WKNY Interview of Sergio Troncoso

I loved chatting with Rita Vanacore of WKNY of Kingston, New York. What a great conversation we had about Nobody's Pilgrims, how I started as a writer, my motivations for telling stories about outsiders and the border, and the messages in my novel. Thank you, Rita, for an excellent interview!

https://radiokingston.org/en/archive/planet-seniors/episodes/sergio-troncoso-author-of-nobodys-pilgrims-shauna-kanter-of-the-voice-theatre

Sergio Troncoso on Nobody's Pilgrims

Nobody's Pilgrims is my latest novel, an adventure story about three seventeen-year-old teenagers (Turi, Arnulfo, and Molly) who find each other and believe in each other, as evil pursues them across the United States. A novel that somewhat predicted the pandemic, Nobody's Pilgrims is set in a dystopian America where grit, intelligence, luck, and love are needed to survive. Here's a brief talk I did on YouTube on the main themes of Nobody's Pilgrims (Lee & Low Books). I hope you enjoy it.

 

https://youtu.be/X6thIoAgq3I

Sergio Troncoso with Brad King, Downtown Writers Jam Podcast

Please take a listen to my wonderful conversation with Brad King of The Downtown Writers Jam Podcast from Pittsburgh, PA. I loved our easy, free-flowing talk. We connected with each other as we dove deep into my history in Ysleta, Texas on the United States-Mexico border, how I became a writer, and how my working class upbringing has informed my writing as an outsider. Thank you, Brad King.

https://thewritersjam.com/episode-138-sergio-troncoso/

Revista Latina North Carolina Interview with Sergio Troncoso

For those of you who read Spanish, here's an interview about A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son (Cinco Puntos Press) in Revista Latina North Carolina. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Para aquellos que leen español, aquí hay una entrevista sobre A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's (Cinco Puntos Press) en la Revista Latina North Carolina. Espero que lo disfruten.

 

https://www.revistalatinanc.com/2020/11/12/sergio-troncoso-en-entrevista-para-revista-latina-nc/

Contra Viento Journal Intervews Sergio Troncoso

My interview in Contra Viento Journal was published today. Thank you Gabriel Dozal and Sean McCoy.

"I also think growing up dirt poor on the border had a profound effect on me. My neighborhood in Ysleta hasn’t changed too much: it’s become working-class, when it was actually poorer in the ’60s and ’70s. Not even working class. I believe, and have always believed, in los de abajo, the very poor, and what they have to contribute, the ideas they explore, the importance of their lives, even if so many others just ignore them. If that’s empathy, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. But even that word, ‘empathy,’ seems studied somehow: these are just the people I knew, the people I grew up with, my people."

https://contravientojournal.org/radiant-perspectives-on-the-border-conversation-sergio-troncoso-peculiar-kind-of-immigrants-son/

Writers Corner Live TV Show Interviews Sergio Troncoso

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

 

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

Interview in Blue Muse Magazine

Here's an interview I did with Emma Nelson at Blue Muse Magazine, a publication of Central
Connecticut State University. We met at the Connecticut Literary Festival. I love talking to students who are serious about writing, and Emma was an excellent interviewer. I hope you enjoy it.

"I followed Troncoso to the signing table and bought his new collection of stories, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son. The fifty-eight-year-old author is gregarious and generous; readers ask him questions and he listens intently. With a red pen and glasses tucked into his white-and-grey striped shirt pocket, he signed my book with a friendly smile and was eager to explain the ins and outs of the short stories. He stayed at the signing after the other authors had left. When his books sold out, he sent his wife, Laura, to their car to retrieve additional copies."

https://bluemusemag.com/2019/12/10/connecting-across-borders-author-sergio-troncoso-emma-nelson/

Deborah Kalb Interview

Deborah Kalb interviews me about A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, writing, and El Paso:

"The recent August massacre began with stereotypes and prejudices of who the people in El Paso were. These stereotypes missed the real El Paso, the values of hard work and dedication to family, and the peaceful humility of the largely working-class, immigrant community of El Paso.

"But to break these stereotypes people--especially the white population that has never been to the border--must read about and engage with El Paso (and other immigrant communities) and experience for themselves the pride El Pasoans feel about being hard-working Americans"

http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2019/10/q-with-sergio-troncoso.html

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

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

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

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

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

A Letter from a Reader

Hello Sergio,

I wanted to reach out to you and share how much I relate to the personal essays in Crossing Borders. I am currently an undergrad student at the University of California, Irvine studying Spanish with an emphasis in Education. Like the majority of immigrant families in California, my family is originally from Mexico. Del Norte del país, estado de Durango to be more specific, just like your family.

I truly admire how much involvement your parents had in your education growing up. Most importantly, I admire you for carrying those family values and raising Aaron and Isaac the way you did. Unfortunately I grew up with a single mom, who worked until late hours of the night to provide for my siblings and me. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll always be grateful for the sacrifice she’s made for our family, but she had very little involvement in my educational path. And as I continue on this path, I see our relationship growing more distant. Like you and your mother, my mom and I always had a really good friendship, but being away from home has made it difficult to relate to each other’s lives.

I see myself growing apart from my mom, my comfort zone, and for what purpose? I am surrounded by Asian, Middle Eastern, and white students who walk around like they have their lives figured out. Upper-class students who pull up to the parking lot in their Audis, Mercedes, Lexus; they would never be able to relate to my family’s financial situation. They would never know what it’s like to sleep in the living room because their family of six can barely afford a two-room duplex located in what’s considered the “ghetto.” Yet here I am, reading over your personal essays and reflecting on my decision to cross this border. My decision to continue with my educational goals, even if it meant growing apart from my mom, and her contribution to my Mexican identity. So more than anything, I just wanted to say thanks. Thank you for making me feel like I’m not alone.

I truly want to make a difference in our Mexican-American/Latino community. The families in our community need to make a change and be more college-oriented. We need more families like yours. More parents like Bertha and Rodolfo because a “Mexican accent” doesn’t stop them from getting involved in their children’s education. And for the parents who do not have the time to get involved like my mom, at least get them to understand the importance of a higher education.

Anyway, I hope you get to read this really long message. Even if you don’t respond, I just want you to see the impact your personal essays had on my personal life. Thank you and I am definitely interested in reading more of your work!

Alejandro Favela

---

Alejandro, I've read and re-read your letter several times. I write for readers just like you, and I can only say thank-you for writing such a wonderful, heartfelt letter to this writer. Every writer who toils alone for years deserves a letter like this, which gives him encouragement to keep writing. And yes, you are not alone. I am with you, if only from afar.

I think it's a difficult journey we are making, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be making the journey. I think you should be proud of your mother (as I am of my parents) for what they could teach you, about hard work, sacrifice, friendship. She may not understand everything you are doing now, but make an effort to get back into her community, to teach her about what you know now and why it matters to you.

I know you will find others who assume their position in life, who seem so much more sophisticated than you, who will never understand the poverty you grew up with. I know I did. Take it as an advantage, the advantage of being real, the advantage of knowing good people exist in all strata of life, the advantage of not being easily consumed by things. I have met so many people who assume they are right simply because they are rich. You show them otherwise. As a teacher once told me, "You show them that a Mexicano can beat them with his mind!"

Yes, you are right that I am trying to write about the great values we have in our community, through books like Crossing Borders, and how to translate those values in other settings beyond where we grew up. That's what will move our community forward, in my opinion. I believe we should also criticize those values that are not helpful to us, and leave them behind. I want this conversation to occur in our community, so that we can be self-reflective, so that we can improve ourselves, so that we can be proud of ourselves, yet without being idealistic or romantic about our community.

Thank you for reading my work. You made my day.

Saludos,
Sergio

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.

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.)

My brother in Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illegal is Illegal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Fixit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

228 Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America in Retrenchment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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