place: Alejandra Mendoza, Del Valle High School; 2nd Place: Anais Madrid, El Paso Academy; 3rd Place: Jasmine Saldana Madrid, Valle Verde Early College High School.

5-8th grade category:
1st Place: Natalie Rivas, Presa Elementary School; 2nd Place: Isabel Batista, LeBarron Elementary School; 3rd Place: Adenike Herrera, LeBarron Elementary School.

Every year, we award prizes for students who read the most books between September 15-November 15. The prizes are awarded only to students within the geographical area covered by the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library. A list of eligible schools is available at Troncoso Reading Prizes.

First Place receives a $125.00 gift card, Second Place receives a $100.00 gift card, and Third Place receives a $75.00 gift card. All prizes are gift cards from Barnes and Noble Booksellers. A total of six prizes are awarded in the two categories every year.

Each student also picks a favorite book from the books read and writes a short essay (100 word or less) on that book. We read those essays at the awards ceremony.

Librarians at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library register readers during the eligible period of the prizes. The library staff administers the prizes and makes final decisions on all the prizewinners.

If you have any questions or to register next year, please contact the library staff at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library, 9321 Alameda Avenue, El Paso, Texas, 79907. Telephone: 915-858-0905.

Is Insta-responding Corrupting the American Character?

I watched President Obama and his town hall meeting tonight, with Anderson Cooper, and their discussion and debate with the audience about gun violence and Obama’s modest proposals on gun control. What struck me was perhaps something odd, but the more I thought about it, perhaps something important about modern political discourse: Obama’s speech was slow and deliberate and thoughtful, while Cooper’s speech was quick and pointed and glib.

I thought about Obama’s slow speaking as a way of talking in a seminar, when you have two or three hours to understand a point, whereas Cooper’s speech was on a timer, a fuse lit with seconds to go, zeroing in on a quick point, entertaining yet superficial. As a somewhat slow talker myself, I could listen to Obama, and I gave him the patience to make his point, and I agreed with much of what he said. I wondered if Cooper—representing the media and in a way how we communicate in our media culture—was more modern than Obama, but also at the root of why we in this country are less of a ‘we’ as years go by, why we talk past each other in political discourse, why we characterize opponents in stereotypes (or other facile categorizations) and caricatures. Has ‘media insta-responding,’ to coin a term, corrupted our ability to think carefully, to weigh, to consider, and even to empathize? When we know of a world that only ‘insta-responds,’ do we start basing our decisions on prejudices, stereotypes, and easily understood theories without tests in gritty practice?

Insta-responding is part of our world in a way that it never was for me growing up. We insta-respond on Facebook by pressing a ‘Like’ button, and that somehow demonstrates our political solidarity, or aesthetic preference, or temporary pleasure, or all of the above. We insta-respond through talk radio, with one voice reaching millions and pontificating on this or that current event, quickly, glibly, for entertainment as well as to score political points. And sometimes these are exactly the same: to score a quick political point is to entertain, even if your point is superficial, or based on a straw-man version of your opponent.

Insta-responding is the internet. The troll is a creature of responding fast, in every newspaper discussion page online, in any kind of entertainment forum online. When you are responding fast, and are kind of an ass, then of course you want the ability to be anonymous. So online responding has led to ‘discussion pages’ that are not about discussing anything, but more like pages of one-sentence hit pieces to vent, to smear, to feel good about yourself when you have little else to feel good about. Responding on these ‘discussion pages’ has never changed my mind about anything, has never illuminated me to a new perspective. It’s mostly invective.

Of course, where we see a constant river of insta-responding is on television, and its news, where anchors respond to events as they unfold, before they know who did what to whom, where reporters give preliminary (and often false) conclusions, but who cares? The point is to respond, to capture eyeballs, to entertain, to show the gut-wrenching images, and later, much, much later, to make sense of it all. If anyone tunes in for that more considered perspective or the matter-of-fact corrections the next day, that is. The TV crowd may already be on to the next disaster, or outrage, or political fiasco. And so the wheel keeps a-spinning!

One of the reasons TV has been the first and most important purveyor of insta-responding is because time is money on television. If you can’t speak (and respond quickly), then you can never be an Anderson Cooper. Every second of ‘no talking,’ of ‘no reacting,’ is a second when the viewer can turn away, change the channel. Advertisers hate that, and so do television executives. When we put a price on time, on seconds, and when we put that time on an apparatus called television, any reasonable person would have expected ‘discussions’ to be glib and quick and definitely entertaining, and with images that would also be arresting. A split-second of an image communicates more viscerally than anyone describing that same image. When we as a country have most of our political discourse filtered through television, what do you, as that reasonable person, think would happen to that discourse? ‘Discourse’ would become ‘talk,’ and ‘thinking’ would become ‘insta-responding.’

What kind of political candidate would be favored in this insta-responding world? Someone who would promise to bomb all the bad guys as ‘foreign policy.’ Someone who would say, “Trust me. Just don’t ask me too many hard questions and expect concrete answers.” Someone who would play to your prejudices and anxieties. Someone with all the answers, as long as these ‘answers’ are easy, digestible, colorful, and even outrageous. Someone arrogant who makes fun of complexity and thinking and any crap that keeps him from adulation, or as I would put it, a slavish insta-responding to him.

Imagine another world. Imagine a world where people would turn off their televisions, and debate outside, over cups of coffee, and not through any filters like talk radio hosts, but face-to-face. What would happen to empathy? Imagine if we had hours upon hours discussing such serious issues as gun control, gun violence, the Constitution, the United States becoming multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious as never before, and that these discussions would be done in town squares, or better, through lunches, and weekly meetings that would last until most of us got hungry. Then some of us would go out for a bite to eat. What would happen to how we see each other?

Imagine that many of us valued being alone, and bolstered our minds through reading, and reading literary fiction from other worlds, and imagine that we would take the time to read these long novels from other worlds, and so consider other viewpoints, other societies, characters radically different from us, yet complex characters surviving, failing, trying, loving. What would happen to who we would consider an Other?

Imagine, finally, that we would seek respect from others not because of the size of our biceps or how we could punch like Holly Holm, and not because we are in an SUV and angry and so we better goddamn get respect on the highway, and certainly not because we had a gun in our hand, nor money in the bank, nor a cutie in our arms. We might still need a gun to protect ourselves, and we most certainly would need a cutie in our arms for a variety of reasons, but we would not go to the gun because we demand insta-respect from innocents, and the cutie would be in our arms because we read, and are calm and reliable, and that cutie is like us, a reader, and maybe even a Trekkie or at least a sci-fi geek. We’re imagining, okay?

It’s not too late, America, to escape the Cave of Insta-Responding. Read. Think. Go talk to someone different from you and take him or her out to lunch. And respond to what you hear, but don’t just blab: write about it.

Winners of 2015 Troncoso Reading Prizes

This week the staff of the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library and I presented the inaugural winners of the Troncoso Reading Prizes with certificates of achievement, gift cards from Barnes Noble, and gift bags from the El Paso Public Library.

The winners also received a signed copy of one of my books, and we read their individual essays on their favorite books. Here are some pictures with parents, teachers, and even principals who attended the event at the library. I can't wait to do it again next year.

Winners of 2015 Troncoso Reading Prizes:

9-12th grade category: 1st Place: Alejandra Mendoza, Del Valle High School, 2nd Place: Jasmine Saldana Madrid, Valle Verde Early College High School, 3rd Place: Amber Saldana Madrid, Valle Verde Early College High School.

5-8th grade category: 1st Place: Galilea Rodriguez, LeBarron Elementary School, 2nd Place: Jesus Martinez, Presa Elementary School, 3rd Place: Victoria Alarcon, LeBarron Elementary School.

A total of 90 students signed up for the inaugural Troncoso Reading Prizes, and these students read a remarkable 1,562 books. An overwhelming majority, 71 students, read five or more books between September 15-November 15. Many students read more than twenty books.

The prizes are awarded only to students within the geographical area covered by the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library. A list of eligible schools is available at Troncoso Reading Prizes.

First Place receives a $125.00 gift card, Second Place receives a $100.00 gift card, and Third Place receives a $75.00 gift card. All prizes are gift cards from Barnes and Noble Booksellers. A total of six prizes are awarded in the two categories every year.

The prizes are given to students who read the most books from September 15 to November 15 of each year. During this time period, students read a minimum of five books. The students who read the most books are the prizewinners. Each student picks a favorite book from the books read and writes a short essay (100 word or less) on that book. Prizewinners have their essays laminated and displayed next to their favorite book in the library.

Librarians at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library use the Evance System to register readers during the eligible period of the prizes. The library staff administers the prizes and makes final decisions on all the prizewinners.

If you have any questions or to register next year, please contact the library staff at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library, 9321 Alameda Avenue, El Paso, Texas, 79907. Telephone: 915-858-0905.

Troncoso Reading Prizes

I have established the Troncoso Reading Prizes for children and young adults at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library in Ysleta (El Paso, Texas). These six prizes for grade school, middle school, and high school students in the Ysleta area will be given out every year for those who read the most books from September 15-November 15. The librarians at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library will administer the prizes. To read more about the Troncoso Reading Prizes and to download the rules for eligibility, please visit:

http://www.sergiotroncoso.com/library/index.htm

 

El Paso Public Library, Sergio Troncoso Branch Library, 9321 Alameda Avenue, El Paso, Texas, 79907.

Ramon Renteria

Yesterday Ramon Renteria officially retired from an illustrious career as a newspaper reporter for the El Paso Times. In my mind, he was that one border voice for El Paso, Texas and the border region that was indispensable. Over the years, I came to know Mr. Renteria as a straight-shooter who understood everything from the politics to the peccadilloes of my hometown, and I valued the many friendly exchanges we had over coffee or through emails. In 1999, Mr. Renteria gave me one of the first interviews after my first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, was published, and I wanted to return the favor today.

ST: As you reflect on your great career as a journalist from El Paso, what changes have you seen that most startle you, what trends, positive and negative, are most important for readers to understand the changing newspaper business?

RR: I've worked 44 years as a newspaper reporter, starting as a general assignments reporter in eastern New Mexico. Thirty-nine of those years were spent in El Paso where I made the rounds of the beats, covering everything from cops to the courts system, the Hispanic community, border issues, Juárez, and education. I also spent four years running a two-person bureau in Las Cruces for the El Paso Times and keeping track of news throughout southern New Mexico. I received a well-rounded education in the field, hands-on reporting– something more valuable than anything you could possibly learn from books or simply listening to someone lecture in a college classroom.

I've gone from fairly primitive technology, a manual typewriter to the electric typewriter, the first somewhat limited newsroom computers to what we now have, the ability to write and transmit news or whatever you write from almost anywhere on a laptop computer, a computer table or a smart phone.

As an old school journalist, I've always stuck to the basics: solid research and reporting and writing with passion.

I've been fortunate to have worked in the heyday of newspaper journalism back when editors and corporations didn’t mind spending money to get the story. The best editors encouraged and cultivated good writing. I always tried to look for the story beyond the basic who, what, where and why principles taught in college journalism.

While the newspaper industry has lost advertising revenue and readers in its print product over the years, I still say that it takes boots on the ground—good reporters and photographers—to gather the content that newspapers now increasingly rely on to beef up their online products. People still enjoy a good read in the newspaper. The good writers, the ones who try to tell a good yarn, are fading from the news industry.

A reporter these days is no longer just a guy with a pen and notepad. You have to constantly reinvent yourself or at least embrace the new technology. When you go on assignment, you’re now expected to not only gather the words and facts but also to bring back or send from the field images, either still photos or short videos. I cast aside the traditional notepad long ago and replaced it with a tape recorder, first a standard cassette recorder and now two digital recorders capable of recording a 17-hour interview nonstop.

I’m convinced more and more print papers will start publishing on fewer days of the week within the next five years but never will disappear. Sadly, the younger generation sometimes prefers to receive its news in daily spurts of social media.

Too many young people no longer read for pleasure, no longer read books, magazines or newspapers. I worry how long we can maintain a literate nation if the trend continues.

ST: Why did you become a journalist, and why did you stay a journalist even after your initial reasons may have changed? What advice would you give young journalists today, in newspapers and in other areas of journalism?

RR: I became a journalist simply because I loved reading and writing as a teenager. Or as I said in my farewell column because “shoveling words is much easier than shoveling cow manure.” Frankly, I was an incredibly shy person, so shy that I refused to take the final in a college speech class. Writing seemed like the perfect escape, the perfect way to express myself. Journalism forced me out of the shell, forced me to learn to listen to what others have to say.

I tell prospective young journalists that they have to be multi-media experts, multi-talented and proficient at not just collecting and writing information but also at shooting and editing photographs and video. That future is here now. If they don’t embrace the new journalism, then maybe shoveling cow manure is a better option.

I could have gone into management, perhaps gone to a bigger market. I chose to continue writing because that’s more fun. Half the fun of being a reporter is being out there experiencing stuff and talking to people. You can’t get the color and good quotes for a story if you’re tethered to a telephone in an office.

The way news is delivered is changing radically but good writing skills still matter.

ST: Your book page has been so important for the community of El Paso, but also for the devotion it has had to Latino writers. Why did you start the book page? Why was it important for you to provide a forum for Latino literature?

RR: I did not start the book page. I was asked to take over the book page more than 10 years ago. For years, the page mostly focused on wire copy or the authors and books that the wire services chose to profile. The page rarely reflected the literature produced by writers in the El Paso and border region or even writers from across the Southwest.

I wanted to showcase Latino authors and other writers from the borderlands and the Southwest but usually found their voices missing on the wire services.

Gradually, I transformed the page, gave it more of a border/Southwest flavor. Lucky for me, New York writer Rigoberto González started submitting reviews showcasing writers and poets from New York to California. After a while, the book page lured other Latino guest contributors and other reviewers who preferred to write about books dealing with the border, the West and Southwest. Not that I’m looking forward to colgar los tenis anytime soon but if anyone were to write my obituary I hope that they at least mention that I tried to give some ink to writers too often still neglected in the mainstream press.

ST: What do you think you would most want to communicate about the importance of writing and reading for you? What ideas might you have to encourage those who may not be avid readers or who may be reluctant about writing?

RR: I stopped reporting and writing for a few years and became a line editor, editing copy that other writers produce. I could point out the people in the newsroom that read on a regular basis simply by the way they wrote. The equation is simple: you can’t be a writer or a good writer if you don’t read. Reading nourishes the imagination whether you write fiction, nonfiction or fact-based journalism.

If I knew how to compel people to become readers, I would be making big bucks in some corporate office in New York City, Chicago or Atlanta. I don’t know. That's a difficult question. If you haven’t acquired a passion for books or the printed word by the time you’re in grade school, it is going to be extremely difficult for you as an adult to sort out what is real or meaningful and what is bullshit.

As for writing, you learn best by writing on a regular basis and rewriting, sometimes rearranging stuff until it hurts. Too many young writers, especially in this business, think that they’re great writers because they have a degree or two or because they can regurgitate facts. Good writing is a lonely endeavor, just you and the blank page or the blank screen and that damn blinking cursor.

ST: What changes have you seen in the El Paso/Juárez area that you think are important, and what would you most want to preserve about the character or ambiance of this city?

RR: When I arrived here, El Paso/Juárez was a rapidly growing metropolis trying to find itself, trying to carve its identity. Middle-aged and older white guys ran the newsrooms and the editorial policies of the two daily newspapers. The Chamber of Commerce pretty well dictated who would get elected to political office. El Paso was trying to change but at the same time clinging hard to the old ways, the old attitudes or systems that sometimes kept Mexican Americans from progressing. I’m not too familiar with how things work in Juárez but in El Paso, the Mexican American population eventually found itself in positions of authority. Sadly, the majority of political leaders snared in the FBI’s ongoing corruption scandal were Mexican American.

El Paso is starting to look more like a big city or a city with big city issues, more traffic congestion, too many schools and not enough children, aging public infrastructure and an eroded downtown core trying hard to bounce back.

I recently interviewed a Virginia writer who has lived in El Paso for a few years. She described El Paso as a big city with a small town heart.

I hope El Paso matures, behaves more like a city, but never loses that small town corazón.

ST: Your homespun humor and your love of detail about all-things-El Paso have often distinguished your columns. How did you come about this ‘writing style,’ or voice? Tell us a bit about the craft of writing from your point of view.

RR: I don't recall how I found my so-called voice. One day as a payasada I decided to inject a bit of Spanglish into the column. Mixing English and Spanish has always been the border’s third language, sometimes even in Juárez. So I started writing in the voice of la gente. I’m convinced that’s why the column has earned so many fans over the years. A lot of people can relate to the pendejadas that I write. Even though I dislike writing in the first person, I have often told readers about my own medical issues, my own brushes with death. Maybe that convinced some readers that I’m not a celebrity but just another vato who hurts and cries and worries and farts just like them. The homespun style sort of just evolved.

My bilingual writing style also pissed off a lot of people. I’m constantly chastised by the language purists. Los güeros insisted that I should stick to English or at least include a glossary because they don’t get what I'm saying. Well-educated Mexicanos and Mexican Americans often accused me of cheapening the language, that I am neither proficient in English or Spanish and that I should shut up and not remind them of their ghetto roots.

I write mostly to amuse myself, sort of like a monkey playing in a zoo. I love the rhythm of words. Once in a while, something somewhat profound rolls off the fingertips. Most everything I write goes through multiple layers of rewriting.

ST: What are your plans, and in particular do you have any writing-related projects as you step away from the newsroom?

RR: I don't have any immediate plans other than to take a break from the daily work routine for a while and spend some time re-connecting with friends and family. Like most writers, I'd like to leave a memoir of sorts for my children and grandchildren. So I’ll be devoting some writing and editing time to that endeavor. Like I said in my farewell column, I love writing and the rhythm of words. Hopefully, I can latch on to some free-lance writing projects such as travel pieces or profiles. The El Paso Times offered to continue my weekly column on a free-lance basis but I've declined that offer for the time being. The newspaper left the door open for me to reconsider. So quien sabe? Maybe the never-ending columnist, as one fan once described me, will resurrect someday. Writing is not a faucet that you can turn off and forget, especially after you’ve spent almost all of your adult life writing– converting snippets of facts and quotes into an interesting yarn that may inform, amuse or inspire someone.

The Rise of an Iron Mariposa

In Red-Inked Retablos (University of Arizona Press), Rigoberto González weaves his words to create a tapestry of literary activism and erudition, passion and precision, action with words. He successfully achieves a book of ‘mariposa consciousness’: that is, a primer for the gay Chicano writer and intellectual on how to move from family poverty and homophobia to self-education and self-realization, from not having a voice in a marginalized world to fighting with literary work to create your voice and change the world around you.

If individual and community freedom matter to you, then you should pick up this book and read it.

Red-inked Retablos is divided into three expressions (or ‘retablos’) of the memories, stories, people, books, and ideals that have inspired González to ‘spill blood on the page:’ self-portraits akin to memoir, studies of books and writers, and speeches.

The memoir essays, the strongest of these three sections, reveal González’s boyhood fascination with reading and his discovery of Truman Capote (“The Truman Capote Aria”) as an early model of sorts, a gay man on television who turns out to be a writer. Amid the poverty of a farmworker family in tiny Thermal, California, and with a father constantly disappointed with his sensitive, shy son (“Easter Rock: 1983”), González finds his way to books. He creates an interior life that keeps the meager, macho, and violent world around him from swallowing him whole.

As a teenager and young adult, González is self-aware enough to find answers to his questions, and courageous enough to take risks to change his life. González educates himself despite his mother’s death before he is a teenager (“Orphans in a Terrorist World”), and despite his father abandoning him with a cruel and controlling abuelo. At every turn, González remembers and makes sense of these traumas, as an adult, as a gay man, as a Chicano, as a student and later as a professor. He writes to find meaning in his world, he writes to overcome this world, and he writes with passion to change what he sees as its shortcomings.

The studies of the poet Andrés Montoya, Arturo Islas, John Rechy, Michael Nava, Richard Rodriguez, Francisco X. Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa and others show the rich vein of “beloved Jotoranos” who are González’s literary ancestors. But what these studies also display is that to achieve his ‘mariposa consciousness’ González has done, and continues to do, an enormous amount of work. The work to perfect his craft. The work of close reading. The work of criticism and thinking. The hard work of writing well. He has taken the work ethic of the farmworker, and transformed it, and transformed himself, into this hard-edged beauty.

The only quibble to this nonfiction collection is its cohesion. Some of the studies seem perfunctory, while others are more in-depth (“Lullaby from Thomas James”). One of the speeches is a must-read for any Chicano literary activist (“To the Writer, to the Activist, to the Citizen”), while the other is a polemical speech that makes the surprising claim that González’s book column for The El Paso Times was “shut down.” Whether or not that is true, I leave it for others to debate. But that speech doesn’t quite fit with the other one, and the whole collection is a loose fit at best between the memoir essays, studies, and speeches.

What matters, however, is this remarkable journey and transformation that González achieves in words and literary activism in Red-Inked Retablos. It is a roadmap for other gay Chicano writers who will follow him. His insistence on being proudly gay and on being proudly Chicano, his love of these two communities and antipodes in one self, the effort to bridge the two and create his world in words, the struggle to educate and elevate those around him– all of this work should make it a roadmap for all of us who care about living in a better world.

(This book review originally appeared in the El Paso Times on March 31, 2013.)

Thursday Night in El Barrio

Tonight I read at La Casa Azul Bookstore in El Barrio, at 103rd Street and Lexington Avenue, with the poet-anthropologist Renato Rosaldo. Owner Aurora Anaya-Cerda and her staff have created a great space to read and explore books. Please visit and support this independent bookstore in Manhattan.

With Aurora Anaya-Cerda and Renato Rosaldo

With Raquel Toledo

If you want independent voices in a vibrant culture where not only what sells is available, but also what challenges conventional culture, mores, and politics, then you need to buy books from places like La Casa Azul Bookstore.  You need to support those small and non-profit publishers who nurture these independent voices in print.  You need to buy those quirky magazines and indie literary reviews that give you a fresh perspective on life, that ask you to question your perspective as a reader rather than just reinforce your prejudices.

Afterward Renato, my wife Laura, and a few friends stopped at El Aguila on the corner of the block, for some tacos de carnitas.  Wow, were these tacos excellent, and the agua de horchata!  I didn't want to leave.  And down the block, another taqueria named El Paso.  It was the best Thursday night I've had in a long time.

To end this wonderful night, I am reading one of my son's essays, to help him perfect an already insightful piece on Homer's Odyssey.  It is the simple things that matter, the connections we make with our families every night, the friends with whom you read and share stories and poetry.  Those are the best nights I remember.

Why Read?

I believe this is the crisis of our times: we are losing readers, we are forgetting why reading is important as well as pleasurable, and we are becoming accustomed to a culture focused primarily on images.  What happened to our long-term attention span?  Why are logic and fact-based analysis overshadowed by rhetoric and politics?  Why can’t we slow down?  Why do we believe responding in real time on Twitter and Facebook is ‘meaningful involvement’ with society or family?  Why is reading more important than ever?

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading Edith Wharton’s novels at night, and have marveled at the modernity of the protagonists, from Lily Bart to Undine Spragg, and at Wharton’s ability to keep the story moving, the characters evolving, and the reader surprised.  I like to learn from good novelists, and I am learning from Wharton.

I have timed my reading to finish whenever a Yankee game is on the Yes Network, and if no game is at hand, then at least Storage Wars or American Pickers.  That’s it.  That’s about the only TV I watch, or I feel is worth watching.  My kids rarely watch TV, and my wife only watches the news, if that.  They do see episodes of The Office, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report on their computers, which prompts me to consider whether I should cut cable TV once and for all.  But I don’t.  Not yet.  I want to, but I don’t.

Since Aaron and Isaac were toddlers, my wife and I read to them.  Every night.  Thirty minutes for Laura.  Thirty minutes for me.  This was our religion through their grade school years.  Not surprisingly Aaron and Isaac as high-school students are enthusiastic readers for pleasure.  After school, they are as likely to guffaw at Stephen Colbert on their MacBooks as they are to read their novels in bed.  But this family culture of reading, if you can call it that, took years to foment, took attention and care to implement and nurture, and took active dismissal of what I would call the normal American culture of not reading.

I am often asked how I became a reader, in part because many know that I grew up poor along the Mexican-American border of El Paso, Texas.  My parents did not read to me.  They could read and did read in Spanish, but most of my reading was in English.  My parents did hand me two or three dollars for paperback books I ordered at South Loop School from Scholastic Books every other Friday.  But more importantly, they left me alone.  They left me alone with my massive collection of paperbacks, and they never disparaged my love of reading.  The opportunity to read and the space to read are as important as having your parents read to you.  I still remember the lime-green bookshelves my handy father built in my room.  These bookshelves housed my treasures.  I have never forgotten how he took the time to do what mattered to me.

So I don’t know if you are made a reader, or if you are born a reader.  What I do know is that reading widely —reading beyond your time and culture, reading different genres, reading in different languages— changes your perspective profoundly.  Television becomes a bore, and what is said and done on television is amusing.  But it’s rarely important.  The crisis of the day or the outrage of the day becomes just more inane shouting to get your attention.  On the Internet, online status updates are interesting little notes about your life, but never more than that.  It’s not really who you are, and well, a serious reader would know that.  But you worry about the others.  Those who don’t read. Those who take television as the truth.  Those who sell stocks at the clarion call of another ‘crisis,’ or buy gold as they anticipate a Mayan apocalypse, or attack an ‘other’ because ‘they’ are after us, aren’t they?

Yes, I worry about our American culture and how it is shaping us.  It’s short-term-ism, if you can call it that, its obsession with fluff and images, its endless talk about who stunned in what dress.  Are any of us ever going to look like Victoria Secret models?  Will any of us ever get a chance to date them?

We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought.  But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves.  That may be more insidious and long-lasting.  What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality.  We ignore reading, and lavish time on images.  To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think.  To see an image is to react.  What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices?  What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button?  What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

Because I live in a different milieu of my own creation, and also because I’m rather humorless unless the joke is really quick and clever and insightful, I’d rather be reading and catch a Yankee game afterwards.  For me, that’s the perfect night.  I can kiss my wife goodnight, and kiss my boys goodnight too (yes, remarkably, they still let me), and know that I am happy to do things the simple way, the slow way.  I focus on how I find meaning in my life over the long-term.  That is how I work to be free.

November Readings and Events

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.

Solve the mystery, win a free book

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(AT)gmail(DOT)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!'

The Bookery in Socorro

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.

The Provinciality of the United States

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.

American Anima

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.