“Julia, is everything all right?” her father said in a raspy voice. “It’s three in the morning, m’ija.” “I’m sorry. I have to talk to you; it’s something very important. Papá, Mamá, I’ve made a decision, and I wanted to… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
“A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
“It’s a great honor, m’ijo. We know that. I’m sure everyone in Ysleta is proud of you. But this is who you are," she said, for a moment scanning the dark night air and the empty street. A cricket chirped in the darkness. "God help you when you go to this ‘Havid.’ You will be so far away from us,… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share
“Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers.… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share
“I made many decisions, some awful and others brilliant, but I found ways to keep that openness in my soul that meant more to me than breathing. I told them over the years what I was doing, how I was trying what no one in my family had ever tried to do. When I was failing, I admitted that as… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share
“I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share
“So the Juárez/El Paso area before the recent drug violence was not a bilingual, bi-national, bicultural Zion, but it was one world. One entity. One place. One city where you could live in between worlds, and have the hope of creating something new. A third way to be, not along the border, but on the border. That is what the… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share
“Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share
I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
“Two weeks ago, Aaron and Isaac, I learned your mother Laura has breast cancer. My heart feels impaled. These words, so useless and feeble.… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
“But Anja. I hear Anja's voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
At Harvard, the strong and savvy and confident thrived, while the nice or shy or quaintly moral were just bit players. In Ysleta, you… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
“Julia, is everything all right?” her father said in a raspy voice. “It’s three in the morning, m’ija.” “I’m sorry. I have to talk… — Sergio Troncoso Copy Share Image
