Tiresome arguments still break out over this aging literary question: Is the short story dead? Then a book shows up providing a clear and definitive answer: absolutely not.
El Paso native Sergio Troncoso’s excellent new short story collection, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, takes the reader far, yet not far at all, from the currently troubled Texas-Mexico border. The prizewinning author focuses most of his well-written tales on the lives, conflicts, and contemporary situations of several Mexican Americans who have achieved degrees of success and assimilation in twenty-first-century New England and on New York’s Wall Street. They keep discovering that they are unable to leave behind their South Texas roots, the lessons and cautions they were taught by their parents and other relatives, and their shared experiences of being brought up near the border.
In one of the book’s thirteen stories, “This New Now,” a woman named Galilea who grew up in El Paso County is living with her Jewish architect husband, Ben, in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “She had never expected to be living in New York,” Troncoso writes. “Yet, because she had left the border, she had found the Hudson River, she designed websites with a creative edge, and she did not have to explain herself, or what she did, to anybody. In New York, as long as one paid the bills and was relatively quiet, no one cared what god a person followed, if she followed any god, what religion she practiced, if any, or what she did at night, if she did anything at all.”
Galilea’s comfortable New York life, however, is spun in new directions, first by a chance meeting at a Cinco de Mayo party at Columbia University for “El Pasoans in Exile” and then by a devastating loss.
Several border-related themes are integral to Troncoso’s stories. Racial differences, interracial relationships, incidents of machismo, and feelings of being a stranger in a strange land sometimes affect the characters’ lives and relationships. At the same time, the characters also face concerns that are more universal, such as aging, love, marriage, death, self-reflection, and adapting to new places and new circumstances far from home.
The book’s final three stories are darkly futuristic yet imbued with borderland recollections and ghosts. They also raise important questions regarding what our nation and culture are becoming.
Troncoso’s writing credits include another short story collection, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, an essay collection, and two novels. He teaches at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, is Vice President of the Texas Institute of Letters, and is a member of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame. His literary honors include the International Latino Book Award, the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, and the Southwest Book Award.
In A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, Sergio Troncoso tells skillfully nuanced stories from the perspective of a poor immigrants’ son who has found success within the world of America’s elite universities and financial power, yet still feels adrift and alienated and seeks deeper meanings.
Where he finds hope for the future, his and the world’s, is in the simple yet wise words of his now-departed relatives and in memories and lessons ingrained in him at the Texas-Mexico border.
