WEST OF THE REVOLUTION: AN UNCOMMON HISTORY OF 1776 by Claudio Saunt

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amazon
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Of late American readers have been well served by a veritable cottage industry of works about the Roman Republic and Empire, and their respective falls, and various aspects thereof, and what lessons we, with our republic (or empire, as some would have it), purportedly at the precipice of analogous fiscal, ecological, military, social and/or  political Seneca Cliffs, might learn from them. History may not repeat itself any more than we can wade into the same river twice, but, of course, we can step into rivers that look more than a sight familiar. Sometimes a nicely behaved river—let’s dub it the Goth Swan—turns of a sudden into a drowning horror. Indeed, a close reading of Roman history does suggest, in blurriest outlines, some analogies with contemporary trends and conundrums. But there are perhaps more valuable insights to be parsed from our own little-known and, relatively speaking, recent history. CONTINUE READING AT LITERAL MAGAZINE



> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Book Review: The Comanche Empire by  Pekka Hämäläinen

All book reviews by C.M. Mayo

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

In Plain Sight: Felix Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908 to 1914 by Heribert von Feilitzsch

[amazon]

My review, just published in Literal:

IN PLAIN SIGHT: FELIX A. SOMMERFELD, SPYMASTER IN MEXICO, 1908 to 1914
by Heribert von Feilitzsch
Henselstone Verlag, 2012

It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, "A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history." Like Gandhi, Francisco I. Madero was deeply influenced by the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad-Gita and its concern with the metaphysics of faith and duty. And like Gandhi, Madero altered the course of history of his nation. From 1908, with his call for effective suffrage and no reelection, until his assasination in 1913, Madero received the support of not all, certainly, but many millions of Mexicans from all classes of society and all regions of the republic. But the fact is, during the 1910 Revolution, during Madero's successful campaign for the presidency, and during Madero's presidency, one of the members of that "small body of determined spirits," who worked most closely with him was not Mexican. His name was Felix A. Sommerfeld and he was a German spy. >>> CONTINUE READING

The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window to the Invisible World): 

Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

Just posted in Literal Magazine


Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
By Sam Quinones

Reviewed by C.M. Mayo

This is a grenade of a book. Based on extensive investigative reporting on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland tells the deeply unsettling story of the production, smuggling, and marketing of semi-processed opium base— or “black tar heroin”— originating in and around Xalisco, a farm town in the state of Nayarit, and in tandem, the story of the aggressive marketing of pain pills in the U.S.— in particular, of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin—and the resulting conflagration of addiction and death.

Unlike previous drug epidemics—heroin in the 70s, crack in the 90s— this one involved more deaths and more users, and not so many in urban slums but “in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s.”

Mexican black tar heroin trafficking isn’t anything like what you’ve seen on TV or in the movies or, for that matter, most books about narcotrafficking. It’s a small-time and customer-centric business: smugglers carry small high-quality batches over the border, and then drivers, using codes received on their cell phones, deliver tiny balloons filled with heroin directly to individual customers. The smugglers and drivers, “Xalisco Boys,” for the most part— friends, neighbors, brothers, third cousins— are not ready-for-prime-time “narcos” but otherwise ordinary young men from an otherwise ordinary farm town.

Nor are these Mexicans crossing the border because they are drawn by the light of “a better life” in the U.S. Their goal is a short period of hard work—and if that work happens to be delivering balloons filled with some drug to gringo addicts, so be it—and then to return home with the cash to peel off for a house, a wedding banquet with a live band, a stack of Levi’s jeans for the clan.

The number of English language reporters who could have written such a book can be counted on one hand— if that. Quinones draws on two decades of covering remote corners of Mexico and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. His two previous books, both superb, are True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In Dreamland, Quinones writes about the “Xalisco Boys” with unusual insight and compassion [CONTINUE READING]

Nut Country: 

Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy 

By Edward H. Miller

Lone Star Nation:

How Texas Will Transform America

By Richard Parker

Our Lost Border:

Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence

Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso

CLICK HERE.

Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller

Just posted in the Washington Independent Review of Books:

NUT COUNTRY
Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy
by Edward H. Miller


Book Review by C.M. Mayo

In the early 1950s, for most Texas voters, the party of Abraham Lincoln had about as much appeal as Rhode Island barbecue. In the Civil War, Texas, a slave state, had fought for the Confederacy. Reconstruction brought Republican Party-rule, with its emphasis on establishing and protecting rights for freedmen. The backlash from largely ex-Confederate “redeemers” took only a few years to flush the Republicans from power. 

Attacking them as “the black man’s party,” these Democrats called for racial solidarity among whites and for rolling back the rights of African-Americans. For decades to come, Jim Crow Texas, like the rest of the South, was controlled by the so-called “yellow dog Democrats,” Democrats who would vote for their party’s candidate, even if he were a yellow dog. Yet by the 1960s, the Republican Party, now espousing conservatism, came roaring back in the Lone Star State.

What happened? [CONTINUE READING]

Since I'm working on a book about Far West Texas, 

most of my recent reviews are of books about Texas.

The Pecan: A History of America's Native Nut

by James McWilliams

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America

by Richard Parker

Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence 

edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso

My book review policy

(in case you were wondering)

The Pecan: A History of America's Native Nut by James McWilliams

BOOK REVIEW by C.M. Mayo

The Pecan: A History of America's Native Nut 
by James McWilliams
The University of Texas Press, 2013
ISBN 978-0-292-74916-0
Hardcover pp. 192

Crisply entertaining and chock-full of crunchy research by a food historian, this apparently delicious little book on America's native nut— (and isn't the cover charming?)—  is a horror story. 

It opens, as the darkest do, with a sunny scene of innocence. Clustered along river bottoms in what would one day become Texas, groves of pecan trees rained down their bounty for wildlife and indigenous peoples. For centuries, pecans were their superfood, dense with calories and nutrition. In the 16th century, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the conquistador who shipwrecked en route to Florida and wandered west, found the Guadalupe River "a river of nuts"— although he had no word for them but "walnut." The name "pecan" dates from the late 18th century.

Those are not pecan trees at Monticello

The pecan did not do well further north. Thomas Jefferson planted some 200 pecan trees in Monticello; none survive. Where nuts were wanted, European walnut varieties proved more popular and versatile, so the pecan was left to do what it had always done, thrive in its wild state along river bottoms, mainly in what is today Texas. Notes McWilliams, "unlike any other fruit-bearing tree in the age of cultivation, the pecan managed to evade the cultivating hand of man for centuries after humans began exploiting it for food."

Yum! Buy the pie at Royalty Pecans

In the nineteenth century, as ranching and cash crops such as cotton, corn and wheat spread across the South and Midwest, many pecan trees disappeared; nonetheless, a large number of pecan groves survived, especially in Texas, because they clung to riverbanks and bottoms, and proved able to survive a flood other crops could not. 

Farmers found wild pecans not only delicious as snacks for themselves, but good pig feed, and bags of them, easily gathered, could be sold in new markets in San Antonio, Galveston, and New Orleans. In the second half of the 19th century, Texas took the lead in pecan production, but not from formal orchards; for the most part, farmers gathered wild pecans.

How to sell more pecans? The market wanted uniformity, thin shells, and dense nut meats. Even the most magnificent pecan tree's seed, however, would not "come true," that is, bring forth a tree producing equivalent quality nuts. The solution was grafting. As early as 1822 one Abner Landrum detailed his own successful experiments with pecan grafting in the American Farmer. It seems no farmer bothered to emulate that experiment. The market for pecans was still marginal and, as McWilliams ventures, "it was simply more macho to run a ranch with cattle than to turn that land over to pecans."

The Big House at
Oak Alley Planation

In the mid-century 19th century, in the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, a slave gardener named Antoine successfully grafted an orchard of more than 100 fabulously productive pecan trees. Decades later, the plantation's new German owner, Herbert Bonzano, brought the nuts of those grafted pecans to Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exposition. And thus, like so many other fruits before it, the pecan was at last, if slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell, paved with good intentions.

For a time, farmers relied on wild pecans, resisting experts' advice to graft pecans, perhaps out of innate conservatism and a reluctance to becoming dependent on nurserymen. Attitudes soon changed. After a series of insect plagues in the last three decades of the 19th century decimated major cash crops, the USDA championed chemical insecticides that, "lo and behold, worked." Writes McWilliams, "The USDA was no oracle, but as pecan farmers recognized, history showed it could make life much easier for those who tilled the soil for a living. So long as they would listen." Listen they did. 

The 20th century brought increasing industrialization in pecan production. After World War I, writes McWilliams, "pecan trees were becoming carefully managed commodities rather than natural aspects of the southern landscape." As for shelling, an important source of employment in San Antonio in the 30s, after some labor unrest, this was given over to machines. 

In World War II the U.S. government gave the pecan industry a push, promoting the nuts as nutritious replacements for meat; and after imposing price ceilings to help promote consumer demand, buying up millions of pounds of surplus pecans (many fed to schoolchildren). By the late 1940s, pecans were no longer holiday treats or just for pralines, they were in everything from cakes to cookies to pies, even salads. McWilliams: "The aristocrat of nuts had become a commoner."

McWilliams brings the pecan through the rest of its 20th century history with mail order, frozen foods, processed foods, chain restaurants, granola, and ice cream; its oil extracted for lubricants in clocks and guns, its wood milled for basketball court flooring, its shells collected for mulch, barbecue chips, plywood, pesticides, and more. By 2011, when the author tours a Texan pecan farm, he is stuck with dark wonder:

"First, the entire operation is a streamlined model of mechanization. Vehicles designed to fit snugly between seemingly endless rows of perfectly aligned pecan trees spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; they lay mulch, prune trees, apply fertiziler, and harvest nuts. Other machines disk the soil and smooth the turf between the trees so that fallen nuts do not elude harvest. At times helicopters are even brought in for the purpose of keeping frost from icing the nuts. Propane cannons are on hand to scare off crows. It occurred to me as we drove from orchard to orchard that there was nothing 'natural' about a contemporary pecan orchard. I was looking at a factory in the field."

Texas Pecan Growers Association
Recipe for Traditional Pecan Pie

Oh, but it gets stranger. The money isn't so much in the pecans as it is in shipping trees from the nursery to China. In 2001, Chinese did not have a word for pecan. Today pecans are a popular health food in China, available everywhere from airports to gas stations. It seems a question of time before the Chinese outstrip the U.S. in pecan production.

The future of the pecan, a "chemically saturated activity," whether in the U.S. or China or elsewhere, looks grim. Arsenals of insecticides are increasingly necessary to combat aphids, beetles, weevils and more. These chemicals also threaten bees and other pollinators (and without them, our food supply as we know it may collapse). Plant diseases are also becoming increasingly resistant to chemical assault. The soil degrades. At some point— perhaps when China has become the top producer; perhaps when some insect or fungus has wiped out enough orchards; or in the wake of some ecological or economic jolt— it may become unprofitable to continue producing pecans in the U.S., the grafted and chemically attended ones for the mass market, that is. What then will have become of the now few stands of wild pecans? The good intentions of many decades—ye olde single-minded "economic development"— have brought this once thriving wild nut tree to a state of such fragility that, concludes McWilliams, "we may well lose yet another natural thread to the past."

Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project:

#5 Cynthia McAlister with the Buzz on the Bees

Lone Star: Nation How Texas will Transform America by Richard Parker

River of Ink: Literature, History, Art by Thomas Christensen

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America by Richard Parker

• Lone Star Nation
• How Texas Will Transform America
• By Richard Parker
• Pegasus, November 2014
• pp. 352
• ISBN-10: 1605986267
• ISBN-13: 978-1605986265

Book Review by C.M. Mayo

• >> READ THIS POST AT THE NEW SITE, WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Texas Exceptionalism (TE): I would give it the knee-jerk reject but for the fact that after more than 25 years of living in another country (Mexico), if I've learned anything, it's that empathy for others' notions of themselves, off-kilter as they may seem, is not only the more politic but oftentimes the wisest stance (because the other thing I've learned is that there's always more to learn). Plus, as my birth certificate says, I'm a Daughter of the Lone Star State, so nudge its elbow and my ego is happy to hop along, at least a little ways, with that rootin'- tootin' idea. But I was not raised in Texas and, to put it politely, I've yet to grok TE. The way I see it at present, yes, Texas is a special place full of proud and wonderful people, with a unique history and an awesome landscape, and once we look with open eyes, ears, intellect, and heart, so is just about every other place, from Baja California to Burma.

That said, though in Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America, Richard Parker serves up a heaping helping of gnaw-worthy TE, it is an elegantly-written and important book examining trends and challenges for Texas — Texas first, Parker argues— and the nation. 

Migration is changing Texas at warp-speed, and here, with an overview of the history of migration into the area, Parker makes the most vital contribution. 

[>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

It was the Fifth Migration, from the Rust Belt of the 1970s and 1980s, that brought northerners with their Republican-leaning politics; the Fourth, Southerners, many of them Yellow Dog Democrats, coming in to work in the oil and related industries in the early 20th century; and the Third, Southerners arriving in the 19th century to farm and ranch in what was originally Mexican territory, then an independent Republic, then a slave state, then a member of the Confederacy, then, vanquished, reabsorbed into the Union. (The Second and First Migrations telescope thousands of years of immigrations from elsewhere in indigenous North America and, originally, from Asia.) 

The current wave of migration, the Sixth, is bringing some 1,000 immigrants into the state each day, from Mexico, points further south, East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and all across the United States itself. And because of this, the over a century-long "Anglo" dominance is about to crumble.  Soon the idea of Texas itself may morph into something denizens of the 20th century might no longer recognize. 

J. Frank Dobie (1888-1964) was considered 

the first recognized and professional literary 

writer in the state. From the Wittliff 

Collections biography: "Many Texas writers 

openly credit Dobie with giving them the 

inspiration not only to be a writer but also 

to feel comfortable using their home state 

as a subject."

Yet where did that idea of Texas— this great state for big men in cowboy boots—  and the related TE— come from? How did it become an image fixed in not only the Texan imagination, but the national and international? I would have ascribed it merely to a mash-up of anti-Mexican Texan and US-Mexican War propaganda, the tales of literary legend and folklorist J. Frank Dobie, Southern wounded pride, and splashy bucketfuls of Hollywood fantasy, until I came to Parker's riveting detour into the history of the marketing of the World's Fair of 1936. That fair, held the same year as Texas' centennial, was celebrated with all get-out in Dallas. For its leading citizens, this was, Parker writes, 

"the opportunity to recast Texas:  No longer a broken-down Southern state of impoverished dirt farmers, but one with oil and industry— an inspiration if not a beacon to hungry Americans looking for opportunity in the midst of the Great Depression.... Copywriters, journalists, and artists were hired to tell tales of cowboys, oil, and industry in the years leading up to the World's Fair." 

But alas, this came with the racial nonsense of the time. Parker: 

"Gone was the Mexican vaquero, the African American, and the Native American, or at least they were relegated to the role of antagonist.... A centennial exposition [Theodore H. Price, a New York PR man] argued, would teach attendees that the cowboy story was really a story of racial triumph..." 

Giant, the 1956 movie based on Edna Ferber's 
novel, starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor

and James Dean.

Some of Texas history is painful to read, painful as those punches Rock Hudson's character, Bick Benedict, took at the end of Giant, in defending his Mexican-American daughter-in-law (from being refused service in a café because of the color of her skin). Parker doesn't shy away from discussing some ugly and enduring racial problems in Texas, including in Austin, its capital and haven of liberalism, music, and righteously organic breakfast tacos.

At the time Lone Star Nation went to press in 2014, according to Parker, "nearly one in three people who call Texas home have arrived from elsewhere in the United States in the last year." The gas and oil boom have since collapsed along with the price of oil, so I would expect those numbers to have dropped; nonetheless, as Parker stresses, the overwhelming majority of immigrants end up not in the oil fields, but the "triangle," the area in and around Dallas, Austin-San Antonio, and Houston. The draw? "Better-paying jobs and bigger homes for less money."

Parker argues that better jobs are a function of education, and that therefore one of the challenges Texas faces is adequately funding its schools and universities while keeping tuition at affordable levels, especially for the working class and recent immigrants. But the political will may not be there; neither has it been adequate to cope with water shortages, both current and looming. 

Parker's political analysis is seasoned but unabashedly biased. My dad, a California Republican, would have called it "Beltway Liberalism," and indeed, until returning to Texas, Parker, a journalist, was based in the Washington DC metropolitan area. I happen to agree with much of what Parker argues, but as someone trying to get my mind around Texas, I would have appreciated his making more of an effort to explore, if not with sympathy then at least empathy, the various strains of conservatism. 

To illustrate the trends and challenges for Texas, Parker offers two scenarios for 2050: one in which Texas has not invested in education, nor maintained a representative democracy, nor addressed environmental issues, and so degenerated into a nearly abandoned ruin (think: Detroit meets Caracas meets the Gobi Desert); in the other, challenges addressed, Texas is a super-charging China-crushin' hipster Juggernaut. My own guess is that the Texas of our very old age will fall somewhere in between, vary wildly from one region to another, and be more dependent on developments south of the border than the author or, for that matter, most futurists, consider. 

On this last point, in discussing the tidal wave of migration from Mexico, Parker mentions the Woodlands, a once upscale Anglo suburb outside of Houston, still upscale, but now predominantly Mexican. I would have liked to have learned more about this slice of the sociological pie, for in my recent travels in Texas, and from what I hear in Mexico, I've also noticed that a large number of well-off Mexicans have been moving to Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. I'm talking about Mexicans who speak fluent English, play tennis and golf, and have studied and traveled abroad in, say, New York, Vancouver, Paris. There's a bigger story there, for many of them are the wives and children, but not so many husbands, who spend weekdays at their offices in Monterrey, Guadalajara, or, say, Mexico City. These families have not come to Texas for the jobs, nor the wonders of that great state (whose loss still makes many Mexicans bristle), but primarily for their safety—  and, in many cases, for business opportunities. Should security improve in Mexico, I would expect many of these families to return and quickly. Whether that is likely or not is another question.

In sum, Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America is a rich, vivacious read that provides a sturdy framework to think about the past, present, and prospects of a state that is as much a place as it is, in the words of John Steinbeck, "a mystique approximating a religion." And if the author is a true blue believer in TE, well hell, bless him. Highly recommended.

>> Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

>> Follow me on Twitter @cmmayo1

A Conversation with Rose Mary Salum

On Making Connections with Literature and Art

(includes discussion of Houston, Texas)

A Conversation with Sergio Troncoso

(includes discussion of El Paso)

Marfa Mondays #16

Tremendous Forms: 

Paul V. Chaplo on Finding Composition in the Landscape

Marfa Mondays #10

A Visit to Swan House

Review of 

Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, 

edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso 

Review of 

Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West

by Rubén Martínez

Top 10 Books Read 2014

John Tutino's MAKING A NEW WORLD: FOUNDING CAPITALISM IN THE BAJIO AND SPANISH NORTH AMERICA

Just out in Literal 34, 2013, my double review of:

MAKING A NEW WORLD: FOUNDING CAPITALISM IN THE BAJIO AND SPANISH NORTH AMERICA
By John Tutino
Duke University Press, 2011
ISBN 978-0-8223-4989-1

MEXICO AND THE MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF THE UNITED STATES
Edited by John Tutino
University of Texas Press, 2012
ISBN 978-0-292-73718-1

Review originally published in Literal 34, 2013

The Bajío, a rich agricultural, mining and industrial region north of Mexico City, does not even appear on most English-speaking peoples' mental maps of Mexico. North of the U.S.-Mexico border, the best word to describe the image of Querétaro, the Bajío's first and still thriving major city, would probably be "obscure." And yet Querétaro, founded by Otomís and Franciscan friars in 1531, may be the hometown of capitalism-- so argues John Tutino in Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America, a nearly 700 page tour de force of original research heavy with appendices, yet with such a wealth of novelistic detail, the reading itself trips along like a novel.

While not denying the role of England and its North Atlantic colonies, Tutino points out that because they dominated the capitalist world after 1800, the origins and nature of what preceded it—sparked by Ming China's demand for silver and Spain's American colonies' ability to provide it—have been overlooked. The main early silver mines in the 16th century were Potosí in South America and Zacatecas, in the Bajío north of Mexico City. It was this nexus out of which flowered the international trade and culture of capitalism.

The "enduring presumption" that capitalism was "Europe's gift to the world (or plague upon it)," is the first Tutino explodes, and the second, that the conservative nature of Spanish Catholic culture could not nurture the innovation and creativity necessary for true capitalism, he attacks with a few life stories from the early days in the colonial Bajío, as it was expanding beyond traditional farming and mining into a more intricate and internationally connected commercial society. He gives their names, describes their accomplishments in trade, mining, farming, and various social honors and donations to the church, yet, to the reader's undoubted surprise, one is Otomí, one most likely descended from African slaves, and another, an Italian count. Tutino asserts:

"[T]the Bajío and Spanish North America were not ruled by a dominant Spanish state; they were not led by men more interested in honor than profit; they did not organize work mostly by coercion. Life was not ruled by rigid castes; communities were no constrained by an imposed Catholicism that inhibited debate. They were instead societies founded and led by powerful, profit-seeking entrepreneurs of diverse ancestry."

This dynamism of the Bajío and Spanish North America and its vital importance for understanding North American, and therefore the United States history itself, is reprised in Tutino's anthology, Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States, with his essay, "Capitalist Foundations: Spanish North America, Mexico, and the United States." . . . READ MORE

Links: 

Literal Magazine
My book reviews page
My ever-growing embryonic list of recommended books on Mexico.

P.S. My interview with John Tutino will be podcast #13 (hey, I say that is a lucky number!) in the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I am still battling the fallout of the asteroid, that is, my new book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual Introduced and Translated. Updates about that anon.

Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West by Rubén Martínez

What is the West? That cross-borderly mashup of music, footwear and haberdashery known as “cowboy cool”? Or is it indigenous? The Big Empty, healing refuge, Hispano, Chicano, Mexicano? Or is it now found in the scrim of “underwater” water-sucking tract houses? What is this landscape, if not seen through millions of different eyes each with its own needs, lusts, filters and projections? And how is it changing? (Radically.) In Desert America Rubén Martínez tackles these immense and thorny questions in a narrative of multiple strands masterfully braided into a lyrical whole. . . 

CONTINUE reading C.M. Mayo's review in the Washington Independent Review of Books

Comments

Sergio Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Cross Borders: Personal Essays

With permission from the wonderful bilingual Literal Magazine, herewith a reprint of my review -- in the current issue, on newsstands now-- of Sergio Tronocoso's two new books, a novel and a collection of essays. 

Cross Borders: Personal Essays 

By Sergio Troncoso

(Arte Público Press, 2011)

From This Wicked Patch of Dust

By Sergio Troncoso

(University of Arizona Press, 2011)

Este maldito terregal,  this wicked patch of dust, is what SergioTronoco’s mother called Ysleta, their barrio in El Paso, Texas, and from this he takes the titles of his new novel and an essay which is included in the collection, Crossing Borders, both published in 2011. 

Ranging from several lengthy and intimately personal essays about family, to lessons in literary politics, to a passel of posts from his blog, Chico Lingo, Crossing Borders provides a rich introduction to not only Tronoco’s new novel, but also his previous work, which includes the novel The Nature of Truth (Northwestern University Press, 2003), and the short story collection, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (University of Arizona Press, 1999), which won the Premio Aztlán for the best new book  by a new Mexican-American writer. 

Troncoso’s work, by his own admission, is not easy. In “Literature and Migration,” he states his position plainly:“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.”

Though born the son of Mexican immigrants in a hardscrabble border barrio, and brought up Catholic, he was educated at Harvard and Yale and went on to marry a Jewish classmate who has since made a successful career in banking. Today they and their two boys, Aaron and Isaac, live in a doorman building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a world as exotic to Ysleta and Ysleta is to it.  If the role of the writer is, as Tronoco argues, to be an outsider, his perch is priviledged indeed, for it has not always been easy to find his way in the northeast, nor, for all his experiences and Ivy League education, to revisit his childhood home. “On good days I feel I am a bridge,” writes Troncoso. “On bad days I just feel alone.”

There were some bad days during his tenure on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, which he recounts in the essay “Apostate of my Literary Family.” Not to be confused with the unrelated Bethesda, Maryland-based Writer’s Center, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center is a short train ride from Manhattan into the tony Westchester subsurbs. Initially, Troncoso felt disrespected and treated as token Latino. He tired of “having to endlessly explain issues of literature to those who were not writers, [and] justifying the importance of Latino writers to those who did not read much literature (Latino or otherwise).” But in the end, he learned a valuable lesson: “whether, and when, to  submlimate or redirect instinctual personal reactions into socially acceptable points of view and arguments. Perhaps this is a function of any family, to convert its members into socially funcional human beings.”

Family is the subject of most of the other essays, which include a trio of letters to his sons about their mother Laura’s terrifying and brutal struggle with breast cancer. Though clearly set in turn- of- the-21st century Manhattan, there is a timelessness to the story. The reader can imagine the two boys, once grown, and again, when they too have young children, and then again, decades later when their parents are elderly or perhaps no longer living, reading and rereading, mining ever richer veins of meaning in these heartfelt letters from their father. Laura survives and her husband writes, “We have more days and do not waste them. We do posses an eternal wound in a way, a wound that reminds us of the rarity and fragility of life. Our quotidian fantasy is now a new quotidian reality: vividly colorful days, days of curiosity, days bereft of many useless fears and petty ambitions, these days of wonder.”

The magnet of family flung into in a cultural, economic, political, religious, and geographic centrifuge is the focus of the novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which opens with Mexican immigrant Pilar and her husband Cuauhtémoc’s travails in building a house in the as-yet-unwired desert barrio of Ysleta in the summer of 1966. A dozen years later, their daughter Julia, a UTEP undergrad, is traveling through Italy, having spent the summer as a Spanish translator for the Sisters of Perpetual Charity. Meanwhile, in Ysleta, her parents listen to their old friend Carlos play Mexican love songs on the guitar, while the kids escape to another room to watch Charlie’s Angels. The centrifuge accelerates. Ismael, class valedictorian, earns a scholarship to the Blair Summer School for Journalism in New Jersey, while Julia, with a group from the Mexican-American Cultural Center, has traveled to Nicaragua, and taken a sharp turn to the left into liberation theology.  “Mamá y Papá,” Julia writes, “do not be surprised if this letter has been read by someone in the post office in Ysleta or even by the FBI or CIA.”

Ismael goes to Harvard and finds a Jewish bride; Julia to Minnesota and a conversion to Islam. In late 2011, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ismael is in New York when his sister, now married and living in Tehran, calls to see how he is. Their conversation is so well-grounded in knowing detail that Troncoso makes what might seem fantastic, a brother and sister so far from Ysleta and so impossibly far from one another, both believable and moving. 

Five years later, after the loss of a beloved brother who was serving in Iraq, Ismael, a writer now, presents their mother with a story, a narrative Ouroboros. “It’s about Ysleta. It’s about how we lived, how we tried. It’s about how we were together for a time.”

In the final essay in his collection, “Why Should Latinos Write Their Own Stories?” Tronocoso answers, “to define ourselves,” and “to challenge ourselves.” In his novel, he has done this brilliantly. 

-- C.M. Mayo

--Reprinted by permission of Literal Magazine. All rights reserved.

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