Sergio Troncoso’s newest collection of short stories revolves around themes that are central to the life of someone raised on the border: pilgrimage, intermarriage, separation from one’s culture, time and the self. Yet what we realize, after reading A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, is that it’s impossible to restrict border-life experiences to just a few tropes. Fronterizos are varied — no more or less nuanced than a person living in the shadow of a different border. As a younger writer, I tried to escape the themes of the border because I thought there were a limited number of stories I could tell. I discovered later that, like the characters in Sergio’s new book, Latinos have a pool of options at our disposal, and the pool is constantly being refilled. But what makes these characters peculiar?
A Peculiar Type of Immigrant’s Son is comprised of several linked stories that feature different versions of displaced children. Versions that are resourceful, lustful, dependable, hard-working, flawed, loving, and ultimately human. We’re whisked from Cambridge to Manhattan to the Rio Grande, following the paths of immigrants who must constantly confront the backward tug of the past, while navigating the strange (and often hostile) nature of what’s newly present. Perhaps in reaction to these circumstances, many of Sergio’s characters refuse to be confined by past or present at all; the final few stories subvert our expectations by placing Latinos in speculative futures.
I recently spoke to Sergio, who won the the Kay Cattarulla Award for his short story “Rosary on the Border” (included in this collection), about such disparate themes as: dystopia, El Paso, what its like to leave the border, social media, perspectivism, and various assimilations.
•
Gabriel Dozal: Something fascinating about your new book is how it asks us to consider various selves and versions of ourselves. I often ask myself, Am I the same person I was five years ago, ten years ago? Why is this type of introspection important for us to investigate?
Sergio Troncoso: Perspectivism, or perspectival truth, is important because it goes to the fundamental question of identity: who are you? Not just ethnic, religious, racial, or even gender identity. But identity through time. This temporal exploration of identity cuts across every category. Of course, we are always where we began: I am still that boy from Ysleta who grew up poor, with mexicano parents. But I am also now a New Yorker, a father, a husband, a teacher, and even a writer who goes back to the border often. So this ‘time identity’ is what we must struggle with to gather together a self and to find meaning in our whole lives. It is this gathering together of many selves, which we do every day, that’s so important to finding out not just where we belong but who exactly is belonging in that ‘where.’
GD: Does being from the border instill in us a type of empathy? A different type of empathy? I often feel that being from El Paso has helped me to be able to see from different perspectives and through different lenses.
ST: I think it does. It did for me. I grew up between Spanish and English, between Mexico and the United States, between ‘Mexican culture’ and ‘American culture,’ if there are such things. Now, you also have to be self-aware, or at least be asking questions and trying to pursue answers. So empathy is not just bestowed by place: empathy is active. You, the person on the border, have to take advantage of the place you were born in, to see its possibilities, and yes it’s a rupture, a wound, a nowhere-land of sorts, where you are not quite sure where you belong. But if you pay attention, if you ask hard questions while you live there, if you keep asking these questions when you leave, and if you keep pursuing these questions as you come back to the border, then you are nurturing your empathy.
I also think growing up dirt poor on the border had a profound effect on me. My neighborhood in Ysleta hasn’t changed too much: it’s become working-class, when it was actually poorer in the ’60s and ’70s. Not even working class. I believe, and have always believed, in los de abajo, the very poor, and what they have to contribute, the ideas they explore, the importance of their lives, even if so many others just ignore them. If that’s empathy, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. But even that word, ‘empathy,’ seems studied somehow: these are just the people I knew, the people I grew up with, my people.
GD: A border is such a fantastic metaphor because it offers so many possibilities to explore: our ideas and behavior in the literal sense of being from a border, but also the more figurative way a border helps us investigate what types of mores (a type of moral line) we are willing to cross and when it’s appropriate to do so. I feel like the characters in your new book are dealing with borders in both of these ways.
ST: That is true. The characters are living on the border, or come from the border, but they are also crossing geographic borders, for example, by trying to be a Mexican American living in Connecticut like David Calderon. Or crossing temporal borders, like Arturo, the scholar who is looking for the historic Carmelita Torres. Or attempting to cross linguistic borders like the character Ximena Garza in Jamaica, Queens, who needs help from the police but only speaks Spanish. I could keep going, but I took this metaphor and played it out not just in themes and characters, but also in stylistic possibilities in the stories themselves, how they were written. And I even played out the metaphor by how I challenged the reader, as a border crosser, to pay attention to what they bring to any page in terms of predispositions and prejudices in reading stories and characters.
GD: It wasn’t until I left El Paso and lived in Washington, DC, for two years that I came to appreciate El Paso and Juárez in a different way. What is it about stepping back from the border that gives you a different perspective on our homeland?
ST: Many writers have been able to understand their communities in a different, maybe better way by not being immersed in those communities, by leaving and returning to them repeatedly. James Joyce and Ireland is a good example. He wrote his most important work long after he had left Ireland, yet this work was in a way made possible by having that distance. One thing distance does is give you perspective and context. You understand the border better by understanding where it fits in the wider world. Another thing distance creates, in my mind anyway, is what you lack, what you don’t understand about the place you left. I felt I knew so little about Ysleta and Mexico and Chihuahua, for example, when I was at Harvard, so for me leaving made it more imperative to understand what I was lacking. But I would not have appreciated that ‘lack’ without having left my homeland of the border.
GD: In the first story of the collection, “Rosary on the Border,” the character’s parents don’t understand who their son has become. The little I know of you, Sergio, reminds me so much of my father. You both grew up in the lower valley of El Paso. You both attended Ysleta High School in the ’70s. You lived in Ysleta, my father grew up not far away, in Tigua Circle, behind Jay J. Armes’s house. My father instilled a strong worth ethic in me and he is also a creative like you. He has an art gallery in San Elizario (a place also mentioned in your new book) and taught middle school art for twenty-eight years at Eastwood Middle School, in El Paso. In preparing for this interview, I learned that you believe in that same strong work ethic my father instilled in me, a work ethic which you inherited from your parents. But my question is, now that you are a parent, what is it like seeing the paths your own children have taken? How do you see your own parenting change from the way your parents raised you?
ST: Well, in a way my parenting hasn’t changed from what I learned in Ysleta, and in another way it has changed drastically. My sons, Aaron and Isaac, called me “the toughest father on the Upper Westside.” They grew up as New York City kids, but I tried to teach them the Mexican immigrant values I learned in Ysleta: every day, every weekend, every summer, work until you drop, get up in the morning, and do it again the next day, and the next… When my kids didn’t have homework after school, I gave them homework. Every summer they had to take extra language or math classes to move themselves forward. I was indeed tough on them. But I was trying to show them what my parents showed me, that Mexican immigrant work ethic.
Yet instead of using my sons as cheap labor, as my father did with me and my brothers in Ysleta, I showed my children how to work intellectually, how to work to improve yourself, how to find your weaknesses and strengthen them. I loved my father, who recently passed away, and I love my mother, who still lives in the same adobe house in Ysleta we built ourselves decades ago. But I wanted to translate those Mexican immigrant values to Aaron’s and Isaac’s lives in New York City, because these are great values, fundamental values, the values many of the Pilgrims brought with them.
GD: In many ways you are my ideal reader, Sergio. You understand the nuances of life in El Paso, and I often think of myself as a regional writer; I can’t help but write about El Paso and border crossing (in all forms). I tried to write only about technology in my poetry but ended up just writing about the technology of borders.
ST: I think you, the writer, should write about what matters to you at the moment you are writing. That doesn’t always have to be about El Paso, but for me that place, and especially Ysleta, often figures in one way or another in my writing. I think that’s natural. But I also think that over time I have become more experimental about the writing craft, so I may be writing about Ysleta, or El Paso, but I am trying different experiments with time and perspective, for example, that take the prose beyond realistic stories about my homeland. I believe you always have to challenge yourself as a writer, to improve, or at least try to improve, to question even what you think you know, to test that ‘knowledge’ with a new idea or a new way of approaching what you did before.
GD: I like that you understand what “muy muy” means. Sometimes I’ve heard it referred to as a negative statement, like, Mexican parents don’t want you to get too big or too smart because then you’ll leave the house, leave the border, but there’s another tougher implication that “muy muy” might have.
ST: “Muy muy” is a phrase my mother has often used, and that’s primarily where I get it from. Later, after I used it in my stories, I found out that the Mexican singer Amandititita has a great song “EL Muy Muy,” which makes me want to dance every time I hear it! I think the phrase, just like any phrase, can have multiple meanings in different contexts. When someone is acting “muy muy,” I take the phrase to mean that person is being arrogant, or someone is trying to leave their humble beginnings (and not really succeeding). In a way, that phrase is also about self-hate, to separate your self from your identity because you don’t believe in it. No te creas muy muy!
GD: Because I’m a poet, I’m especially interested in language play. My favorite sentence from your new book (among many) is from “Turnaround in the Dark,” where you write: “Martinez, you’ve become the landscape.” This sentence has so many possibilities and so many ways it can be read not only within the story but as a possible stand-in for the collection as a whole.
ST: I’m glad you picked out that phrase, because it mattered to me as well. Every phrase in A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son mattered to me, and I repeat and hear my own words after I write them to create a certain cadence, or song, for every story. Individuals fight to be more than matter, more than the landscape, more than where they were born, but we are also inevitably shaped and forever formed by our homelands, like Ysleta and El Paso. It’s a tug of war, in many ways, that never ceases, wherever you are, whatever landscape you are in. I guess at root we are talking about consciousness and human freedom, at the same time that we (our bodies) are matter and ‘a thing,’ all of which are deeply philosophical questions.
GD: I love that the funeral home in your first story of the collection is called Mictlán.
ST: Mictlán, as you know, is the underworld of Aztec mythology, which is comprised of nine levels or regions.
GD: I feel like I know how to describe perspectivism intuitively, to myself, but how this relates to the stories in A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son is difficult for me to put into words. Could you tell us about how perspectivism is an essential part of your stories?
ST: Nietzsche’s perspectivism is about how the understanding or ‘knowability’ of anything is informed by different perspectives, vantage points. So perspectivism rejects objective metaphysics or objective facts. Truth is inseparable from the different values individuals and communities make of it, so there is no ‘objective truth,’ but more like a ‘perspectival will’ to claim such-and-such as being true.
The stories in A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son are linked stories in which a character appears in one story only to reappear in another from a different angle or perspective. So the reader who thinks she ‘knows’ a character will see that selfsame character from a different point of view in a later story. I hope readers will appreciate how they themselves bring ‘prejudices’ and ‘biases’ to certain characters, to like or to dislike them, for example, and how perspectivism is at play not only within each story, but also between the reader and each story.
Another way perspectivism is important to this collection is in the connection between immigrants who leave the border and immigrants who stay near the border: we are different selves, from that poor son who grew up in Ysleta to that man who may now live in Connecticut, from being a child to being an adult, from being a son to being a father. All of these selves we struggle to bring together, through time, to get a sense of who we are ‘now.’ So perspectivism is at work within each of us, because we are different selves in time.
GD: One thing that I’m jealous of is how fiction writers move so logically from idea to idea. I feel like, in poetry, information is relayed in speed and compression of thought. Who are some poets you read?
ST: Rigoberto González, Eduardo Corral, Ada Limón, José Antonio Rodríguez, Emily Dickinson, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rosa Alcalá.
GD: It seems that the northeastern United States, where you live, and El Paso couldn’t be more different places. What is similar about the Northeast and El Paso? What do these places have in common, if anything?
ST: New York City is full of immigrants, just like El Paso, but the immigrants in NYC are from across the globe. NYC also has a lot of mexicanos and chicanos who live here, but these populations are not as dominant in terms of numbers as they are in El Paso. The Mexican food is much better in El Paso, without a doubt. I also spend some time in Kent, Connecticut (especially on the weekends), and Kent is a tiny town of only three thousand people in the northwest corner of the state. The town reminds me of Ysleta, the small town nature of it, although Kent is in the middle of the Litchfield hills and forest, whereas Ysleta is in the Chihuahuan desert. I like the people in small towns. They rarely think of themselves as muy muy.
GD: I loved the dystopian stories that are based around “Library Island.” I wonder, what about being from El Paso gives us a unique perspective on division and polarity? This overlaps somewhat with one of my previous questions, but I often find that, as writers, as cultural arbiters, we are pressured to have our stories align with the moment. Conversations around culture and politics sometimes lack nuance in favor of toeing the party line (another border!). I could be wrong. I feel like you’re critiquing something important in our cultural moment in these penultimate stories in your book.
ST: I am critiquing the anti-immigrant and more specifically the anti-Mexican attitude so prevalent today in the national government. I am also critiquing, more fundamentally, how we got there: why is it that empathy for new immigrants is so low? I think part of the answer is the change in the demographics of this country, where we are becoming less dominated by one race or religion or even ethnicity, and we have to decide just how exactly we are a ‘we.’ I am also critiquing how we often reach conclusions, nowadays, when our minds are so immersed in the images and smart phones and internet anonymity that allow for easy hate. I think there is a part of modern-day technology that has deteriorated complex thinking and judgment. It’s easier to be a mob on the internet, from the left and from the right.
Reading for hours, of course, changes how you think, how you approach the world, how you gather and consider facts and arguments, how you use your imagination to understand complex characters. Reading is deep empathy, or at least it can be. So I’m also critiquing our culture of non-reading, and how this has made us cruel and stupid. “Library Island” is that sanctuary that many of us readers seek, that place where we will be understood in a way that the “Outer World” will never understand us. A great story is a way to reach eternity, for a few moments, a place to immerse oneself in another way of life on a page, and also to experience the imagination of a writer who may long ago have become dust. So reading is reaching eternity for a reader as well as for a writer.
GD: You mention Ysleta so much in these stories. I know some young writer in the lower valley growing up near Riverside High School (my alma mater) or near Ysleta will pick up this book and will know that their stories are crucial and important. It’s how I felt reading them. Thank you for the chat Sergio.
ST: Ysleta means “little island.” The word is even a misspelled version of ‘Isleta,’ which is a pueblo in New Mexico from which the Ysleta del Sur pueblo separated during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. So ‘Ysleta’ is the misspelled name of an orphan, in a way. Humble yet distinct, tough, and rasquache to the core. Ysleta was the place that formed me, those early influences particularly from my family and friends. Yet even in Ysleta, I was already different, already separate in a way, and that tug of war never ended. I think that’s a fundamental tug of war for any person. If my work speaks to another young person from my neighborhood, perhaps this work will encourage them first to think that he or she is valid and that their lives should be the stuff of literature. But I also hope my work encourages them to write their own stories, to give me Ysleta fifty years from now, or the Ysleta from Tigua Circle, which is very different than the Ysleta from Barraca near South Loop School. Between those few miles reside many worlds.
•••
Gabriel Dozal is from El Paso, Texas. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. His work appears in Guernica, The Iowa Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. You can find a selection of poems from his Border Simulator series in Issue 2.
Sergio Troncoso is the author of six books, including Crossing Borders: Personal Essays and The Last Tortilla & Other Stories. He is president of the Texas Institute of Letters and a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Workshop.