Writers' Village University - T-Zero Quarterly

T-zero visits
Sergio
Troncoso 

He has recently completed a novel and is the author of several short stories, including "The Snake," which was just chosen for inclusion in the International Corpus of English, an electronic dictionary of the English language, "A Rock Trying To Be A Stone," "Angie Luna," featured in New World:  Young Latino Writers, 1997, and "Remembering Possibilities," featured in Other Voices, Vol. 10, No. 27, Fall/Winter, 1997 .

His  short story "Espiritu Santo"  is featured in this edition of t-zero Quarterly.
 

Your stories generally take place in El Paso, Texas, where you grew up, and you mention the Mexican-American border specifically in your short story "The Snake."  How did growing up on this border affect you?

Growing up on the border made me bi-cultural and bi-lingual.  That was positive, and I am proud of my Mexican heritage.  The border experience also left me neither here nor there.  I was not strictly American or Mexican, but some odd combination.  I think this also caused me to be reflective and to seek out my identity.  Much of my philosophical explorations after I left El Paso for college were about finding out who I was.  So in one sense I became a man without a country, a permanent exile, someone who had to create who he was.

What is your opinion regarding the increase in militarization on this border?

I think the militarization of the border is a terrible idea, and should be stopped.  I can understand the frustration of having illegal immigrants streaming across the border constantly, and unfortunately some of them are involved in criminal activity in El Paso.  Drug-running is now an increasing problem.  Some Chicanos are the biggest proponents of the militarization of the border.  Yet it simply adds a group, namely the military, who is unfamiliar with the area, with its people, and this group possesses dangerous force.  Maybe the Border Patrol should be beefed up.  The increasing drug traffic from Colombia which goes through the Mexican-American border is causing this need to react militarily.
 
I think, as lots of people who grow up on the border do, that Washington, D.C. and Mexico City tend to misunderstand the border routinely.  People on the border, on both sides, tend to want to work things out practically, instead of politically.  So I think the biggest mistake national politicians make is to inject national politics to what are really local problems.  Mexico City has often been anti-American, suspicious of the powerful gringos to the north.  Washington often is convulsed by hysteria about illegal immigrants coming over to steal jobs.  On the border, things are different.  I'll give you an example.  The El Paso Water Department has routinely crossed the border with its trucks to spray canals and other sources of water for contamination and bacteria.  Now, they do this unofficially; if they asked for permission for this "international" aid, they'd have to go through endless bureaucrats up in Washington, and the whole thing would probably be embroiled in stupid, xenophobic, why-are-we-helping-the-damn-Mexicans politics.  But we all drink the same water.  And El Paso has the means to clean it up, and Juarez doesn't.  So the two cities do this, and other things, to help each other.  Involve the
foreign capitals, and usually it's a mess.

What was your childhood/family life like?
 
I had an excellent childhood on the border.  My parents were attentive and loving, yet they also pushed us to excel in whatever we did.  So I always knew I could take risks, and my parents would always love me.  Ironically, this risk-taking led me to leave home, and leave them.

My father and mother are both from Chihuahua.  My paternal grandfather was a newspaper editor and publisher of El Dia, the first daily in Juarez, Mexico.  I knew him pretty well, and he always warned me not to become a newspaper man.  It was too painful.  He was thrown in jail some 65 times for writing critical articles in his Mexican newspaper against government corruption in the 1920s and 1930s.  My maternal grandmother was a great influence on me.  She was from a farm in Chihuahua, tough as nails, and outspoken, and sharp.  She would tell me stories about the Mexican Revolution, about fighting off armed men with a shotgun, men who might want to steal your food or rape you.

I wanted to be a writer in high school, and my grandfather's history encouraged me to do so.  My grandmother's stories were the first things I wrote about.  So one provided me with the skills, the other with the content.  I don't think I had much of choice in being a writer.  I needed to be a writer, if that makes any sense at all.  And I was willing to pay any price to keep writing.  It's a matter of not only wanting to express yourself, but also a matter of wanting to explore things with your mind, to make sense of things, to imagine.  These things were, and are, at the core of who I am.

My father and mother have always been proud of my efforts, and the older I am, the prouder I am of what they themselves accomplished.  We grew up poor.  I remember when we had an outhouse instead of a bathroom, and a kerosene stove and lamps.  My father taught himself the skills to be a draftsman, learned English, and my mother was a seamstress for a while.  They really worked their butts off, and started saving, and bought cheap desert land that eventually became relatively valuable.  All four kids graduated from college, and I am not the only one with a graduate degree.  So I think the leap my parents made from living in Mexico to moving to the United States was a huge one, traumatic, yet successful.

What impact did being in Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar have on your life?
 
When I was a Fulbright scholar in Mexico City, I really made the transition from studying Mexican politics and economics to studying literature and writing.  I began to study Mexico in college because I wanted to know where I was from.  On the border, they actually teach very little about Mexico even though it's a few yards away.  So during the Fulbright, I read Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Faulkner, and I also started reading Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Nietzshe, Heidegger.  I was there to study the Mexican political economy, but I did something else.  I also found out I wasn't Mexican, although I fell in love with Mexico City and still have many friends there.  I didn't quite belong there.  My Spanish is fluent, and most mexicanos do not believe me when I tell them I was born in Texas.  Also, after college, I had just finished studying Mexico for four years, and I even had a Mexican girlfriend.  So in many ways, I was at a crossroads back then, was I really Mexican or was I an American?  I could've stayed in Mexico City and never come back, and sometimes I thought that I might.  But ultimately, I decided I didn't really belong there, or anywhere else, and that I just needed to make my home as I went along.  It would have to be a unique home.

After this you attended and graduated from Harvard University, then went on to receive two graduate degrees from Yale University.  Were you always so driven in your educational pursuit?
 
I was driven to search my history first, and then to search the answer to questions about  the self through philosophy.  I did this through school, first at Harvard and then at Yale.  I probably studied too much and wasted some time there.  Yet I did acquire the means to keep asking questions, to know how writers and philosophers throughout history have answered these selfsame questions, and to start my own way of answering them.  I studied government and economics at Harvard, with a focus on Mexico.  Then first International Relations and then Philosophy at Yale.  So although these subjects seem disparate, they aren't for me.  They were ways to find out answers I had then, about my heritage, and about the soul.  Eventually, at the end of all of this school work, I became very critical of how the academy approaches these questions.  There really is too much abstraction in school, and in us.  This is a self-criticism too.  Much of my work is against trying to discover the world only in your mind.  It is a criticism of human pride and vanity.

You say "there is too much abstraction in school."  So, what made you decide to teach a summer course at Yale University?
 
I like teaching and talking to students, but I also know it's a certain kind of (abstract) world at the university and I don't want that world to dominate my life.  So a little thinking is good, too much is deadly, from my point of view.  Now, keep in mind, this is coming from someone who loves to think.  I just know myself.  My problem is fighting the impulse to abstract.  The best thing about being a teacher is finding one or two or three good students a year, one who makes me work hard to clarify exactly what I mean.  I don't mean someone who's a pain in the ass simply to be a pain, but a thoughtful person who pushes you to be clear, and who wants to join you to explore the things you yourself do not understand.  I learn from my good students.  I hope that my students learn to explore ideas and to take risks with what they know.  I hope that they learn that understanding something well can be exhilarating.
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What is the subject matter discussed in your class?  How do you keep it from being too "abstract?"

The summer courses I teach are mostly about economics, but sometimes I do teach writing.  I always work in the writing no matter what I teach, one way or another.  I also work in philosophical problems.  I try to keep my courses from being abstract by what I teach, and how I teach it.  I like real problems, I encourage student participation, and I adapt to what kind of students I get.  I expect them to join me in working hard to understand the issues at hand.

In "Espiritu Santo" you discuss man's temptations towards doing evil.  Do you believe the nature of man is inherently good or evil?
 
There is not an 'argument' why being good, from an ethical point of view, is better than being evil.  We just assume it's better.  Aristotle would tell you it's habituation, and I do believe that.  But I wouldn't say, as he does, that the human soul is good to start with.  That's just an assumption, and we all hope it's true.  But it's still just an assumption.  I believe the worse we get, the easier it will become to be bad and not even remember what it was to be a good person.

Do you feel society as a whole is becoming progressively worse or better?

I don't think society is getting progressively worse or better.  I think we go through periods of deterioration, and periods when we improve.  Often it's just a muddle, not a trend.

What do you feel that we, as individuals, can do to preserve good in the world?

To preserve good in the world, I think you need to be open-minded first.  That means there are many ways to become a good person, some that will seem completely alien to you.  But then you also need to push yourself to your own limits.  Just because there are many paths, doesn't mean any path will be a good one.  That's a common mistake.  Start with that, and you learn not by hearing it from me, but by doing it yourself.

I noticed you mention Ysleta High School, which you graduated from, in two of your short stories.  How much of what you write is based on your personal experiences?
 
My first stories were more autobiographical than my current ones.  I use Ysleta High School, and other places which I know pretty well, more like stages to play out a drama.  I can easily imagine many scenarios, but I like to have surroundings which I know, characters which are believable.  Now I am writing more stories set in New York since I know the city well, and these stories are for the most part not autobiographical.  I might explore a question I myself have, through a character, but that's as far as it will go.

I understand you just finished a novel about a "moral murder."  Do you care to elaborate more on what it is about?
 
The novel is more or less complete.  I don't know when [it] will be published.  I am shopping it around, but as of yet, I don't have a publisher.  I will only tell you it explores Dostoyevsky's question of whether there might be good reasons to kill someone, as in Crime and Punishment.  It is also a case against the dangers of too much abstraction, the prejudices it can lead to.

What kind of impact would you like to make on others through your stories?
 
I would like people to read my stories and think about them.  I hope it spurs them to question themselves, to question their surroundings.  I don't presume to have any exact answers, and if I do they will be mine alone.  I hope readers take my stories as points from which they can begin their own explorations.