Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
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| Author | Sergio Troncoso |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Essays |
| Publisher | Arte Público Press |
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Publication date
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Sep 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 201 pp |
| ISBN | |
| LC Class | PS3570.R5876 Z46 2011 |
Crossing Borders: Personal Essays is a collection of essays by Sergio Troncoso first published in 2011 by Arte Público Press. The book of sixteen personal essays explores how Troncoso made the leap from growing up poor along the Mexico-U.S. border to the Ivy League, his wife's battle against breast cancer, his struggles as a writer in New York and Texas, fatherhood, and interfaith marriage.
“On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone,” Sergio Troncoso writes in this collection of 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.
A reviewer from the Portland Book Review wrote in a four-starred review: "Crossing Borders is a series of personal essays by author Sergio Troncoso that bring you into his family and his personal growth. Troncoso writes about crossing personal, religious, and cultural borders, as well as literal borders, and brings the reader into experiences they are not likely to have on their own. Crossing Borders is a book the reader will get invested in, if only to learn more about the family being talked about in the essays. Most heart-wrenching are the three pieces entitled “Letter to My Young Sons,” which details their mother’s battle with cancer and shows a father’s love for his children. If a reader only reads one essay, though, it should be “Why Should Latinos Write Their Own Stories,” a piece that shows the importance of preserving heritage and teaching the world things that they may not know about Latinos. In all, Troncoso’s book is a piece of artwork and a piece of heritage that everyone, not just Latinos, should take the time to read."
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