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.)

Stories from the Heart of El Paso

Matt Méndez’s Twitching Heart (Floricanto Press) is an evocative collection of stories set in El Paso that challenges the reader to explore the dynamics of relationships, gender roles, politics, and faith. The prose is simple but true, and the stories are suspenseful often without easy conclusions, which encourage the reader to ponder the layers of meaning in Méndez’s prose.

The interlinked stories begin with the title story, with Chuy and Teresa, father and mother to eleven-year-old Oscar, in a frayed relationship. Chuy has cheated and has been thrown out of the house. Yet Chuy agrees to take care of Oscar while the mother is at work, and agrees again to take Oscar to a tile job at a neighbor’s house, where paralyzed Angélica supposedly performs miracles at the behest of her mother María. The parents’ struggle is partly about their son, what kind of man he should become, whether he should learn skills with his hands, or skills for college. The struggle is also within the father Chuy, his life “silent and a stuck way to be.”

In “Tacos Aztecas,” Israel tries to remember how to show Cristina that he loves her, after homophobic thugs killed their son Artemio behind Ben’s Grocery one year ago. Israel believes it is his fault Artemio died, because he encouraged his son “to change his mind about being a sissy.” A big family never happened for Israel and Cristina. Cristina’s mother worried the family would be cursed, because Artemio was conceived before marriage. History is a crushing burden rather than a fount of pride or possibilities. Cristina is also wracked with guilt, because she encouraged Artemio “to deny who he was,” to hide it from his father, instead of defending Artemio like a Matachin. Revealing their sins to each other, Israel and Cristina might create another chance for themselves.

“El Terrible” is a gem of a story for two reasons: the details are terrific—from the father-son relationship to the basic skills of boxing—and the message about what work should mean, not labor, not the 9-to-5 grind, but work as caring about what you do, that message is so important. Martín is cut from the basketball team, and attends a school of “bored looking teachers and students.” His father José, a bus driver, has other plans for his son: to fight The Deacon’s kid—a star quarterback and “the biggest Mexican” Martín had ever seen—and to teach his son the skills and discipline of boxing.

At school, the promise of the fight takes on a life of its own, and Martín can’t back out. At home, Martín thinks his father is crazy and doesn’t know anything about boxing. But among the highlights of their training, José shows his son how waiting is sometimes better than attacking, the crucial lesson of counter-punching. Martín learns something new about his father, and himself, and why seriousness of purpose transforms the meaning of all work.

The language in Twitching Heart brings the reader to an authentic El Paso: homes are “chantes” and deflowering a young woman is “taking her cherry.” Even the right way to prepare and use thinset for setting floor tile brings you to the ground. Not the literal ground, of course, but that ground of the Chicano working-class too often overlooked in literature. This is the stuff that brings you to a place, and that brings to life a people. This is also what we should never be ashamed to explore, to criticize, and to laugh about: our struggling lives, with their imperfections and idiosyncrasies, our mannerisms and concerns, whether philosophical or stupid.

When we can do that artfully, then we have taken steps to value these lives from El Paso, and simultaneously we have taken steps to understand them and even transcend them. Matt Méndez succeeds on these counts in his admirable debut of stories in Twitching Heart.

(This book review originally appeared in the El Paso Times on February 17, 2013.)

Damaged yet unbeaten heroine from New Orleans

Joy Castro’s new novel, Hell or High Water (Thomas Dunne Books) is a gritty and suspenseful thriller set in post-Katrina New Orleans—damaged yet unbeaten— and told through the eyes of crime reporter Nola Soledad Céspedes.  She is the story as much as she writes the story, as Nola investigates the scary underworld of sex offenders, their many victims, and what if any possibility exists for understanding of and redemption for her tortured past.

Nola is a feisty and savvy 27-year-old reporter for the Times-Picayune, trying to make the leap to serious reporting as she simultaneously struggles to reveal and hide herself to her successful girlfriends.  They don’t know she grew up in the dangerous Desire Projects or that she was fatherless as a child. Nola’s Cuban mother was often drunk even as Mama created “an island of love” amid the muck.  Nola and her mother have also kept many astonishing secrets from each other.

The plot is driven by the abduction of Amber Waybridge, a young tourist who disappears in the shadowy corridors of a restaurant in the French Quarter.  Nola interviews sex offenders about their evil habits and rehabilitation, if any, and empathizes with their victims and the lifelong destruction left behind.  Some of the most suspenseful moments in the novel occur when Nola encounters rich sex offenders as well as poor ones in their own homes.  Issues of class and race transect Nola’s observations about who gets rehabilitation and who does not and the elision of inconvenient history among the well-to-do.  How will Waybridge’s abduction, Nola’s research and newspaper writing, and her history all come together in the end?  For the many sticky situations along the way, Nola packs a Berretta in her handbag.

In Nola Céspedes, Castro has created a character defined by a strong voice, trenchant societal observations, and solitude, as her middle name suggests, Soledad.  What Nola must accomplish she must do so according to her agenda, what she must overcome she must do so alone, and what external and internal demons she must conquer she must do so head-on.   What humanizes Nola in the end is that she recognizes what she wants yet what she lacks.  She is courageous enough to change and act to overcome the real and psychic injustices the world has flung her way.

Hell or High Water is a tightly written thriller where Nola’s first-person perspective and her witty, often cutting dialogue will make the reader believe in the character, and really, care for Nola and what happens to her.  You want to talk to her, you want her to succeed, and even when she is making mistakes you are rooting for her to escape her predicament and survive and defeat her enemies.  Like the city for which she was named, Nola is damaged yet unbeaten.

The novel’s twist at the end reveals that Nola’s primary quest is to heal her own soul.  But to achieve that, like many of us who may have begun with less than nothing and wounds too deep to easily heal, Nola may have to act beyond the boundaries of morality.  Hell or High Water is an exciting, incisive novel.

(This book review originally appeared in the El Paso Times on September 30, 2012.)

Thursday Night in El Barrio

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

With Aurora Anaya-Cerda and Renato Rosaldo

With Raquel Toledo

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

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

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

Why Read?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Distance to Tucson

Distance—whether it be psychic, physical, linguistic, ethnic or cultural—allows us to easily stereotype individuals, groups, and even places. I wrote a novel, The Nature of Truth, in which I argued—yes, in my novels I argue, sometimes with myself—that the pursuit of truth through abstraction is often rooted in hate. Years later I read Anzaldua’s Borderlands in which she says, “In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of violence.” I knew I had found a kindred spirit.

So it was upon my arrival in Tucson. What I expected after being outraged by the banning of books and the elimination of Mexican-American studies in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), and what I discovered after talking to people at the festival, were two different things. The all-too-neat abstraction in my mind was challenged by the complexity on the ground.

A Salvadoran taxi driver (a naturalized citizen) drove me to the hotel and said he feared Governor Jan Brewer and Sheriff Joe Arpaio from Maricopa County near Phoenix “porque son racistas,” that is, “because they are racists.” I could not disagree with him. But he also pointed out that it wasn’t necessarily like that in Tucson.

At my table at the Authors’ Dinner on Friday night, this point was repeated by the well-to-do crowd; some were Latino, but most were not. They argued that Phoenix was the more politically conservative city, and Maricopa County had the burgeoning population, many of them newcomers from California and the Midwest. It was this group, or a part of this group, that had voted in a radically conservative legislature and passed a state law to ban Mexican-American studies and installed the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in the TUSD who implemented the misguided, punitive agenda. Some at the table whose families had lived in Arizona for three or four generations, who were blond and blue-eyed and spoke excellent Spanish, were as vehemently against Brewer and Arpaio and John Huppenthal (the Superintendent) as I could have ever been. So the first thing I learned is that Tucson is not Phoenix, and vice versa.

The gifted storyteller Luis Alberto Urrea delivered a rousing keynote speech at this dinner. He gleefully mentioned having the most books banned at the TUSD, and thanked the district (to great applause) for increasing his books sales and Twitter followers. Urrea was funny and irreverent. But at the end, he pointed to the 900-plus attendees at the dinner, all of them booklovers in one way or another. He reiterated an important point: they were really the heart of Tucson, and the tens of thousands who would attend the Tucson Book Festival would emphatically repeat that point. The retrograde media image of the city did not do justice to how people often came together for books and culture in Tucson. Urrea received a standing ovation. Again, I appreciated that Tucson is not Phoenix, and certainly not Maricopa County.

Throughout the Tucson Book Festival, as I attended my panel and signed books at the University of Arizona Press table, people could not have been friendlier. It was one of best-organized book festivals I have ever attended. I spoke to high school kids protesting the TUSD's book banning and elimination of Chicano studies. They had a table next to the Nuestras Raices big tent featuring Latino authors. At this table, the kids displayed all the banned books. I bought two of their t-shirts featuring a Mexicano with a sombrero seemingly asleep with his arms crossed in one picture, only to look up in the next picture as he reads a book. The title on the t-shirt: “Think Again!” I’m giving the t-shirts to my sons.

In fact, the only time I heard comments in support of Sheriff Arpaio’s camera-ready crackdown on undocumented workers in Maricopa County was Saturday afternoon from a California writer, a Latino no less. Go figure.

At the festival, what I often did witness was talk of recalling Governor Brewer, petitions for signatures to make that happen, and people organizing for the next election to counter the crazy conservative elements that have for the moment dominated this state. Yes, I also saw many hairdos from the 1950s and 1960s, and too many new-age books about aliens hiding in the desert or plotting the end of the world. Yet I also experienced the variety and plurality of books and people and discussions that could have easily taken place in Brooklyn.

I would argue that the conservative politicians in Arizona do not know Chicanos. I would argue that they also do not know what studying Chicano literature and culture does to a group of students who too often feel put down by those who don’t take the time to understand them. When I was a teenager in El Paso, I sometimes felt worthless because of the stereotypical images I would see in the media about Mexicanos being lazy, stupid, and even dangerous. When Latino administrators at my high school yelled at me and repeated, “They don’t take people like you at Harvard,” reading Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima gave me hope. I saw myself in literature for the first time.

I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Acuña’s Occupied America (banned books at the TUSD) at Harvard, but I didn’t become a bomb-thrower, nor did I grow to resent groups in power, even after I learned what they had once done to the downtrodden and the weak. I did vow never to forget where I was from. I vowed to understand more about my history and culture. And ironically, as I grew to believe in myself over the years, I was able to appreciate and seek out allies and even opponents from all backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and cultures.

This is what the hateful conservative politicians of Arizona are missing: the context. They assume that studying your race and ethnic history, for Chicano students, is exactly how they—the rich and powerful—would be if they studied their race and history. It’s racism by projection, in a way. For a downtrodden group, for a historically disparaged group, studying about who you are helps you to overcome and understand and eventually move beyond the hateful images you have to struggle against. Ethnic studies by and for a group in power, and ethnic studies by and for a relatively powerless group, are two different subjects with different motivations, for those with a reflective mind.

Radically conservative politicians in Arizona exploit the distance between the powerful and the powerless. Forget about getting them to acknowledge what it means. They simply don’t have the goodwill. But at the Tucson Book Festival, I also believed I shouldn’t act similarly with the city of Tucson: what it was in my mind before I arrived and the city I found on the streets were vastly different.

I remember at Harvard how I often saw undergraduates protesting South Africa, spending countless hours organizing protests against dictators in Central America, and so on. Yes, I agreed with them. But I also wondered why these same students didn’t focus on the racism in Cambridge, or why they too often mistreated their own friends in the dorm room next door. In a way, it was safe to focus on a faraway cause, to create the perfect and distant bogeyman, to abstract and so perfect an enemy in the mind, and to ‘act’ but not really to act, to improve this world.

I vowed to practice my politics locally, with my family and friends most of all. I vowed I would always check what I thought I knew in my mind with what I experienced. I wanted to seek out what Aristotle understood as knowledge: the practical work for the good that is grounded in what you see and hear and find out for yourself. Tucson is book country. That I know. At the Tucson Book Festival, we shared that common ground.

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.

November Readings and Events

New Jersey, New York, Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois.  Oh, only five states this month: I am glad I am slowing down.  It has been an exhilarating fall, as I have read across the country and reconnected with old friends and made many new ones.  That is the part I love about traveling non-stop for new books: I get to talk to readers in person.  I have had 'Internet friendships' for years, but now I can meet these friends face-to-face.

My best experiences so far?  Eating Alma's chocolate cake in Kingsburg, California and talking to David Dominguez's classes for four hours, until I was hoarse.  Also, my book party.  That was another highlight.  Friends from across New York City arrived ready to party in my apartment building, and bought 55 books!  I was overwhelmed, and grateful.  In San Francisco, it was a treat to have a quiet dinner with my accomplished high school friend Adan Griego.  Finally, my three panels at the Texas Book Festival: one for From This Wicked Patch of Dust, another for Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and the last one for the You Don't Have A Clue anthology.  Every panel was stimulating and thoughtful.  I loved the audience questions, and relished the many conversations I had at the Barnes and Noble's signing tent in front of the state capitol.  It was one of the best book festival experiences so far, and kudos to the organizers of Texas Book Festival for putting on such a great show and for their support of libraries.  They certainly have their hearts in the right place.

A French scholar is writing a book about Latino literature and my work, among others, and so he is interviewing me in December.  I had a testy, but fun interview with the prolific, quick-witted writer Roberto Ontiveros for the indy newsweekly the San Antonio Current, where I said: “I see in the United States a culture of stupidity that we have come to accept as the norm. In fact, most of us don’t know anything different, and so we even don’t have a sense of loss, how our minds have atrophied. We used to expect much from our writers and readers, in terms of patience, in terms of understanding and debating ideas, in terms of assumed knowledge. But no more. We’ve raced to the bottom.”  That day I had read too much Emerson and spotted too many images of the Kardashians on the Internet, television, and even in bookstores.  Am I wrong?  Also, Crossing Borders is now available as an e-book.  And finally, I was the featured author on The Latino Author website: The Latino Author.com.  Thank you all: October was a helluva month.  Here is my schedule for November:

November 1, 2011, 7 PM---New Jersey City University, Weiss Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Jersey City, NJ: New Jersey City University.

November 3, 2011, 6:30 PM--Co-honoree (with Aubrey Hawes), for contributions to the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, Benefit Gala 2011, Mark Twain-on-Hudson, Tappan Hill Mansion, Highland Avenue, Tarrytown, NY.

November 4, 2011, 7:00 PM--University of Texas at El Paso, Quinn 212, El Paso, TX.

November 5, 2011, 9 AM---Keynote Speaker, Region 19-Education Service Center’s 14th Annual Parent Engagement Conference, Canutillo High School, 6675 South Desert Blvd. (Loop 375/Trans Mountain Road exit off I-10), El Paso, TX.

November 5, 2011, 2 PM---Barnes & Noble, 705 Sunland Park Drive, El Paso, TX.

November 5, 2011, 5 PM---Barnes & Noble, 9521 Viscount Boulevard, El Paso, TX.

November 6, 2011, 3 PM---Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Boulevard NW, Albuquerque, NM.

November 17, 2011, 6:30-8:00 PM---Guild Literary Complex, Global Voices series at the International House, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

November 18, 2011, 11 AM-12:15 PM---National Council of Teachers of English, Panel with other authors of You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens, Chicago, IL.

I hope to see many of you at these events.  I am humbled that I am one of the two honorees at the annual gala of the Hudson Valley Writers' Center.  You always wonder if anybody cares, or if anybody is reading your work, or if somebody will ask you a question based on what you actually wrote rather than on what they want you or your stories to be.  It is more than enough to fight your own demons; I don't think I have the strength to fight someone else's.  I am on the road again for a while, and all my wood chopping for the winter will have to wait until I get a break.

October Readings and Events

I'll be in New Jersey, Oregon, Maryland, Texas, and California in October.  I am exhausted just thinking about it!  I hope to see you at one of these readings or events.  That is what makes these trips so worthwhile to me, when I connect with readers face-to-face. My complete schedule of readings and appearances is at: www.sergiotroncoso.com/readings/index.htm.

October 5, 2011, 5 PM---Weiss Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, with other authors of You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens, Jersey City, NJ.

October 8, 2011, 6 PM---National Endowment for the Arts Stage, Wordstock Book and Literary Festival, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR.

October 16, 2011, 2 PM---The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD.

October 18, 2011, 6:30-8:30 PM---Collegiate School, Collegiate Book Festival’s Opening Reception, 260 West 78th Street, New York, NY.

October 21, 2011, 5-7 PM---The Twig Book Shop, 200 E. Grayson, Suite 124, San Antonio, TX.

October 22-23, 2011---Texas Book Festival (Saturday: 11:30-12:30 PM, “Stories from El Paso,” and Sunday: 1:30-2:30 PM, “Latino Mystery Stories,” and 3:00-4:00, “The Art of Personal Reflection”), Texas State Capitol, Austin, TX.

October 24, 2011, 4:30 PM---San Francisco Public Library, The International Center, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA.

October 25, 2011---Reedley College, 995 North Reed Avenue, Reedley, CA.

Also, I recently posted a YouTube video of a reading and discussion of my novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust. I hope you enjoy it: http://youtu.be/m4pwgIuGUOM.

I received a nice review of my new book of essays, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, from the El Paso Times: "Troncoso is a complicated man trying to understand a complicated world. In his quest for understanding, he eloquently shares lessons learned in 16 provocative essays. These very personal essays cross several borders: cultural, historical, and self-imposed. For example, he contemplates writer's block in 'A Day Without Ideas,' comparing it to a deathlike existence where nothing matters and he will ‘simply be there.’ In a painful letter to his sons detailing their mother's struggle with breast cancer, Troncoso the writer reveals his true identity as Troncoso the frightened, caring, and strong father. He takes on the 9/11 attackers, in a piece called 'Terror and Humanity,' not with hatred or revenge, but with a plea for basic humanity....the collection remains timely. We owe it to ourselves to read, savor and read them again."

Finally, I am working on several projects at the same time, while reading across the country for both books, correcting one son's essay for English, reviewing Spanish grammar for a test the other son will have today, feeding my beloved cat Ocistar, buying milk, and well, you get the picture.  I am not that complicated; I am just exhausted.  It has been a busy time, but so far I have not dropped anything I am juggling.

I love to hear from readers. That lifts me up like nothing else.  Every time readers write to me about how they enjoyed one of my stories, or identified with one of my characters, or thought about their lives differently after reading my work, that day my bones do not ache and I feel as powerful as the Housatonic River. Thank you.

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.’