Crossing Borders

Personal Essays

Troncoso, Sergio

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611924183
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Saggi letterari

"On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone, " Sergio Troncoso writes in this riveting collection of sixteen personal essays in which he seeks to connect the humanity of his Mexican family to people he meets on the East Coast, including his wife's Jewish kin. Raised in a home steps from the Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, Troncoso crossed what seemed an even more imposing border when he left home to attend Harvard College.

Initially, "outsider status" was thrust upon him; later, he adopted it willingly, writing about the Southwest and Chicanos in an effort to communicate who he was and where he came from to those unfamiliar with his childhood world. He wrote to maintain his ties to his parents and his abuelita, and to fight against the elitism he experienced at an Ivy League school. "I was torn, " he writes, "between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home."

Troncoso writes to preserve his connections to the past, but he puts pen to paper just as much for the future. In his three-part essay entitled "Letter to My Young Sons, " he documents the terror of his wife's breast cancer diagnosis and the ups and downs of her surgery and treatment. Other essays convey the joys and frustrations of fatherhood, his uneasy relationship with his elderly father and the impact his wife's Jewish heritage and religion have on his Mexican-American identity.

Crossing Borders: Personal Essays reveals a writer, father and husband who has crossed linguistic, cultural and intellectual borders to provoke debate about contemporary Mexican-American identity. Challenging assumptions about literature, the role of writers in America, fatherhood and family, these essays bridge the chasm between the poverty of the border region and the highest echelons of success in America. Troncoso writes with the deepest faith in humanity about sacrifice, commitment and honesty.

Crossing Borders

In my life, I have crossed many geographical, linguistic, cultural and even religious borders to the point where I often ask myself where do I belong, who am I really and who am I becoming.

I grew up dirt poor on the Mexican-American border of El Paso, Texas, and went to Harvard and Yale. Although I was raised a Catholic by my Mexican parents, I now attend services for High Holy Days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with my wife and two boys, Aaron and Isaac. Yes, I am a traveler between cultures and religions, but I do know who I am. The question that often burns in my mind, however, is why these border crossings are not attempted by more people. They should be.

I understand it is perilous to cross to the other side, whatever that “other” side is. You traverse into a no-man’s land. You leave your “home” and possibly risk alienating those who stayed behind. I have been asked by many Latino writers and friends if I am now Jewish. I know often there is an undercurrent of surprise and even anger, at least by the most weak- or fearful-minded, when I proudly tell them about my wife, Laura, and my children. I was at a Latino book festival recently, at a restaurant with four writers. We were discussing the links and differences between Judaism and Christianity, a discussion I had prompted. I turned to a poet, who had been quiet for most of the evening, and pointed out that the artist on her T-shirt, Frida Kahlo, was half Jewish and half Mexican-Catholic. The poet, a proud Mexicana, seemed stunned at first, and then looked at her T-shirt as if she were looking at it for the first time. Yes, I said, we create pure beginnings to simplify things, maybe to build our self-esteem, but in reality we are interrelated, mestizo, in more ways than we can imagine.

The other peril to crossing borders is that you might not be accepted by your new family and friends. Laura and I met in college, and after seven years together, when we announced we were getting married, let us just say I did not get a heroic welcome at her parents’ kitchen table. But I never gave up. Laura’s aunts and uncles, brother and sister, took me in almost immediately. But I think it took another 10 years before Laura’s father and especially her mother accepted me wholeheartedly. During that time, our two wonderful boys had been born, and we had survived a serious personal trial. In many ways, that horrible trial not only opened up old wounds, but also finally allowed them to heal forever. I was dedicated to Laura, and to our children. Laura’s parents understood that is what mattered most of all.

In this personal history of crossing borders, I have often admired Ruth and her dedication to Naomi. Ruth, a Moabite, married Naomi’s son, who soon died. When Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem, she urged Ruth to go back to her home and the gods of her people, but Ruth refused. “Do not ask me to leave you,” Ruth said, “Wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Only death will part us.” Through hard work and perseverance, Ruth eventually found her place in a new land. The greatest king of the Israelites, David, came from a long line of ancestors beginning with Ruth. So, indeed, there are no pure beginnings, only survival, perseverance, dedication and reaching out to the “other” side.

Literature and Migration

I grew up on the Mexican-American border of El Paso, Texas, about one kilometer from Mexico, the homeland of my parents who were from Chihuahua. In the barrio Ysleta, where I lived until high school, we spoke Spanish at home and on the streets, and English in school. I believed this bilingual border existence was not uncommon until I arrived at college. I was surprised to learn I suddenly had an accent and that not everyone was fluent in both Spanish and English. Mexican Americans were a miniscule minority in the Ivy League, yet in El Paso they had been the majority for most of the twentieth century.

What characterizes this migration from Spanish to English, from the culture of the Mexican-American border to the culture of the America’s Northeast? The struggle for legitimacy was important. But I also became an outsider unwittingly, when I had not grown to consider myself an outsider in El Paso. Moreover, to jump from a proficient English to a literary English, I had to teach myself skills that perhaps were innate for many of my peers, skills that had been passed on to them by their parents. I had to teach myself on the fly, so to speak. Meanwhile, I struggled to fortify a sense of self that others saw as an exotic curiosity or an odd interloper.

In the beginning, the mantle of the outsider was thrust upon me by new surroundings. But later, I adopted the outsider status to communicate the good I saw in the Mexican-American community of El Paso to places like Harvard and Yale, Boston and New York. The first story I wrote, “The Abuelita,” is about a Chicano who is a philosophy graduate student at Yale. Arturo phones his abuelita in El Paso to claw away at his loneliness, and ends up discussing Heidegger and his philosophy of death. The grandmother unintentionally gives him a response not just to his loneliness and being away from home, but also to Heidegger’s philosophy, which values abstractions over the more quotidian concerns of the human being, like love and friendship. The honesty and character of the abuelita is pitted against the academic’s pursuit of truth that too often overlooks the simplest, most humane solutions.

Again, when I wrote my first book, I donned the outsider status to try to communicate a world not well understood in the Northeast. In The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, I wrote philosophical stories about Chicanos to focus on their mental life, instead of on the physical, colorful traits I too often read in stereotypical American literature about Latinos. Also, I did not allow my publisher to italicize the Spanish whenever I used it, because in these border stories Spanish and English were often interchangeable, a unique hybrid language misunderstood not only by the purists in Washington, D.C. but also by those in Mexico City. A third culture, an in-between culture in which the antipodes matter less every day, is flourishing on the Mexican-American border.

My prose also tended to be simple and direct, another consequence of my migration from Spanish to English. I followed as my guide a favorite writer, Joseph Conrad, whose third or fourth language was English, yet who wrote searing literary works, including Heart of Darkness, which imprinted themselves into the souls of English readers. I didn’t use words like “ideation,” “deconstructing dynamics of power and authority” and “synthesizing structure.” Perhaps when I was in New Haven as a graduate student in philosophy, I might have written like that, but I made it a point of eschewing such language forever. I still however use words like “eschewing.” I can’t help it.

Why did I write simply? When I started writing fiction, which was late in life for a writer, as a grad student, I wanted to get away from the meaningless abstractions of philosophical seminars. This linguistic pretension removed me from my community, from my father and mother, from my abuelita. For in classrooms within the Gothic fortress of Yale’s Old Campus (and I suspect at many universities all over the world), a human being is first and foremost a mind. But in Ysleta, my home, the human being was, and is, feet. Feet in pain. Callused hands. Adobe houses built by those hands and feet. La gente humilde of Ysleta.

At Yale I was reacting against the elitism of the academy, an elitism that is hard to overcome when you can immerse yourself in books and forget the workers who make that world possible. I was also reacting against myself. I loved reading German and Greek philosophers. They did provide unique, unconventional insights into the human being. I had become an Ivy Leaguer in many ways. I was torn, between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.

I also noticed that many of the practitioners of academic fancy language, as I’ll call it, were individuals who treated people poorly. Their education and facility with argument and power encouraged lying, deception and manipulation. The nature of truth, the pursuit of abstraction in universities, was a passive aggressive violence. Eliminate your opponent, not by killing him, but by warping arguments to win at any cost, by murdering his mind. The nature of truth was hate.

When you view human beings as abstractions, then it is easy to abuse those abstractions without guilt. Judging a person as a category is the root of racism; it is the root of cruelty. Moreover, writing about the world of people is an exercise in abstraction, and explains my deep ambivalence about being a writer. Too often my writer friends lose themselves in their world of words.

So I took a different tack with my literary fiction. I wanted to write so my father and mother could understand me. I was writing for them, and to give voice to those from Ysleta. I wrote simply. I also wrote prose obsessed with details, personal stories, to give meat to those understanding my community outside the American mainstream. I used myself as an example to provide a meaningful character struggling with complex issues, within the murk between right and wrong.

Yet I also wanted to explore ideas from Yale, and beyond, which I thought were worthwhile, so I wrote philosophical stories questioning the basis of morality. I wrote stories that asked whether murder was always wrong, or belief in God always holy, or success the root of moral failure. Most importantly, I believed the people of Ysleta had a lot to teach the people at Harvard and Yale about being good human beings. I still believe that.

But this effort to be clear and direct about difficult questions has sometimes condemned me in academic circles or among those who prize the beauty of language above all. I am also overlooked by those who never desire to think beyond the obvious and the popular. I write philosophical stories. You will never find my fiction at Wal-Mart or Costco.

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.

From being a besieged outsider needing a voice, to becoming an outsider by choice deploying my voice (in English), the final significance of my cultural and linguistic migration has been philosophical. I like to ask difficult, often unpopular questions that get to the root of issues contemporary society ignores. Against much of popular American fiction, my stories are not primarily to entertain the reader, but to unmoor him. I want the reader to face through my characters perhaps what he will not face himself. In the United States, I ask: What is an American? How does abandoning or reforming your “home country” to join American culture affect your psyche, your sense of belonging, your relationships to neighbors who may be different from you? How do you build a community when you often don’t have a common religion, race, ethnicity or even language? How do you build a sense of truth in this multicultural world? Is the United States still the promise land?

I think the role of a writer, not just a writer who is an immigrant in the culture in which he writes, should be to separate himself or herself from that society and culture, and be an outsider. Often the media are manipulated by those with money. The majority of citizens rarely bother to ask and try to answer tough questions, since they are immersed in making a living, the affairs of family and the immediate concerns of their personal lives. The average person, if he reads at all, will want to escape from local and national problems with a story that takes him somewhere else. The writer, I believe, should use this groundwork to his advantage. He should tell a good story, because without it you will never attract much attention nor have many readers. But any writer who is satisfied with only telling a good story is not living up to what great literature can be.

You must prod, and enlighten, and question the reader, then you must reveal through the particulars of character and plot and story what will stay with the reader long after he puts your book down. What he will gain is a seed of truth told through the experience of story, a seed that will grow in him, and thousands like him, and let him know first that he is not alone, and second that he can think differently than others, and third that he can act in small and important ways to reflect this new world in his life. We are all in some sense outside the world we inhabit. But a great story brings us together by linking the quiet thoughts of free and imaginative thinkers through time.

Fresh Challah

As soon as I walked into the Royale Bakery on 72nd Street and Broadway, I knew I would get good Challah. The air was heavy with the aroma of freshly baked bread. A worker in a stained white apron marched with a metal sheet of braided bread loaves gripped in his hands and held above his head. With one swift motion, he slid the sheet onto the shelves against the wall. The loaves of Challah glistened under the bright white light, and seemed soft and steamy from the other side of the cash register. Arrayed behind a glass counter were vanilla crescents, lemon squares, linzer törtchen, dandies, hazelnut spirals, chocolate-dipped sables and rugelach. I was in heaven, and I was not about to leave, so I slid into one of three Formica booths against the wall. An old woman, not higher than five feet, with a bouffant hairdo under a black hairnet, her skin a creamy pallid except for the smear of rouge on her cheeks, shuffled toward me. Her long, stiff apron seemed to snag her legs, and I worried she would tumble forward at any moment, but she did not. She asked me with a generous smile and a wink if I wanted a cup of coffee. I said that I did and felt immediately guilty for having sat down to be waited on by somebody whose bluish hair reminded me of my grandmother. She did not seem to notice my discomfort and brought back my extra light coffee with, to my surprise, two pieces of rugelach on a paper plate. She winked at me again. I was really in heaven at the Royale.

Tomorrow would be Yom Kippur in Manhattan. I decided to fast from sunup to sundown and reflect on the number and variety of my wrongs over the past year and what I could do to correct them and why it had taken Yom Kippur to focus on my problems and resolve them. Maybe I would not even accomplish what might become clear in my head. Thinking rightly did not imply doing the right thing. Aristotle had argued that point against Plato, and I knew it only too well. Yet as I relaxed at the Royale Bakery and stared at the customers waiting at the counter, sipping my coffee which slithered down my throat like a hot snake, I hoped that whatever failings I uncovered in my character, whatever festering wounds I found in my soul, could be changed, or at least better understood. I rarely had melodramatic crises. I mostly endured self-imposed irritations that coalesced into questions refusing to leave me and bedeviling my mind.

As I chewed on a raisin of the rugelach, I thought about one question that had perplexed me for months. I was not Jewish, but in some sense wanted to be. True, the woman I loved was Jewish. But that did not explain how I felt. I also loved rugelach, Challah, kasha knishes, Passover tsimmes and matzoh ball soup, my favorite. Yet I would also travel many miles for white-meat mole poblano, deep-fried carnitas from a Juárez bistro, my mother’s fresh flour tortillas and succulent, tangy asaderos from Licon’s Dairy in Clint, Texas. It was invariably true that my religious and cultural epiphanies contained a culinary sine qua non. I often became a believer in a cause or a country through my stomach.

But in what other sense did I want to be Jewish? I could only explain that feeling by describing how I wanted to be Mexican like my grandmother, Doña Dolores Rivero. Whenever I looked at my abuelita, I wanted so much to protect her. Even if her dark brown eyes were downcast and weary, she was poised for a fight. I wanted to ensure she did not have a hard life anymore; I wanted her to enjoy an elusive peace in her soul. Most of all, I wanted her steely optimism never to be crushed by evil. She had always been tough, and she also knew how to hurt her toughest grandchild, the one with such a sharp tongue. So we understood each other only too well.

My abuelita often told me about her life as a child on a Chihuahua ranch, yet I could tell she often kept many things from me. She spoke of her childhood as if a type of pain was too vivid to explain with mere words and too personal to confess to someone you loved. So the stories she recounted were always haunted with what was not said. Around every dark turn in her stories, I could palpably sense how lucky she felt to have survived. Maybe she believed the explicit details of her history would expose her as something less than human. Maybe she thought she had lived a life so painful from where she was now in El Paso, on her shady porch drenched with sunlight on Olive Street, that it was better to keep those ghosts in the past. Perhaps Doña Dolores did not want to reveal how human beings could be so cruel to each other, and so she would keep her grandchild hopeful.

This was what I knew of my grandmother’s life, from her stories to what my parents and their friends had said about Doña Dolores Rivero. She had grown up poor in rural northern Mexico during the social chaos of the Mexican Revolution. Several uncles and brothers perished in a civil war in which over a million Mexicans died. Those who survived were refugees for years, with little food, dying of disease, alone to fend for themselves and without any real local authority to protect them. I had the suspicion that my grandmother might have been raped when government soldiers and gangs of armed horsemen swept through small hamlets scattered across the Chihuahua plains. No one in my family would utter the word “rape,” although my abuelita said in a whisper that no law existed in the middle of the desert with a war raging behind every hill and valley. I did know my grandmother had in fact shot men with a rifle, and maybe that was the truth: she had shot and killed the men who had wanted to abuse her. I knew that as a child my abuelita had defended her mother from being beaten by her husband, and placed herself between her parents.

As a young girl, Doña Dolores had been known for her strength. Not only was she tough-minded, but she was also physically tough. She could sling a 50-kilo sack of beans over her shoulders and toss it into the back of a grain truck. I knew working men would be embarrassed to be near her, because she was often stronger than they were. I also knew my abuelita possessed a sympathetic heart, perhaps a bit too vulnerable for her own good. She fell deeply in love with a man who is hardly spoken of in my family. She had three children by him, but he never married my grandmother. She alone raised two daughters and a son in the Chihuahua desert. My mother told me she did not own a single pair of shoes until she was a teenager. I was also told that many ...

Table of contents

• cover
• Cover
• Advance praise
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Crossing Borders
• 2. Literature and Migration
• 3. Fresh Challah
• 4. Letter to my Young Sons: Part One
• 5. Letter to my Young Sons: Part Two
• 6. Letter to my Young Sons: Part Three
• 7. A Day Without Ideas
• 8. Latinos Find an America on the Border of Accept
• 9. The Father Is in the Details
• 10. Terror and Humanity
• 11. Trapped
• 12. Apostate of my Literary Family
• 13. This Wicked Patch of Dust
• 14. Chico Lingo Days
• 15. Finding our Voice: From Literacy to Literature
• 16. Why Should Latinos Write their Own Stories?