Foreword Review INDIES Multicultural Award, Silver Texas Institute of Letters, Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story Best of Texas , Lone Star Literary Life Reading the West Award Nominee.
How does a Mexican-American, the son of immigrants, a child of the border, la frontera, leave home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? Sergio Troncoso is the author of the collections A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays , and the novels The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust.
A Fulbright scholar, he has won numerous awards, including the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, International Latino Book Award, the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, and the Southwest Book Award. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and attended Harvard College and Yale University, where he earned graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy. I am glaring at a casket: can that be my father, that shrunken, wax-like face? His face is so gaunt, his slight smirk now a permanent smeared smile.
Did he lose that much weight? His mouth tight around his lips somehow, as if his skin is already stretching against his skeleton and melding with oblivion. Did they sew his mouth shut? When a body is embalmed, is it hollowed out and left as a meaningless sign for the living?
It must be him. He has lost a lot of weight, had his stomach stapled, but he looks shriveled somehow, not exactly healthy. I ask him: is that our father?
