Troncoso Writing Workshop at Mark Twain House, July 1

Please join us for a one-day workshop at the Mark Twain House & Museum, Tuesday, July 1, 5-7:30 PM, in Hartford, Connecticut. Thank you for helping to spread the word to those in the Hartford area! 

The author of eight books, Sergio Troncoso graduated from Harvard College and received two graduate degrees from Yale University. A Fulbright scholar and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. The El Paso City Council voted to rename the Ysleta public library branch as the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library. His work has appeared in CNN Opinion, Houston Chronicle, Other Voices, New Letters, Yale Review, Pleiades, Michigan Quarterly Review, Texas Highways, and Texas Monthly. He teaches at the Yale Writers' Workshop.

 

https://marktwainhouse.org/event/writers-workshop-with-sergio-troncoso-in-person/

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

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/

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

Dallas 1963: Context and Questions

Dallas 1963 (Twelve, 2013), by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, takes the reader back to the city of Dallas and to the years before that fateful day on November 22, 1963. In this 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this important book raises several fascinating questions.

To what extent was Dallas already the “City of Hate” before the assassination? What role did conservative figures play in creating this paranoid milieu? How does this environment in part mirror current conservative attacks against President Barack Obama? Did the hateful environment in Dallas contribute to, or encourage, or explain Kennedy’s assassination?

The Dallas of 1960 is a city where the Ku Klux Klan once had its national headquarters, the current mayor had once been an unabashed KKK member, and important statues celebrate Confederate heroes. The Dallas Morning News is led by publisher Ted Dealey, who refers to Washington, D.C. as “nigger town” and joins oilman H. L. Hunt in supporting the belief that the United Nations is creating a world socialist system. For them, JFK’s support of Medicare is tantamount to “sweeping dictatorial power over medicine” and will create government death panels. This is Obamacare’s déjà vu.

Joining these powerful citizens is Rev. W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who sermonizes that JFK’s Roman Catholicism is a “political tyranny” that threatens the very fabric of the U. S. of A. Meanwhile, General Edwin A. Walker resigns from the military, finds Dallas politically hospitable, and gives speeches to adoring local crowds where he exhorts unleashing nuclear holocaust on the Soviet Union, even at the price of millions of casualties stateside. Super-patriot Walker wants to overthrow the “totalitarian regime” of Kennedy, and files to run for Texas governor in February of 1962.

Stirring this toxic stew, and exploiting it, is Representative Bruce Alger from Dallas, the lone Republican in the Texas delegation, and an arch conservative. During a visit from Lyndon B. Johnson on the eve of the 1960 election, Alger leads a “mink coat mob” that attacks LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson. A sign in Alger’s hands reads “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.”

Later when U. N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visits Dallas in October of 1963, Frank McGehee, the Dallas founder of the National Indignation Convention, adopts the tactics of conservative intimidation by leading a mob to disrupt Stevenson’s speech. One protester, a Dallas insurance executive, slams a placard on Stevenson’s forehead.

Oddly, Lee Harvey Oswald is a relatively minor figure in this book, a Socialist sympathizer who nearly assassinates General Walker in April of 1963 and later kills Kennedy. This is odd because Dallas 1963 repeatedly hints that the hateful conservative milieu in Dallas somehow portended JFK’s assassination. But how exactly? Was Oswald drawn to Dallas because of its conservative fanaticism, and so he decided to combat it there? Why did he turn the rifle instead on JFK? These questions and any others explicitly linking the right-wing hate in Dallas to what happened on November 22, 1963 (at least the official and most likely version of events) are not answered in this book. We are left to make these links somehow on faith.

Dallas 1963 is a meticulously researched book that brings you back to a place and time beset by a mass or even class psychosis, where innuendo and wild accusations gain currency, where zealots sound reasonable, and wild and murderous ideas are taken seriously, and acted upon. The dark side of democratic rule, too often, is the rule of the mob. When that mob has power, money, news media, and well-spoken leaders, then the most inhumane acts can be perpetuated by societies in the name of what is ‘right.’ Dallas 1963 will help readers gain a perspective that resonates with the caustic politics that have unfortunately become the norm today.

(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on November 3, 2013.)

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.)

Why I Wrote From This Wicked Patch of Dust

Two days ago at the Brooklyn Book Festival a young woman came up to me after my reading, and asked me a simple question: Why did I write my novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust?  The festival was my first big event to launch the novel, and although what she asked was straightforward, the answer is anything but.  Let me give it a shot.

I wrote From This Wicked Patch of Dust, because I wanted to write about the Mexican-American border, where I grew up.  I wanted to write about the poorest of the poor in a Texas colonia, or shantytown, with a dream of becoming American.  Although the novel is fiction, my family was also dirt poor in Ysleta on the outskirts of El Paso, yet I loved my childhood.  Any voice I have as a writer is in one way or another rooted in communicating what was good, what was struggle, and what we couldn’t answer in Ysleta.

Much of our political rhetoric only caricatures poor immigrants, documented and undocumented.  There is rarely a sense of the commonality we, the more established inhabitants of these United States, share with these newcomers.  I wanted to portray characters who come to life, reach out to the reader, and find a place in his or her thoughts, emotions, and even laughter.  I hope you will see the Martínez family clearly, their warts as well as their merits, and believe in these characters.

I also wanted to focus on the dynamics of immigrant families.  If you read From This Wicked Patch of Dust you will experience the lives of Cuauhtémoc and Pilar Martínez, the parents from the ‘old world,’ so to speak, who sometimes, and sometimes do not, see eye-to-eye on whether and how their family should become American.  The children —Julia, Francisco, Marcos, and Ismael— take divergent paths to becoming American, adopt different religions or cultures, and even move to different places across the country.  The siblings are in conflict with each other, they are in conflict with their parents, yet all of them still belong to and love their family.  The Martinez family tries to keep it together as many things, including their own decisions, pull this family apart.  How do we honor who we are, how do we break away from where we began, and what does all of this mean for our families?

Another question at the heart of my novel was: How can I portray the culture of a group, not one individual, but a related group, as in a family?  That is the reason From This Wicked Patch of Dust is told, alternatively, from the six perspectives of each family member.  We live in families, yet each of us experiences being part of a family in a different way.  We are together, yet we are also apart, in a family.  What keeps us together, and what drives us apart?  That’s the drama at the heart of the novel.

How does time fragment the togetherness of a family?  This is why the chapters in From This Wicked Patch of Dust are several years apart.  Our common experiences are the bonds that keep us together for a while, but as we get older, as individuals and as a group, those common experiences become more experiences in the past.  We start living our lives apart, yet we often yearn to come back together, as adult children, as elderly parents, to that togetherness we once had.  Even though the children of Pilar and Cuauhtémoc Martínez end up in different parts of the world, so far from Ysleta in many ways beyond geography, they retain a bit of Ysleta within them.

I imagined the novel as an orchestra piece, where the different perspectives and time fragments would yield a music by the end of the novel that would give a sense to each reader of what is achieved and what is left behind after a family is gone.  Some would call this micro-history, but it is a 'private history' we all experience in one way or another in our lifetime. And this experience has so much to do with what kind of selves we become. Certainly it is a different kind of storytelling than the escapism and neat ending of a typical Hollywood movie, which encourages short-term satisfaction rather than reflection.  As a writer, I hope I have caused my readers to think.

Finally, the allegorical allusions in the novel are focused on this question: Why are we as a country growing further apart?  Why do we have less in common with each other?  Why do we see only ‘the other’ in our neighbor, or in an ethnic group not quite like us, or in a religious group not quite like us?  Admittedly, a country is not a family.  I know that.  But there is a sense when a group feels more together, and when it has ceased to be a group at all and individuals just exist next to each other, ready to take advantage of each other at a moment’s notice.

Have we reached that point in the United States, where we have little in common with each other?  Where Birmingham, New York City, and Reno are as foreign as Cairo and Tel Aviv?  There is no way empirically to prove or disprove this.  I can only point to our bitter political rhetoric, the media manipulation to promote narrow agendas and to divide us, and what I hear and see on the streets of El Paso, New York, Kansas City, San Francisco, and wherever else I travel.

What can bring us back together, if anything?  From This Wicked Patch of Dust has a tentative answer at the end of the novel.  Of course, I am always hopeful.  I will always make the effort to grapple with a question even when it is one such as: Why did you write this novel?  I must have said something coherent to the young woman at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  After I finished talking, she bought the book and asked me to sign it to ‘Meryl.’

A Peculiar Journey

I go through spurts in writing.  This past summer I wrote, and rewrote, more than I have in years.  I got into a certain rhythm.  The ideas were flowing, and my skills, such as they were, produced work I did not throw away.  I experienced what I will only describe as a painful low, yet the summer ended with an unexpected bonanza.  Yes, I will have new work next year, but I won’t discuss the details until the dust settles.

That’s why I stopped writing Chico Lingo three, four times a month.  I had to focus on my paid gigs, so to speak, and this blog, which has strangely grown near and dear to my heart, was neglected.  Chico Lingo is my way to discuss and explore topical ideas, even philosophical points.  It is my way to be part of the cultural and political discourse of this country.  It’s a community newsletter, an alter ego, a peak into my brain on any given week, and even a platform to jump into a question I want to explore further, perhaps in more crafted writing.  I think it’s been a good discipline for me to write Chico Lingo.

After the flurry of writing and rewriting of the summer, I have taken a step back from my literary work this autumn.  Yes, I am working on shorter pieces.  Yes, I am in the middle of a few small projects that editors have asked me for.  So the writing work never quite goes away.  But the intensity is different, and I am also retooling.  I am questioning how I write, from the micro level of the line, to the possible structures of stories, to the architecture of novels in my head.  I always try to improve my skills, and I do like to experiment.  I hope all of this makes me a better writer.

I work hard, then I take a step back to see if I can find better ways to work.  It’s a recursive process, Hegelian, if you want to get philosophically fancy, or simply learning by doing, and then thinking about what you learned, and what you did.  I imagine myself a maker of a chair, who made lots of chairs —a whole dining room set!— in a concentrated time, and now I take a step back to see how I can learn to make different chairs, with different tools and technologies, with new knowledge about stains, lathes, and woods.  I might even try making a table.

One main focus of my retooling is to try capture and use a more poetic rhythm to my prose.  To take my written words from not just clear writing and good storytelling, but to sing that song with words that will be my own.

It has been a long literary trek for me.  Early on I think I wrote in a certain simple way because my native language was not English, but Spanish, or more precisely the Spanglish of El Paso.  Years ago I was simply trying to get my point across.  I was trying to survive, whether it was at Ysleta High, or Harvard and Yale.  Also, I believed first and foremost in ideas, not words.  Perhaps this is the curse of the philosophical mind, to know that what you write —its logic, argument, and import— is far more essential than how you write it.  I still believe this is true, in a way.  Heidegger, for example, was a terrible writer, but a great thinker.  What he wrote, once you more or less understood it, reoriented what the world could be.  Nietzsche was that great exception as a philosopher, a unique and important thinker for what he wrote, but also a gifted stylist by how he wrote in German.

So I needed to write simply, to get my point of across, to be heard.  I loved thinking about complex philosophical problems, and so that also lent itself to writing simply and directly.  When you read philosophical papers, the writing is often direct and relatively simple, but your head hurts trying to understand the argument and logic.

But the reason I left philosophy was because I found it too isolating.  I married philosophy with literature in my stories, to try to achieve this nexus of exploring difficult questions, but through stories, believable characters, many of them from the Mexican-American border.  Writing philosophy in literature was also a way to destroy stereotypes in Mexican-American literature.  Over decades of writing, I became better at it.  My English improved.  I became more of a native English speaker, even though I never left my Spanish behind.  After much struggle and self-education and self-reinvention, I again wanted more of myself and my writing.

That’s at the point I am now.  Where I want more from my work in English.  More poetry.  More language that cuts through the colloquial and the cliché.  Whereas early on in my writing career, I hardly read any poetry without being baffled or bored.  Now I am primarily reading poetry, and lustily so.  I gave a speech recently, which delved into my peculiar journey, “From Literacy to Literature.”  I hope you get the idea.  I still remember how Plato ridiculed the poets and warned against their influence, but now I happily inhabit that world in a poem, and it is that momentary beauty that nourishes me even as I try to take it apart.

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.

"The Brothers Warner" and Writing To Educate

My family attended the Kent Film Festival this weekend, in Kent, Connecticut (population: 2,858), nestled next to the mighty Housatonic River in the Litchfield Hills. We love visiting Kent because it’s so different from New York City: forests with deer, bobcats, and bears, and a small-town sensibility and pace that bring you back to the peace of sitting under a giant oak to read a book in solitude.

We saw an excellent documentary, “The Brothers Warner,” about the four brothers who created the film studio famous for making everything from “Casablanca” to “Looney Tunes.” The film was directed and narrated by Cass Warner, the granddaughter of Harry Warner, and what struck me was her description of why the brothers originally went into moviemaking and how different the industry is today. Their goal, of course, was to entertain audiences, but the brothers also wanted to educate and enlighten them. They saw films as powerful tools for promoting the social good.

For example, Warner Brothers made the first anti-Nazi film in the late 1930’s, even when the U.S. State Department was warning them not to do it. Warner Brothers also pioneered movies depicting racism against blacks, teenage rebellion (“Rebel Without A Cause”), and even the history of medicine (“The Story of Louis Pasteur”). One of the points of the documentary was that the brothers Warner often sacrificed profit for message and that marketing did not rule their decisions about what movies to make. They repeatedly put their “toochis ofn tish,” a Yiddish phrase meaning they put their “ass on the table.” The brothers took risks, political, social, and economic risks, to communicate something new through movies.

Not only did this make me think of all the junk movies today, hooked on the steroids of special effects or hot bodies, movies memorable for about five minutes; but the documentary also made me think of my industry and how marketing and celebrity literature have overwhelmed the world of books. Most of the books produced today are meant to be disposable, a quick hit to the bottom line of a corporation, and then forgotten and shredded. Rarely do commercial publishers publish anything that they don’t think will be a huge financial success, and so they follow often outmoded, safe realities of what editors, agents, and reviewers think will sell.

For example, I appeared in a new anthology this month, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, and a reviewer from Publishers Weekly criticized the anthology for not having “fiction examining distinctively Latino themes.” What stereotypical box does this reviewer want us to fit in before he or she gives writers a chance to tell their stories? The anthology was published, not surprisingly, by a non-profit press, Arte Publico from Houston. If the anthology sells, perhaps more doors will be opened to Latino writers wanting to write stories outside of preconceived notions of who or what Latinos should be. But don’t expect commercial publishers to lead the charge to educate a changing public about what deserves to be American literature today.

I find the most interesting movies are created by independent producers, and the most interesting books are published by small, often non-profit presses. These are the creative works in which it is still important to entertain, but the point is also to enlighten, to explore a subject that has been overlooked or forgotten, to perfect a work that will sustain its brilliance for a long time, and to challenge and break stereotypes. If you want to take a voyage that truly opens your eyes, rather than lulls you to sleep or gives you a fleeting high, then go independent, go non-profit, and experience the thrill of new thinking.