From This Wicked Patch Of Dust
''From This Wicked Patch of Dust'' is a novel by Sergio Troncoso first published in 2011 by The University of Arizona Press. It explores the struggle of a Mexican-American family to become American and yet not be pulled apart by a maelstrom of cultural forces. Plot summary In the border shantytown of Ysleta, Texas, Mexican immigrants Pilar and Cuauhtemoc Martinez strive to teach their four children to forsake the drugs and gangs of their neighborhood. The family's hardscrabble origins unite them to survive, but soon the children adapt to their new home, reject their traditional religion and culture, and struggle to remain together as a family. The novel spans four decades. As a young adult, daughter Julieta travels to Central America, becomes disenchanted with Catholicism, and converts to Islam. Youngest son Ismael, always the bookworm, is accepted to Harvard but feels out of place in the Northeast, where he meets and marries a Jewish woman. The other boys—Marcos and Francisc ...
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Sergio Troncoso
Sergio Troncoso (born 1961) is an American author of short stories, essays and novels. He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, working-class immigrants, families and fatherhood, philosophy in literature, and crossing cultural, psychological, and philosophical borders. Biography and literary work Troncoso, the son of Mexican immigrants, was born in El Paso, Texas. He grew up on the east side of El Paso in rural Ysleta. His parents built their adobe house, and the family lived with kerosene lamps and stoves and an outhouse in the backyard during their first years in Texas. Troncoso attended South Loop School and Ysleta High School, where he was editor of the high school newspaper and won a Gannett Foundation scholarship to attend the Blair Summer School for Journalism in New Jersey. His grandfather was Santiago Troncoso, who was jailed 28 times by the Mexican government for publishing anti-corruption articles as editor and publisher of El Día in the 1920s, the fir ...
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