Pleiades Interview with Sergio Troncoso

"There are many hidden philosophical questions and issues in the book. How do you develop character? How do you morph from idealism to realism as you move into adulthood? The book addresses racism, as well. Along the way some people are welcoming to Turi and Arnulfo, but others are racist and xenophobic. They don’t want Mexican Americans or Mexicans living in this country. How do you keep that racist poison from infecting your soul as you are faced with this kind of hate? Turi has to fight for his place in this country rather than to assume he belongs. He has to survive here, and he’s not turning back. Connecticut is where he’ll make his stand. Nobody’s Pilgrims is a thriller."

Thank you to Pleiades Magazine, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, and Rey Rodriguez for this interview.

https://pleiadesmag.com/an-interview-with-sergio-troncoso/

Obama's Focus

I like the photo released from the Situation Room, with President Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates, Joe Biden and others riveted by the live screen as our Navy commandos enter Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and put a bullet in the terrorist’s head.  President Obama looked apprehensive, serious, and tough.  But above all, focused.  He took a gamble to get Bin Laden with commandos, rather than deciding to bomb the hell out of the compound.  The man from Chicago would either win big or lose big.

But the gamble was a good one.  The risk was commensurate with the reward: it was high risk to have our military men in harm’s way, to risk a fiasco where they get killed, but it was also high reward to identify Osama Bin Laden, to kill him, and to prove to the world that the deed was truly done.  What mattered was not only that our commandos were terrific, and that they completed their work without U.S. casualties.  What mattered most of all was this focus from President Obama and why we were there.  What 9/11 was originally about, and why we should ever risk putting our military in harm’s way.

Too often, in the aftermath of 9/11, fear and paranoia were manipulated to focus on targets having little to do with what happened on that awful Tuesday in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.  I experienced that day as a New Yorker, and it is the day I became in my heart a New Yorker.  But it is also the day I began to see this country twisted by opportunists and demagogues to focus not on Al Qaeda primarily, not on Bin Laden, but on agendas having little to do with what and who wounded us so profoundly.

Why did we start a war in Iraq?  For weapons of mass destruction?  But they weren’t there.  For vague Al Qaeda connections?  But the terrorists who harmed us were principally in Afghanistan, and later we now know, Pakistan.  My opinion is that President Bush started the war in Iraq to finish his daddy’s work, to pay back Saddam Hussein for targeting his daddy, to prosecute a personalized, blustery foreign policy that put our military in harm’s way.  For the wrong reasons.  For the wrong target.

Hussein was a creep and a dictator, but that isn’t a national security reason necessary to commit to a war.  And of course, once you start a war, as Eisenhower warned us, the military-industrial complex, from generals to lobbyists to anyone else who profits from wars, will make sure the ill-begotten war continues for years, with thousands of people dead, with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted.  Attempt to stop a war we should have never started in the first place, and how many right-wingers will smear you as soft on ‘defense’?  How many in the public will believe them?  How stupidly can we keep going round and round without the right purpose?

Here was another wrong target and wrong focus.  How did we allow what happened on 9/11 to be twisted first into fear about security within our borders, then into paranoia about border security, and finally into attacks against undocumented workers?  We allowed idiots like Lou Dobbs to manipulate our fears into a full-throated xenophobia against anyone dark-skinned, anyone ‘not like us,’ anyone whom we could easily blame, anyone weak and close at hand.

We couldn’t get to Bin Laden, but we could kick these Mexicans pouring concrete on our sidewalks and slaving away for pennies, yes we could kick them in the ass and feel good about ourselves.  It might have been false, this feel-good kick, but it was something, and it was what we had.  How many of us stepped up, said no, and yelled at the xenophobes, to tell them they had the wrong target?  How many pointed out that our lack of work ethic, and our lack of focus on educating our kids, and our adoration of a superficial, materialistic culture were primarily to blame for our not competing effectively against nations like China?  Believe me, right now dying Detroit could be revived if civic leaders just rolled out the red carpet for one million, hard-working, undocumented Mexicans.

Obama, in that picture from the Situation Room, was focused.  He was focused on the right target.  He was focused on what should have been the target all along.  Al Qaeda, and all it represents.  Period.  Now that this commando mission has been completed successfully, perhaps we in the United States can start focusing on our problems straight on.  Our real problems.  Not our prejudices.  Not our fantasies.  Not our petty vendettas.  But the problems that matter, to solve them and to make us a better country.  To overcome even the worst of our days.

Arizona

Obama won the last presidential election, but Latinos are facing the political backlash from conservative whites, who see, more clearly than ever, that their days are numbered as the ethnic majority in this country.  That’s one conclusion I can draw from recent news and events.  I am felled by an awful spring flu, with a fever and an achy body and a nose that gushes as if it were the well of the Deepwater Horizon. But this is too important a day to be a bystander.

Arizona’s new law, SB1070, has been given an acceptable façade with the argument that it’s only against illegal immigrants and that it won’t result in racial profiling.  But what is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that someone is an illegal immigrant?  What does an illegal immigrant look like?  Like John McCain?  Sarah Palin?

It’s a law that the rogue cop who already hates all things Mexican, illegal or not, will easily abuse to jail a poor mother and father who don’t happen to be carrying their birth certificates in their back pockets.  I suspect that even if American Latinos have their birth certificates when they sleep, that the Arizona birthers will assume these documents are fraudulent.  They simply don’t like Mexicans, whether they are here illegally or not.

I conclude this not because I am paranoid, or because I see every political issue through an ethnic or racial lens.  I do not.  Read my blog, witness my marriage, see how I raise my children, examine my voting record.  What you will see, I hope, is a person who was given great opportunities in this country, who is conservative on some issues and liberal on others, who is proud of his Mexican heritage, yet still criticizes and tries to change practices within our community to make it more successful, more powerful, more open-minded.

But when I see that yesterday the Arizona state legislature also passed a bill that “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” I know that this legislative majority in Arizona does not like Mexican-Americans.  Imagine, a Mexican-American studies program in Arizona is being compared to treason.  What kind of mentality makes that irrational link?  The Arizona Department of Education is also trying to fire teachers with accents who teach English classes.  What is happening in this crazy state?  This weekend, the ‘education’ bill is awaiting the governor’s signature.

So I don’t draw my tough conclusions on anything but the evidence of idiocy that are the actions of the Arizona state legislature.  I can only wait for those legislative Caesars in Texas to also take up racist and xenophobic causes, or Oklahoma and Alabama.  Are we about to start a new Confederacy in the South?  What happened to giving opportunity to new strangers to this country, to helping them become Americans, which they so desperately want?  What happened to being open-minded about someone who doesn’t look like you, who doesn’t sound like you?

For Latinos, we must organize.  We must protest.  We must register to vote in huge numbers, and then vote with our neighbors and friends at the ballot box.  We must get involved in politics locally, seek alliances with those who will help us.  We should never stay silent, and allow others to do the work of fighting for causes we care about.  That’s what this country is about: getting involved, gaining our voice, getting a chance to fulfill our highest potential.  These days should prompt a new grito for freedom, respect, and self-determination.

Pandemic Flu and Xenophobia: A History Lesson

The year 1918 was an exciting and terrible time for El Paso and the border: the Mexican Revolution was nearing its bloody end and an outbreak of Spanish influenza incited one of the most shameful and neglected episodes in American history: the decades-long delousing of Mexicans, with insecticides, gasoline, kerosene, and cyanide-based pesticides to make them ‘clean.’ David Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution recounts this remarkable story.

Today when we are facing another pandemic flu, it is useful to review the irrational decisions made back in 1918, by demagogues who already hated Mexicans and who used the fear in the populace to advance an agenda that didn’t in fact help to stop the spread of Spanish influenza. Delousing physically harmed and psychologically scarred thousands of Mexicans, including my grandfather Santiago Troncoso. Let’s not repeat this kind of American history, but learn from it.

First, facts. The ‘Spanish influenza’ began in Kansas. Why it was given this misnomer is probably another legacy of how easily it is to blame the poor and those not media savvy. Also, of course, gasoline and kerosene and pesticides did not kill the Spanish flu, but it did harm and shame many people who were forced to strip naked at the border as they were sprayed with ‘the solution.’ Finally, and most remarkably, Zyklon B was used in El Paso in 1929, the same chemical agent that in more concentrated form was subsequently employed by the Nazis in their death camps to exterminate the Jews. Romo even uncovers evidence to suggest that the use of Zyklon B in El Paso directly inspired German scientists to start looking into its properties for cleansing a country of its ‘pests.’

Today the possible pandemic is swine flu, and we should redouble our efforts to act on facts, rather than on fears or prejudices that end up hurting innocents, or worse. I am waiting for a weak politician, or media loudmouth, to exploit the swine flu fears to further a xenophobic agenda. I am waiting to see whether stereotypes of Mexicans are privately reinforced and maybe even publicly acted upon, with the same bloody results. I hope I will have to wait forever, but I am still wary.

I don’t know if we as a country have a mature-enough political discourse to resist such temptations. The glib media rule the airwaves, including Twitter, and passing along short bursts of fear, instead of thoughtful analysis, is our modern forte. Moreover, the groundwork for xenophobia against Mexicans has already been reinforced by the many years of attacks demonizing undocumented workers in the United States. Perhaps the saving grace of the current situation is that we have a new administration that I believe will be more sensitive to the abuse of public hysteria to further a xenophobic agenda.

Early reports, in the Wall Street Journal, for example, indicate that this swine flu outbreak did start in Mexico. But even here the picture is more complicated than we might think. One of the first swine-flu cases was that of a five-year-old boy from Veracruz who lived near a pig farm operated by Smithfield Foods Inc., an American company based in Virginia. The company denies any involvement in the swine flu outbreak.

All this tells me is that we are interconnected, whether we like it or not. We get our food from all over the world. We get our people from all over the world. This has been our world for a long time, and I don’t attempt to imagine some false pure state where I am island and if I return to this island I will somehow be safer, or better, or truer in some metaphysical sense. Reaching back, or forward, to false utopias, especially during crises in our communities, has always prevented us from solving the problems in the first place, and too often spawned horrific ‘solutions’ that expose our greatest human frailties and moral failures. Work the problem, people. Not the fear.

Killing Latinos in New York

This week The New York Times ran a front page story on Marcelo Lucero, an Equadorean immigrant who was stabbed to death in November by young thugs who shouted anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic slurs: Latinos Recall Pattern of Attacks Before Killing. The news story was about the long-standing pattern of hate in the Long Island town of Patchogue, a pattern that was news to the police. The mayor of Patchogue said that the immigration debate painted undocumented immigrants as “animals,” as outsiders who are “expendable.” Immigrants who have brought life back to Patchogue’s Main Street are instead blamed for cutbacks in schools, for crime, for bringing an alien culture and language to New York. One of the youths (all have pleaded not guilty) told authorities that he only went out “beaner hopping” once a week.

The mayor’s point belies the protestations of anti-immigrant talking heads and political demagogues, that they are attacking only illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants, that they are attacking “those who break our country’s laws,” not Latinos in particular. When you obsessively focus on every crime by an undocumented worker, invariably from Mexico, when you wave the flag and accuse immigrants of taking jobs from ‘real Americans’ to exploit economic fears, when you characterize someone who is darker than you and speaks another language as sub-human, the thug on the street with a knife in his hand and with hatred in his heart will not ask first to see your Green Card. He will stab you, and he may not even bother to ask questions later. That’s the reality. Our hateful environment encourages hateful, thoughtless acts.

‘It is okay to kill a person who shouldn’t be here. It is okay to kill someone who does not speak English. It is okay to kill the kind of person whom my mother and father hate at the dinner table. It is okay to kill someone who sounds like the person the red-faced Lou Dobbs is vilifying on CNN every night. No one wants that kind of person here in the United States, I am doing the country a favor, and I will be having some fun while I’m at it, by getting rid of this vermin.’ How long will we allow these poisonous thoughts to seep into American minds? Shall we wait for more killings of Latinos before we stand up against this hate?

The American hypocrisy on illegal immigration is stunning on so many levels. We profit from undocumented immigrants every day. With cheaper food at our tables. With apartment buildings and houses built by these workers. With nannies who take care of our children. American companies are richer because of the work of undocumented immigrants: food producers, home builders, construction companies, restaurants, bakeries. Perhaps we want to keep these immigrants in their shadowy, defenseless status. ‘Make money off of them, and kick them in ass, or kick them out when we’ve finished using them,’ that seems to be the cruel new American credo.

This hypocrisy on illegal immigration extends beyond those in ‘white’ America, descendants of English, Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants who made their way to the New World by hook or by crook. This hypocrisy extends to some Latinos who have made it here, and want to close the doors to any more newcomers. It extends to some African-Americans who claim a privileged minority status, and so don’t see why any benefits of the civil rights movement should be given to those who weren’t forced to the New World as slaves.

This has never been, and never will be, a black and white issue. We should ask and argue for a return to working out the complex problem of immigration humanely and rationally. We should decry those who use incendiary rhetoric on immigration to climb atop the backs of the weak, for higher ratings or for more votes. We are better than that. Perhaps it is too much to ask of human beings, to see if they don’t recognize that poor, new outsider as someone they once were, as someone who their grandfather or grandmother might have been in another time. It is too much to ask, but we should nevertheless keep asking for America to have an open mind, if we are to keep the best traditions of the New World alive.