Review: Sergio Troncoso. Nepantla Familias

Review: Sergio Troncoso. Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds. College Station: Texas A&M Press. 2021. Isbn 9781623499631 

Michael Sedano

There’s an unspoken rule that anthologies come packed with highs and lows, and that editors arrange contents to open with the near-best stuff and build to a big finish leaving readers fulfilled wanting more. In between, the table of contents hides more workaday stuff, selections that fit the collection’s theme by filling in a literary landscape and provide connecting tissue with the more chingón writing building toward the end and a big wrap.

Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds (link)  breaks all the rules, entonces. Editor Sergio Troncoso assembles a completely readable set of essays, poems, stories, each fully satisfying in itself, and in comparison to neighboring titles. Each piece is the best in the book. But something has to come first, second, next, before, and finally.

Readers won’t have any notion of the blood, sweat, and tears Troncoso must have shed organizing this exploration of its title concept, Nepantla. Go ahead and Google “nepantla.” The editor’s Introduction saves readers divagating into the term, reading deeply into entailed philosophy and art history, ontology, epistemology. 

Troncoso's purposive introduction lays out the editor’s understanding how liminality and nepantla help explain raza experience; it's sufficient to allow the art to do the talking.

Why “nepantla” when “liminality” is already a good word? The editor, and the gateway essay, use “liminal” to explain “nepantla,” but that’s partial. Troncoso assembles his “A” list of raza writers who illustrate, Why “nepantla,” with essays, poems, and stories displaying ways anomie, alienation, appropriation, assimilation, and anglos, define Chicana Chicano exigencies and help fashion responses in their own voices.

There should be little mystery to "nepantla," the title translates it as “in between worlds,” Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds. Back in the sixties, essayists liked to argue how the space, or hyphen, of “Mexican American” and “Mexican-American,” meant Chicanas Chicanos melded into a unique third culture, neither the one nor the other nor the space in between, but all at once.

Familia, the other title word, entails sex, pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, death, age, marriage, religion, spirituality, schooling. These are the literary and expository subjects covered in this collection and the motive and emotional features of raza nepantla landscapes. 

Troncoso explains his focus upon familia in the title and, thus, the contents he’s selected and arranged:

“So the middle ground or borderland that defines nepantla has been with me, in one way or another, all my life, and the essays, poems, and short stories in this anthology reflect the diversity and variety of experiences that might explain, reveal, and mysteriously explore this liminal land that is so essential to the Mexican American experience, particularly within families.” 

The overall structure of the anthology—Essay, Poetry, Fiction—gives readers three ways to read Nepantla Familias, randomly jump into the collection, riffle and read, find a few favorites, or begin at page 1.

Don’t skip the intro.

Sergio Troncoso frames his collection with the critical inspection of the Ivy League professor that’s his day job. The editor explans that this book is another outgrowth of Troncoso’s  career-long literary interest in familia, noting how in earlier work, the author “was trying to create a new ‘home,’ where characters from the border, American literature, and philosophical questions all belonged together in one place.” That's a lot like an identity outside and inside that hyphen space, que no?

The point is nepantla is a known locus. These stories, lines of poetry, prose expositions delve into themes of place, belonging, being out, outsider, insider, excluded. These themes, points of view, stand as loci pulsating around a center that will hold when things fall apart.

Things fall apart a lot in these pieces. Must nepantla entail suffering and misery?

I’d welcome an essay, or a poem, or a story, about happy places. The closest to a happy story is best-selling English language writer Reyna Grande’s chagrin at her Spanish fluency and her pain at losing her first language--she hires people to translate her work for Mexican readers then has to revert to the RAE to read her own book. Most writers place personae in far worse worlds of hurt, pain, danger, pendejismo, mental disintegration. 

Stress grows almost unbearably harsh in powerful  essays from David Dorado Romo, Sergio Troncoso, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Francisco Cantú, Rigoberto González, Alex Espinoza. Opening the collection one after the other, reading them supports my claim these are each and together the best stuff in the collection--personally, I prefer Fiction but these Nonfiction pieces kick your ass. If you have blood pressure issues, don't read them at the same sitting.

I’m not picking on José Antonio Rodríguez but I would really like it if Troncoso’s call for nepantla art had turned up a piece that really answered that kid’s question, “Letter to the Student Who Asks Me How I Managed to Do It,” instead of raking the kid emotionally over hot glowing coals. Hijole.

With almost 250 pages of joy—that’s what readers take away in the end—readers of Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds are certain to find themselves mirrored, cautioned, advised, thrilled, disappointed, deeply moved many times over. This is what Kenneth Burke says literature does, allows a reader facing related events to "size up" a situation as a personal resource in fashioning a response. In other words, “literature as equipment for living.” Come to think on it, "living" is a good synonym of "nepantla."

Texas A&M Press enjoys solid distribution through major academic booksellers and local brick and mortar booksellers. You can order publisher-direct, or provide the datos to your bookseller in this link.

Should Criticism Sting?

Michael Sedano

La Bloga’s Saturday columnist Rudy Ch. Garcia reviewed Boy Zorro and the Bully (El Niño Zorro y el Peleón). Published in English and Spanish, Rudy calls it “a Latino book” on how to handle bullying, finding Boy Zorro on the whole worthwhile. Click here to read the review and Comments from Rudy's July 26 column.

The publisher and author wrote back, objecting to calling Boy Zorro "a Latino book, arguing that "using Spanish merely makes the topic accessible to more readers". Author, Kat A. expresses restrained anger when she avers,

Rudy. Rudy. Rudy. You practically missed the book altogether. Starting with the misclassification of it as “A Latino Book”. This is a book about “Bullying”. You made it a book about Latinos and then used the book as a platform to go off into different tangents about race, skin color, lack of female representation…are you helping or hurting those who actually do something

The publisher, Katherine Del Monte, focuses on the positive messages the book conveys, only once tangentially acknowledging Garcia’s critique that illustrations paint everyone except one kid and the principal pink.

Mr. Ramos, the principal, does the right thing, stays strong, and all outcomes are favorable – no matter their skin color or race.

The author and publisher’s responses reflect one of those hard facts of writing: once the writer has sent the piece “out there,” it belongs to the reader. And the critic.

Sadly, "criticism" has come to mean its lowest common denominator, fault-finding and punishment, so people hate criticism. Maybe it's part of the national character, to take critique as a personal affront.

To be criticized is good. In its most exalted form, criticism compares a concept of perfection to the work at hand and declares how the piece at hand measures up to perfection. Most literary criticism reflects versions of the latter. It shouldn't sting. Indeed, it's an honor to be compared to perfection.

A reader or critic comes to a title with her or his own expectations for the book and reads it through the lens of expectation, plus one’s capacity for the writer’s style and invention. In writing the critique, the critic will say what he or she likes, what he or she doesn’t like, and offer qualitative observations related to the work.

In Rudy's critique, he likes Boy Zorro for its critically important message. His enthusiasm is tempered by ways the book could do a better job for its readers.

Whatever the assessment—love it, hate it, wish it was something else—it belongs to the critic and reflects that critic's sensibility. A work “means” what the reader says it means, regardless of the author’s or publisher’s intent. We do, of course, share a language, so most of the time, we "get" one another. But now and again a Boy Zorro comes around, where critique and intent rub each other the wrong way.

Favorable or not, taking into account a critic's observations--Rudy's expectation that illustrated children's books reflect a child's world by featuring diversity in gender and skin colors--won't diminish established intentions but certainly enhances the likelihood a future book will attract wider readership and more favorable critical responses.

Sandra Cisneros leaves San Anto?

[Amelia Montes is off today.]

by Rudy Ch. Garcia

As many of you 60s and 70s activists know, back in those days there were certain cosas that were not talked about in public places, things that La Raza had no tolerance for listening to. Criticism. Questioning of leadership. Talking about the jefes and jefas. It extended into the written word, as well. I remember a fairy tale I wrote that received physical threats as part of my audience review, on me, not on the tale. We seemed to be a gente allergic to the airing of laundry or anything that questioned the sanctity of our celebrities.

I don't know how much times have changed, but I found it refreshing to read a writer, new to me, detailing the type of discussion and views that those of us here at La Bloga have likely deliberately avoided presenting on our pages. Anyone involved in the Chicano lit world has heard unsavory to critical comments about some ChicanA writers. Yes, ChicanO, too. History and gente will decide whether our choices to not publicize or debate such was a journalistic weakness on our part. Likewise our tendency, sometimes, to find few weaknesses in literary works. I'll leave it at that.

Below is the beginning of a lengthy and journalistically responsible (in my opinion) article by Roberto Ontiveros. The title alone says much about its contents and the sometimes heated comments it produced:

Sandra Cisneros's defenders and detractors debate what the celebrated author has meant to San Antonio and Latino literature

[By Roberto Ontiveros, published Feb. 15, 2012 in the Current, "San Antonio’s free, award-winning, alternative newsweekly, featuring local writers and critics covering politics, arts, music, food & drink, and every other crucial Alamo City topic." – Website's "About Us"]

"As nearly everyone now knows, Sandra Cisneros — the oft-times indigenously attired author who founded the Macondo Writers' Workshop here in 1998 and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation two years later — is done with San Antonio. Judging from the comments strung to the news articles announcing her impending exit, people here feel mournfully mosaic about her departure. She is done with Texas as well, and heading for... who knows where really?
.....
"As longtime friend and absolute fan Bill Sanchez told me, Cisneros's reasons for leaving are as simple as the fact that, at 57, she feels compelled to reevaluate her life and the work she still wants to accomplish. It is time to focus on herself, she tells me. So, Cisneros is done with this state and done with the state she found herself in. To be blunt, it sounds like she is done with a lot of you, too."

RudyG: One of the commenters wrote:
"Roberto [Ontiveros], what have you done? As Latinos we haven't the
luxury of destroying one another. The profound irresponsibility of ethics and knowledge in this piece is
 heartbreaking."

What the commenter termed Latinos not having the luxury of destroying one another, I call responsible journalism. The accusation of "irresponsibility of ethics" sounds to me like charges from the old Movimiento caudillismo some of us tolerated more than others.

I leave further interpretation of this article to La Bloga readers to decide for themselves. Go here to read the full article.

Es todo, hoy,
RudyG