Pen Parentis Reading, February 12, 7 PM

I will be reading with Sonja Curry Johnson and Viktoria Peitchev at Pen Parentis in New York City: Tuesday, Feb. 12, 7 PM, The Hideout at Killarney Rose (80 Beaver Street). 

What does it mean to be displaced? How do the children of displaced persons feel about their national identity?

In continued celebration of their Tenth Anniversary of Literary Salons in Lower Manhattan, Pen Parentis presents three authors, who will read on the theme of displacement. Q&A will follow, centering around work-life balance. All authors presented at Pen Parentis are also parents - the series aims to shatter the stereotype of what parents write by presenting the creative diversity of high quality work by professional writers who have kids.

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Three-Notable-Authors-Discuss-Displacement-During-Happy-Hour-In-FiDi-20190117

First Week of College

I traveled 477 miles from New York City to Lawrence, Massachusetts, and back, to revisit Northern Essex Community College (NECC) last week. This time I was visiting the Bridge Program, a free primer for entering students to help them acclimate to college. These students, all Latino and mostly Dominicano, remind me of who I was over thirty years ago: a poor kid from the U.S.-Mexico border with no clue at Harvard. Coincidentally, this was the same week when my wife Laura and I dropped off our son Aaron at Yale, for the start of his freshman year.

One of the issues that stuck in my mind at NECC was this: how do we identify and help those poor kids who are driven to move up, who are ready to sacrifice for themselves and their families, and who are pulling themselves up by their boot straps, awkwardly, tentatively, but with an undeniable hunger? Because that’s how I was.

In the United States, we spend so much effort militarizing the border, throwing money at the border security industrial complex, and giving air-time to fear-mongers only too eager to bash poor people and their neighborhoods. Imagine if we spent the same billions of dollars on identifying those children of undocumented workers with stellar school records, with the right family values to succeed, with the framework to be the best of citizens. Imagine if we helped these young people become productive college graduates and taxpayers.

Imagine if we made the effort to know poor Mexicano neighborhoods like Ysleta, where I grew up, to understand which families had disciplined parents, which families refused food stamps, like my own family, because the parents thought it was shameful. Instead of vilifying poor families as the parasites of society, instead of attacking these convenient and awful abstractions in pseudo ‘arguments,’ imagine making careful distinctions. Imagine doing the hard work of practical thinking, and implementing this as policy.

In class at NECC, we discussed my novel From This Wicked Patch of Dust, and then I went to lunch with the students, administrators, and teachers of the Bridge Program. I spoke to one young woman who made an impression on me. Kiara was focused and intelligent, she wanted to be a radiologist, her father was a taxi driver, and her sister had already graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, after attending NECC. I had a long conversation with Kiara, and I could tell she was going places.

I had made that leap too, from being poor to the middle class, with loving but tough Mexicano parents who taught me to work beyond exhaustion and avoid the drugs and gangs of our neighborhood. I went from being marginalized in society, ignored, and even laughed at (sometimes by other Mexicanos and Chicanos full of envidia, jealousy), to self-education through cultural sacrifice, financial savings through pain, and learning-on-the-fly through fear. I saw a younger version of myself in Kiara. Will others take the time to see this potential in individuals like Kiara? I always have that hope.

This same week I told my son Aaron, as we moved him into Yale’s Old Campus, that if he saw a poor student looking shell-shocked, as if Yale were a different planet from, say, the Chihuahuan Desert, to help that person, to give him or her advice, to be friendly. “Aaron, I was that freshman, I didn’t even know what the Ivy League was, I was too quiet in class, I ate alone in the dining hall, at least at the beginning, I wasn’t sure I belonged at Harvard. I thought they had made a mistake.”

Our son Aaron is a New York City kid, savvy beyond his years. Before this week, he had visited Yale often, as the head of the Model United Nations group at his high school. I would have been intimidated by a freshman like Aaron. I would have marveled at the ease with which he navigated this strange world of the Ivy League. I know Aaron will take my advice to heart and seek out those who need help and who want to help themselves but may not know how. For two years in New York, Aaron volunteered to tutor poor students who could not afford to pay for expensive private tutors. We are proud of both Aaron and Isaac, not only for their intellectual prowess, but also for the good citizens they have become.

What Laura and I have always taught our kids is that we are connected to each other. Even if we struggled and succeeded, that does not mean we should only look after ourselves. We should help those coming up, who want what we have achieved, who have that same drive and discipline to achieve it, who deserve a chance. By helping los de abajo, you improve your entire community. By seeing and understanding those different from you, you remember who you were, you sharpen your empathy, you decide to find out for yourself (and not accept what you are told). By seeking out that ‘other,’ whoever that other may be, you will learn from them too.

Work@Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Children in the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Day of School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bertha E. Troncoso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encouraging kids to read, encouraging kids to excel in school

This past week has been a momentous one for our family: our fourteen-year-old son has received letters of acceptance from the best public and private high schools in New York City. This has not happened because we are lucky or because we have a lot of money. Our son’s hard work and focus, as well our creating an environment at home for learning beyond school, have been keys to his success. I contrast my son’s school application experience with my own. I went to a poor high school on the Mexican-American border in which a majority of the students probably did not attend college, yet I was successful in El Paso and later at Harvard and Yale because of similar practices at home. How can we encourage our kids to excel in school? This is what I have learned from my parents, and as a parent.

Read to your children early, and regularly, when your kids can’t even walk across the living room floor. Reading to very young children establishes an emotional bond with reading, and with you, a bond they want to recreate as they get older. Laura and I read to both of our sons every night, for about half an hour each, for years. Not surprisingly, both our sons are voracious readers, reading about two or three books a week. We read, they watch us read, we’ve read with them, we buy books and regularly visit libraries, and we limit TV time. All these things create an environment of reading for recreation, to explore ideas, to revel in the magic of storytelling.

Give your children the space and attention to follow their intellectual interests. I loved creating gadgets and traps as a kid in Ysleta, all manner of Rube Goldberg machines. My father allowed me to use his tool shed, to experiment with his construction materials, to bring back ‘junk’ from the dump, which for me was treasure. He taught me how to use his tools; he taught me how to use a LeRoy for drafting when I expressed an interest in his work. Similarly my younger son loves to build, and we often cart old computers, monitors, and fax machines we find on the street for my son to create something new with them. It is about paying attention to what your child is interested in, and giving him or her the space and opportunity to follow that interest.

Teach your child the value of hard work and limits. This was what I told my kids. ‘As long as you do well in school, you have your freedom, your TV time, your time on the computer. But if you are not finishing your homework on time, and finishing it well, then I will be on you like a rash.’ Now I rarely have to tell them anything, because we made it a practice for them to finish their homework first, right after school, before they turn on the TV, have a playdate, or just relax. It was a work habit that became their habit over time. I do not expect them to be perfect; I just want them to live up to their potential. It is gratifying to see the results, and how they have internalized doing well in school for their benefit, and not for mine.

Love your kids, and listen to them carefully. Remember, it is about time with them, and guiding them to become the best person they want to be, and not about money or fancy trips or false accolades. Sometimes I have to tease out of my children an issue that is bothering them. At other times I see an issue, overscheduling for example, that they are grappling with, but have not yet identified. You sit down and talk to them, not to tell them what to do, but to brainstorm the problem, to offer possible solutions, to get them to resolve the problem in a way that works for them. Just letting them know that they are not alone and that they can bring problems to you to discuss is already a victory in your relationship with your child. It is hard work and time-consuming, and I have been humbled repeatedly by the process. But I adapt and learn, and I always keep trying to be a better father.