Troncoso Reading Prizes

I have established the Troncoso Reading Prizes for children and young adults at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library in Ysleta (El Paso, Texas). These six prizes for grade school, middle school, and high school students in the Ysleta area will be given out every year for those who read the most books from September 15-November 15. The librarians at the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library will administer the prizes. To read more about the Troncoso Reading Prizes and to download the rules for eligibility, please visit:

http://www.sergiotroncoso.com/library/index.htm

 

El Paso Public Library, Sergio Troncoso Branch Library, 9321 Alameda Avenue, El Paso, Texas, 79907.

Ramon Renteria

Yesterday Ramon Renteria officially retired from an illustrious career as a newspaper reporter for the El Paso Times. In my mind, he was that one border voice for El Paso, Texas and the border region that was indispensable. Over the years, I came to know Mr. Renteria as a straight-shooter who understood everything from the politics to the peccadilloes of my hometown, and I valued the many friendly exchanges we had over coffee or through emails. In 1999, Mr. Renteria gave me one of the first interviews after my first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, was published, and I wanted to return the favor today.

ST: As you reflect on your great career as a journalist from El Paso, what changes have you seen that most startle you, what trends, positive and negative, are most important for readers to understand the changing newspaper business?

RR: I've worked 44 years as a newspaper reporter, starting as a general assignments reporter in eastern New Mexico. Thirty-nine of those years were spent in El Paso where I made the rounds of the beats, covering everything from cops to the courts system, the Hispanic community, border issues, Juárez, and education. I also spent four years running a two-person bureau in Las Cruces for the El Paso Times and keeping track of news throughout southern New Mexico. I received a well-rounded education in the field, hands-on reporting– something more valuable than anything you could possibly learn from books or simply listening to someone lecture in a college classroom.

I've gone from fairly primitive technology, a manual typewriter to the electric typewriter, the first somewhat limited newsroom computers to what we now have, the ability to write and transmit news or whatever you write from almost anywhere on a laptop computer, a computer table or a smart phone.

As an old school journalist, I've always stuck to the basics: solid research and reporting and writing with passion.

I've been fortunate to have worked in the heyday of newspaper journalism back when editors and corporations didn’t mind spending money to get the story. The best editors encouraged and cultivated good writing. I always tried to look for the story beyond the basic who, what, where and why principles taught in college journalism.

While the newspaper industry has lost advertising revenue and readers in its print product over the years, I still say that it takes boots on the ground—good reporters and photographers—to gather the content that newspapers now increasingly rely on to beef up their online products. People still enjoy a good read in the newspaper. The good writers, the ones who try to tell a good yarn, are fading from the news industry.

A reporter these days is no longer just a guy with a pen and notepad. You have to constantly reinvent yourself or at least embrace the new technology. When you go on assignment, you’re now expected to not only gather the words and facts but also to bring back or send from the field images, either still photos or short videos. I cast aside the traditional notepad long ago and replaced it with a tape recorder, first a standard cassette recorder and now two digital recorders capable of recording a 17-hour interview nonstop.

I’m convinced more and more print papers will start publishing on fewer days of the week within the next five years but never will disappear. Sadly, the younger generation sometimes prefers to receive its news in daily spurts of social media.

Too many young people no longer read for pleasure, no longer read books, magazines or newspapers. I worry how long we can maintain a literate nation if the trend continues.

ST: Why did you become a journalist, and why did you stay a journalist even after your initial reasons may have changed? What advice would you give young journalists today, in newspapers and in other areas of journalism?

RR: I became a journalist simply because I loved reading and writing as a teenager. Or as I said in my farewell column because “shoveling words is much easier than shoveling cow manure.” Frankly, I was an incredibly shy person, so shy that I refused to take the final in a college speech class. Writing seemed like the perfect escape, the perfect way to express myself. Journalism forced me out of the shell, forced me to learn to listen to what others have to say.

I tell prospective young journalists that they have to be multi-media experts, multi-talented and proficient at not just collecting and writing information but also at shooting and editing photographs and video. That future is here now. If they don’t embrace the new journalism, then maybe shoveling cow manure is a better option.

I could have gone into management, perhaps gone to a bigger market. I chose to continue writing because that’s more fun. Half the fun of being a reporter is being out there experiencing stuff and talking to people. You can’t get the color and good quotes for a story if you’re tethered to a telephone in an office.

The way news is delivered is changing radically but good writing skills still matter.

ST: Your book page has been so important for the community of El Paso, but also for the devotion it has had to Latino writers. Why did you start the book page? Why was it important for you to provide a forum for Latino literature?

RR: I did not start the book page. I was asked to take over the book page more than 10 years ago. For years, the page mostly focused on wire copy or the authors and books that the wire services chose to profile. The page rarely reflected the literature produced by writers in the El Paso and border region or even writers from across the Southwest.

I wanted to showcase Latino authors and other writers from the borderlands and the Southwest but usually found their voices missing on the wire services.

Gradually, I transformed the page, gave it more of a border/Southwest flavor. Lucky for me, New York writer Rigoberto González started submitting reviews showcasing writers and poets from New York to California. After a while, the book page lured other Latino guest contributors and other reviewers who preferred to write about books dealing with the border, the West and Southwest. Not that I’m looking forward to colgar los tenis anytime soon but if anyone were to write my obituary I hope that they at least mention that I tried to give some ink to writers too often still neglected in the mainstream press.

ST: What do you think you would most want to communicate about the importance of writing and reading for you? What ideas might you have to encourage those who may not be avid readers or who may be reluctant about writing?

RR: I stopped reporting and writing for a few years and became a line editor, editing copy that other writers produce. I could point out the people in the newsroom that read on a regular basis simply by the way they wrote. The equation is simple: you can’t be a writer or a good writer if you don’t read. Reading nourishes the imagination whether you write fiction, nonfiction or fact-based journalism.

If I knew how to compel people to become readers, I would be making big bucks in some corporate office in New York City, Chicago or Atlanta. I don’t know. That's a difficult question. If you haven’t acquired a passion for books or the printed word by the time you’re in grade school, it is going to be extremely difficult for you as an adult to sort out what is real or meaningful and what is bullshit.

As for writing, you learn best by writing on a regular basis and rewriting, sometimes rearranging stuff until it hurts. Too many young writers, especially in this business, think that they’re great writers because they have a degree or two or because they can regurgitate facts. Good writing is a lonely endeavor, just you and the blank page or the blank screen and that damn blinking cursor.

ST: What changes have you seen in the El Paso/Juárez area that you think are important, and what would you most want to preserve about the character or ambiance of this city?

RR: When I arrived here, El Paso/Juárez was a rapidly growing metropolis trying to find itself, trying to carve its identity. Middle-aged and older white guys ran the newsrooms and the editorial policies of the two daily newspapers. The Chamber of Commerce pretty well dictated who would get elected to political office. El Paso was trying to change but at the same time clinging hard to the old ways, the old attitudes or systems that sometimes kept Mexican Americans from progressing. I’m not too familiar with how things work in Juárez but in El Paso, the Mexican American population eventually found itself in positions of authority. Sadly, the majority of political leaders snared in the FBI’s ongoing corruption scandal were Mexican American.

El Paso is starting to look more like a big city or a city with big city issues, more traffic congestion, too many schools and not enough children, aging public infrastructure and an eroded downtown core trying hard to bounce back.

I recently interviewed a Virginia writer who has lived in El Paso for a few years. She described El Paso as a big city with a small town heart.

I hope El Paso matures, behaves more like a city, but never loses that small town corazón.

ST: Your homespun humor and your love of detail about all-things-El Paso have often distinguished your columns. How did you come about this ‘writing style,’ or voice? Tell us a bit about the craft of writing from your point of view.

RR: I don't recall how I found my so-called voice. One day as a payasada I decided to inject a bit of Spanglish into the column. Mixing English and Spanish has always been the border’s third language, sometimes even in Juárez. So I started writing in the voice of la gente. I’m convinced that’s why the column has earned so many fans over the years. A lot of people can relate to the pendejadas that I write. Even though I dislike writing in the first person, I have often told readers about my own medical issues, my own brushes with death. Maybe that convinced some readers that I’m not a celebrity but just another vato who hurts and cries and worries and farts just like them. The homespun style sort of just evolved.

My bilingual writing style also pissed off a lot of people. I’m constantly chastised by the language purists. Los güeros insisted that I should stick to English or at least include a glossary because they don’t get what I'm saying. Well-educated Mexicanos and Mexican Americans often accused me of cheapening the language, that I am neither proficient in English or Spanish and that I should shut up and not remind them of their ghetto roots.

I write mostly to amuse myself, sort of like a monkey playing in a zoo. I love the rhythm of words. Once in a while, something somewhat profound rolls off the fingertips. Most everything I write goes through multiple layers of rewriting.

ST: What are your plans, and in particular do you have any writing-related projects as you step away from the newsroom?

RR: I don't have any immediate plans other than to take a break from the daily work routine for a while and spend some time re-connecting with friends and family. Like most writers, I'd like to leave a memoir of sorts for my children and grandchildren. So I’ll be devoting some writing and editing time to that endeavor. Like I said in my farewell column, I love writing and the rhythm of words. Hopefully, I can latch on to some free-lance writing projects such as travel pieces or profiles. The El Paso Times offered to continue my weekly column on a free-lance basis but I've declined that offer for the time being. The newspaper left the door open for me to reconsider. So quien sabe? Maybe the never-ending columnist, as one fan once described me, will resurrect someday. Writing is not a faucet that you can turn off and forget, especially after you’ve spent almost all of your adult life writing– converting snippets of facts and quotes into an interesting yarn that may inform, amuse or inspire someone.

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces

Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, a Girl in Pieces (Cinco Puntos Press) is a hilarious and powerful young adult novel with an unforgettable character in Gabi, la gordita, seeking to be true to her independence and integrity while she navigates the disasters and dramas of her senior year in high school. Quintero has created a voice that will resonate for many years to come. I hope this book will find the legions of readers it deserves, students, parents, teachers, and beyond.

Gabriela Hernandez starts a journal right before senior year, and it is this taboo-breaking, gut-spilling text where Gabi is true to herself, where she chronicles her confusions and declarations about being “a bastard child,” teenage sex and pregnancy, being too Mexican or not Mexican enough, her love of food, especially Hot-Cheetos, and society’s hypocritical expectations and pressures on young women, especially Chicanas. Gabi’s journal writing is profane, funny, revealing, and wise, but her experiences and decisions during her last year in high school will keep the reader riveted to the story.

Gabi struggles with her weight and self-image, yet she finds an outlet in writing when a teacher, Ms. Abernard, nurtures her poetry, recommends “secret reading lists” to Gabi and her classmates, and encourages them to read their poetry at a coffeehouse, The Grind Effect. Gabi has early crushes on Joshua Moore and Eric Ramirez, and has never been kissed. But she will change that soon enough, with the aroma of Hot-Cheetos on her “soft luscious lips.”

Meanwhile, Gabi’s two best friends have dramas of their own. Sebastian reveals to Gabi that he’s gay, which goes well, but when Sebastian reveals this to his father the son is kicked out of the house. Sebastian ends up staying with Gabi. Another best friend, Cindy gets pregnant by German, “one of those guys who knows he’s super hot and assumes girls HAVE to like him.” Gabi witnesses the birth of Cindy’s baby and wonders “how something so utterly disgusting can be so utterly beautiful at the same time.” Later, Cindy will confide a secret to Gabi that will cause la gordita to turn (justifiably) violent.

Gabi’s family is also a mess around her, and she must endure, explain, and overcome them. Her father is a methamphetamine addict, who is missing from home for days at a time. Gabi loves and hates her mother, who harangues her about her weight and constantly admonishes her to keep her ‘ojos abiertos y las piernas cerradas.’ Gabi listens and doesn’t listen to her mother’s advice, yet it is the mother who ends up pregnant after having unprotected sex. Beto, Gabi’s younger brother, skips school to paint graffiti art, and seems lost without his father. At the end of senior year, as Gabi is applying to the University of California at Berkeley, she must take whatever steps are necessary to go beyond this family and her life at Santa Maria de Los Rosales High School.

Gabi is in pieces in more ways than one: with emotions that contradict each other, with expectations and pressures that pull her every which way, with “jiggly goodies” in awkward dresses, and with crushes on boys she thinks she likes and those she learns to love. She is trying to put her self together, like a jigsaw puzzle, making mistakes and discovering solutions on the fly, her heart on her sleeve, with a verve that often astonishes the reader. If this is not one of best contemporary books about the teenage soul, I don’t know what is. 

Perhaps the best achievement of Isabel Quintero’s “Gabi, a Girl in Pieces” is what it says about what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ about teenage sexuality, and how many adults are captive to a moral system that often denies them their best sense of self. You can be responsible, you can be honest about who you are and what you want, and you can empower yourself, if you can only survive the treacherous shoals of those teenage years. Like Gabi, you will need a razor-sharp wit and family and friends, as long as they don’t screw you up too much. You will need a ferocious independence, even when you see yourself with so many faults and limitations. Finally, you will need an integrity that demands you be true to your emerging self, always.

(This book review originally appeared in the El Paso Times on April 19, 2015.) 

My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

Domingo Martinez’s second memoir, My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (Lyons Press), is a riveting roller-coaster of emotions from a writer struggling with his internal demons, mortality, family disasters, guilt, and the brink of failure. He succeeds to pull up from repeated nose-dives into oblivion, in part, through writing, a hard-won self-awareness, and friends who value his social insights, humor, and irrepressible spirit. My Heart Is a Drunken Compass is a must-read for those who love painfully honest memoirs and first-rate storytelling.

The book continues where Martinez left off in his first memoir, The Boy Kings of Texas, a visceral exploration into Mexican-American families in South Texas, machismo, alcoholic self-destruction, and even creativity and self-reliance amid abject poverty. Derek, the author’s younger brother, is bright, and wins a full scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, only to descend into drinking binges that alienate him from the family. In one of these episodes, Derek passes out, smashes his head, and ends up in a hospital with serious head injuries. 

The author is plunged into an obsession with not only Derek’s mortality but his own, with missed opportunities and the guilt that comes with self-analysis. Martinez questions whether his actions as a brother caused Derek’s alienation and drinking, whether the alcoholic machismo the older brothers mimicked from their father only encouraged Derek’s own imitations of the brothers. Martinez also criticizes his mother’s divorce from his father, yet he also sympathizes with her. The author also escaped to Seattle to free himself of the toxic family environment in South Texas. 

After Derek recovers from non-life threatening injuries, Martinez segues into his erratic relationship with Steph, “the slim-hipped gentile promised to every son of an immigrant family as per the American Dream.” Bossy and bohemian, Steph is also running away from her family and leads the strangely passive Martinez to camping trips he detests and other misadventures in Seattle. Often when Martinez rethinks a decision he has made with her and wants to question or abandon what they are doing, she displays a terrific anger. Yet the sap still loves her:  Steph proposes marriage to Martinez, and he agrees. 

That’s the point where the relationship unravels. Steph continues her strange behavior of promoting half-truths about her past, manipulating Martinez into more misadventures, and finally punching him in another fit of anger. Martinez has had enough and more or less ends the relationship, yet he still goes back to Steph when she proposes another trip. The author meets Sarah, a level-headed and intelligent older woman, a philosophy professor he loves for her mind even if he is also attracted to her physically. In retrospect, Martinez recognizes how Steph ‘cannibalized’ his soul. As the relationship with Sarah begins, Steph is in a horrific car accident that leaves her with a traumatic brain injury. 

The ex-fiancé takes it upon himself to care for Steph, even though her Anglo parents hate him, even though Sarah feels as if she is having an affair with Martinez because of his devotion to the injured Steph. This is the most puzzling aspect of the memoir: this continued and guilt-ridden devotion to Steph as Martinez flounders with alcoholism, fights to keep Sarah, and struggles as a failing writer. It was a godsend that Sarah came his way, and that she is the one who tells him “to write your way out of this.” And he does so, brilliantly. So Martinez finally realizes what he has to do, with a little help from his friends. 

In My Heart Is a Drunken Compass readers are perhaps treated to the importance of the ethical quality of writing. That is, how writing about something happening to you now, even horrific disasters, gives the writer a way to gather meaning from a chaotic present, to process it, and act so that you make better choices. Martinez earns your trust as a writer and a storyteller because of his messy honesty that mirrors the lives of most readers: his heart is out there, in words, and it gets battered, and he also does much of the battering himself, but he still keeps going.

(This book review originally appeared in the El Paso Times on December 28, 2014.)

The King and Queen of Comezón

The King and Queen of Comezón (University of Oklahoma Press), by Denise Chávez, is a sometimes hilarious, often raunchy novel that enlivens the characters from a fictional small town in New Mexico, yet it also has an uneven narrative flow that may frustrate readers.

The Fiestas of Cinco de Mayo and 16 de Septiembre consume the tiny town of Comezón. Arnulfo Olivárez, an old man dying of cancer and a babyish buffoon, dresses up in an ill-fitting charro suit to attempt to lead the festivities. His eternal comezón is “to love those who didn’t love him, and to have those he didn’t love so much love him so hard.”

Chávez applies this metaphor of the comezón—an itch akin to desire, yearning, unrequited love—to all the characters in one form or another, a tactic that can be revelatory as well as repetitive. Juliana, the disabled daughter in a wheelchair, yearns for Padre Manolo Rodríguez, who in turn desires the well-endowed Juliana, not to mention a return to his native Spain. Lucinda, the wild other daughter, yearns for Ruley Terrazas and to discover the secret behind her real mother. Doña Emilia yearns for her husband Arnulfo to love her and be faithful to her. Don Clo yearns to be like the good man Rey Suárez, the proprietor of the Mil Recuerdos bar, where everyone is also waiting for something to happen.

Amid all of this yearning and waiting are reminiscences, discussions, and arguments where Chávez often focuses on meando or peeing, pañales or sanitary napkins, chones, “that strange fish juice and the powdery acrid smell of crotch,” “thighs dark con el chorro de sangre,” farts, culos, and so on. Sometimes these raunchy references are rip-roaringly funny, yet they also seem occasionally gratuitous, as if the vulgarity is inserted to create levity and movement in a narrative that sorely needs them.

This points to the central narrative problem of The King and Queen of Comezón: most chapters read like character studies rather than parts of an evolving story. The reader, instead of moving forward with a story, must follow lengthy back stories in each chapter—indeed, entire chapters that are back stories—about why a character is who he or she is, what happened in the past, and why it matters to a character’s portrayal. But not much is happening in the narrative present: we are simply learning who these people are.

Emblematic of this narrative problem is when Emilia locks herself in her room, not feeling well: it takes seven chapters to break that door down and to find out why it matters. The reader also feels a comezón, and it’s for a story where action primarily determines character.

A subtler issue with the novel is the constant shift in perspective and voice, not only from chapter to chapter, but paragraph to paragraph, and even within paragraphs. The reader jumps around in Arnulfo’s head for a few moments, only to find him- or herself in Juliana’s head unexpectedly, or Emilia’s, or Padre Manolito’s. Narrative momentum is lost with such haphazard, unexpected shifts in perspective and voice.

Chapter Sixteen, “The Confession,” is an excellent chapter in which Juliana confesses her love for Padre Manolito, and he reveals his conflicted feelings for her. The tension palpitates on the page, the suspense is unleashed through dialogue, and action determines the strength and self-knowledge of Juliana. If only the rest of the novel had been like “The Confession.”

Denise Chávez is an important chronicler of life on the border. She writes about the gritty peccadilloes that make us who we are, as well as the greater sins that condemn us. Those Chávez characters who rise above their lot in life, particularly independent and self-aware women, deserve our attention and admiration as readers.

(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on November 23, 2014.)

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.

Lost in a Labyrinth of Ideas: Hotel Juárez

Hotel Juárez (Arte Público Press), by Daniel Chacón, is a mesmerizing collection of stories fluctuating between the past and the present, imagination and reality. These 39 short-short stories are linked by details, memories, and obsessions. Certain questions permeate Hotel Juárez: Can imagination relieve childhood guilt and violence? What is the relationship between singularity and abstraction? Do drugs and alcohol stimulate creativity, or destroy it?

In “First Cold,” a boy explores several imaginative loops in his head, from visiting the Tarahumaras to racing through a galaxy of supernovas. The most poignant is imagining he comes back as a respectable man to his startled mother, to tell her everything will be okay in the future. Back in reality, the boy is but twelve-years-old, three years before she commits suicide.

The son of Zachary and Angélica, in “The Framer’s Apprentice,” retells their first meetings, somewhat romanticized.  Then the son remembers his mother screaming at him as a seven-year-old, “You’re the reason!  You’re the one!” that is, the reason she got married. This happens a year before she also kills herself. Meanwhile the young son escapes the present by making his own mathematical symbols, living in his mind.

This ‘living in the mind’ dwells on the messy relationship between singularity and abstraction. In “Green-eyed Girl on the Cover of National Geographic,” the narrator is a young American man studying art in Paris who falls for a Moroccan clerk. The out-of-place Chicano guards against over-thinking the details because this leads to a “singularity of meaning.” What we find out in a later story, “Centinela!  Centinela! What of the Night?” is that the father is telling this Parisian story to their daughter, Mari, but withholds details of their night dancing, because this would “limit the possibilities.”

The reverence for imagination and abstraction and the disdain for details come to a moral head in “The Puppy.” A lonely assassin buys a meek, somewhat frightened puppy, and goes about taking care of Snorkel. He plays with Snorkel, and loves him apparently, until he gets a call to do a job in Mexico City. The assassin then drowns Snorkel in the tub, knowing the dog is only “species first and then breed.” When the assassin is back in town, he’ll buy another dog.

The moral crisis, whether or not Chácon explicitly says it or realizes it, is that over-abstraction can easily lead to inhumane behavior, to not ‘seeing’ the individual in front of you. That is an old problem in Heidegger’s philosophy of being-towards-death, for example, the problem of fetishizing abstraction to such a degree that you start thinking of your death as the only thing that matters in your life. Of course, that’s crazy, or another, more philosophical way to put it is that human beings are more than just minds: they are bodies, they are individuals, they have particular characters. That’s what matters in the moral world.

These issues come to the fore in several stories where drugs or alcohol spur the imagination from a “dull life.” In “Mujeres Matadas,” a fifty-year-old El Paso man is listening to death metal music surrounded by twenty-somethings, when a young guitarist, Mari(a), invites him to see “something really evil” in Juárez, at an underground club. In an old maquila factory, the “viejo” is transported to another world. But was it the music and the spectacle, or the “red pills” they took before she steps on stage? Again, in the last section “Hotel Juárez,” a professor of literature buys crack cocaine and is pursued by his imagination and three boys. He ends up in a seedy hotel room, “his head expanded into a universe of voices and images.”

The literary and philosophical issues at the heart of Chacón’s excellent stories are how imagination can save us, but also condemn us, and how too much abstraction can encourage us to lose ourselves in the beautiful desert world at our feet.

(This book review originally appeared in The El Paso Times on June 16, 2013.)

The Making of an Anthology: Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence

Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence has been an anthology long in the making, and I want to share the back story of its creation. I am gratified that our anthology—which I co-edited with Sarah Cortez—has received some wonderful early reviews.

Publishers Weekly called it "an eye-opening collection of essays." Kirkus Reviews said, "Nightly shootings, kidnappings, robberies and the discovery of mass graves—all these and more have put an end to a once-thriving tourist industry and a rich cultural exchange between those living on either side of the boundary. Where there were once bridges, there are now high walls."

The Monitor from McAllen, Texas said, "Two of the more impactful essays were by the editors themselves. Sarah Cortez, a former law-enforcement officer, powerfully proclaims herself part of a group of individuals 'who stand against the wholesale execution of decent human beings by thugs for illegal gain, sanctioned by a government too weak or too dirty to act.' Sergio Troncoso closes the collection with a poignant sentiment: 'It was a better life than what we have today, and we understand that fact mostly in retrospect, as we often do, when we lose what we value before we had a chance to appreciate what it meant.'"

But what readers may not appreciate is the story behind this anthology: the cooperative efforts between two editors different in many ways, the vision and struggle to carry it out with writers across the country and internationally, the unexpected headaches, and the last-minute dramas. The creation of every book has a story behind it, often unseen, with good lessons for any writer, and the opportunity for the reader to glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak, where writers toil, argue, plan, adapt, and with a little luck, find solutions to create the work published.

In April of 2010—I checked my old emails!—I was on a panel at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Denver. Sarah Cortez had included a story of mine in an anthology she had co-edited for Arte Público Press, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery. Later that June, she would accept another story of mine for another Arte Público anthology she was working on, You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens.

The AWP panel was for the writers of Hit List, and when we got together for lunch I told Sarah that her next anthology should be on how the bi-national, bi-cultural life along the border had been so drastically changed by the drug violence. I told Sarah how I had spent so much time in "el otro lado" as a high school student in El Paso, how my parents had stopped crossing to Juárez, their hometown, because of the bloody orgy. A unique way of life, between two worlds, had been severed.

After accepting my story for You Don’t Have a Clue, Sarah proposed in June of 2010 that we work together on this new border anthology, which at that time we were thinking of calling ‘Border Cities Lost.’ I had never edited an anthology before, and I did not have a direct relationship with Arte Público yet, so I thought this was a great idea. We worked out the details of the book proposal that summer, and Sarah presented it to Arte Público in Houston late that year.

In the middle of the summer of 2010, I was also emboldened to contact directly Arte Público about a book of essays I had ready. This book became Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, which Arte Público published in September of 2011. I have had an excellent experience with Arte Público, and I think their staff has been consistently helpful, thoughtful, and even inspiring to me.

Sarah and I spent months conceiving this anthology, sending notices to ask for contributions from writers, reading the many personal essays we received for Our Lost Border, and then editing the accepted essays. It’s a long process, and you get to know your co-editor very well. We are at opposite sides of the political spectrum. Sarah is first a poet, and I am first a novelist. She lives in Houston; I am in New York City.

Despite these differences, we got along well, and I have only the deepest respect for her. We decided early on to check our egos at the door and to focus on the work on the page. That’s the way it should be, but I know from experience that it often doesn’t unfold that way. Emblematic of our working together was our editing of the final 300-page manuscript: after we had each separately edited the manuscript, and sent each other our respective edits, about ninety percent of our edits were identical! Instead of going mano-a-mano on the other ten percent, we talked about each issue practically, and easily resolved the matter. We get along, and that’s the mystery of chemistry when you put two (albeit different) editors together.

I was able to use my contacts in the Mexican literary scene to get Diego Osorno, Lolita Bosch, and Liliana Blum to contribute essential essays for Our Lost Border. In 2011, I had already appeared in an anthology edited by Lolita, Nuestra Aparente Rendición. Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos graciously translated Osorno’s and Blum’s essays into English, and we included all the essays from the Mexican authors in the original Spanish, as well as in the translated English.

I wanted Cecilia Balli to contribute an essay, but she had a work conflict and suggested an ex-student of hers, Maria Cristina Cigarroa. Later Cecilia would introduce Sarah and me at the debut of Our Lost Border at the Texas Book Festival in San Antonio on April 13, 2013. It was one of the most thoughtful introductions I have ever received. Good friends, and exceptional writers of the border, also contributed work: José Skinner contributed a marvelous piece of black humor, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith the incisive introduction. Luis Rodríguez introduced me to José Antonio Rodríguez at another AWP conference (the serendipitous meetings are always as important as the panels), and I asked José Antonio to contribute an essay after we re-connected at an annual meeting of the Texas Institute of Letters.

A week before the final manuscript was due in 2012, we discovered that we had overlooked the translation of Lolita Bosch’s essay! That day my wife had returned from the hospital after a surgery, but I agreed to translate the essay. I took care of Laura during the day, and I translated Lolita’s important essay at night. And I finished on time. In fact, I had enough time to send Lolita the translated essay electronically to Barcelona, for her approval. I was exhausted, but I wanted this anthology done. I was determined to do anything, and everything, to get the final manuscript to Arte Público. Sometimes being a bit maniacal about your work helps.

What lessons did I learn from working on Our Lost Border? Many people help you to create a book, from the publisher to friends and many others you have never met. Work well with them, if they are trying to help you. Another lesson: a real and practical team working toward the same goal can be created from disparate characters. But you won’t know that until you try to work together and solve problems together. It could work, or it could flop, but don’t prejudge the possibility of a team because the potential members look like an odd mixture. One more lesson: never give up, and you can do more than you imagine. Just punch through the difficulties, focus on getting the work done, and you will get there. Final lesson: knowing Excel is invaluable when you put together eight separate glossaries of Spanish words into one mega-glossary. Hint: use the alphabetical ‘Sort’ feature, and keep your list columns aligned.

That’s the odyssey behind Our Lost Border, which brings to light how the drug violence has impacted cities along the border and beyond, families in Mexico and in the United States. This anthology gives voice to those asking why and how this has happened, and what we might do to change in a direction away from the violence, despair, corruption, and fear. For me, this anthology is an example of why I write: not necessarily or primarily to entertain, but to open minds, to offer a perspective beyond the superficial, and to cause thinking that might lead to good action. I hope you will read Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence, and recommend it to your friends.