Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence

by Sergio Troncoso (Editor), Sarah Cortez (Editor)

In his essay lamenting the loss of the Tijuana of his youth, Richard Mora remembers festive nights on Avenida Revolucion, where tourists mingled with locals at bars. Now, the tourists are gone, as are the indigenous street vendors who sold handmade crafts along the wide boulevard. Instead, the streets are filled with army checkpoints and soldiers armed with assault rifles. "Multiple truths abound and so I am left to craft my own truth from the media accounts the hooded soldiers, like the little green plastic soldiers I once kept in a cardboard shoe box, are heroes or villains, victims or victimizers, depending on the hour of the day," he writes.

With a foreword by renowned novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and comprised of personal essays about the impact of drug violence on life and culture along the U.S.-Mexico border, the anthology combines writings by residents of both countries. Mexican authors Liliana Blum, Lolita Bosch, and Diego Osorno write riveting, first-hand accounts about the clashes between the drug cartels and citizens' attempts to resist the criminals. American authors, including José Antonio Rodríguez and José Skinner, focus on how the corruption and bloodshed have affected the bi-national and bi-cultural existence of families and individuals. Celestino Fernandez and Jessie K. Finch write about the violence's effect on musicians, and Maria Cristina Cigarroa shares her poignant memories of life in her grandparents' home now abandoned in Nuevo Laredo.

In their introduction, editors Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso write that this anthology was "born of a vision to bear witness to how this violence has shattered life on the border, to remember the past, but also to point to the possibilities of a better future." The personal essays in this collection humanize the news stories and are a must-read for anyone interested in how this fragile way of life between two cultures, languages and countries has been undermined by the drug trade and the crime that accompanies it, with ramifications far beyond the border region.

The Tortured Landscape: La frontera más ancha = The widest of borders / Liliana V. Blum --
La guerra, nosotros, la paz = The war, us, the peace / Lolita Bosch --
La batalla de Ciudad Mier = The battle for Ciudad Mier / Diego Osorno --
Espejos, fantasmas y violencia en Ciudad Juárez = Mirrors, ghosts and violence in Ciudad Juárez / María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. The Personal Stories: Selling Tita's house / Maria Cristina Cigarroa --
Across the river / Sarah Cortez --
There's always music / Celestino Fernández and Jessie K. Finch --
My Tijuana lost / Richard Mora --
The bridge to an alien nation / Paul Pedroza --
Sucking the sweet / José Antonio Rodríguez --
The Sicario in the salon / José Skinner --
A world between two worlds / Sergio Troncoso

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2013

About the author

Sergio Troncoso is the author of Nobody's Pilgrims, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust; and as editor, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds and Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence.

He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, working-class immigrants, families and fatherhood, crossing cultural, psychological, and philosophical borders, and the border beyond the border.

Troncoso teaches at the Yale Writers’ Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. A past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has also served as a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the New Letters Literary Awards in the Essay category. His work has appeared in Pleiades, Texas Highways, CNN Opinion, Houston Chronicle, Other Voices, New Letters, Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Texas Monthly.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Troncoso was born and grew up on the east side of El Paso, Texas in rural Ysleta. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received two graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy from Yale University.

A Fulbright scholar, Troncoso was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame, Texas Institute of Letters, and Texas Literary Hall of Fame. He was named a Fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters, the first Mexican American writer to receive this distinction.

Among the numerous literary awards Troncoso has won are the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, Gold Medal for Best Novel-Adventure or Drama from International Latino Book Awards, Bronze Award for Anthologies from Independent Publisher Book Awards, Gold Medal for Best Collection of Short Stories from International Latino Book Awards, Southwest Book Award, Bronze Award for Essays from ForeWord Reviews, and the Silver Award for Multicultural Adult Fiction from ForeWord Reviews.

The El Paso City Council voted unanimously to rename the public library branch in Ysleta as the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library.

His literary papers are archived at The Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, Texas.

Nobody's Pilgrims
"Eloquent, bold, and terrifying."
-Elizabeth Crook, author of The Which Way Tree
---------
Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds:
"A deeply meaningful collection that navigates important nuances of identity."
-Kirkus Reviews, starred review
---------
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son:
“It's his most powerful work yet, and an essential addition to the Latinx canon."
-The Texas Observer
---------
From This Wicked Patch of Dust:
“Troncoso’s novel is an engaging literary achievement.”
-Kirkus Reviews, starred review
----------
Crossing Borders: Personal Essays:
“We owe it to ourselves to read, savor and read them again.”
-The El Paso Times
----------
The Nature of Truth:
“Impressively lucid.”
-The Chicago Tribune
----------
The Last Tortilla and Other Stories:
“Enthusiastically recommended.”
-Booklist
----------
Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence
“An eye-opening collection of essays.”
-Publishers Weekly

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Our Lost Border" gives voice to the residents of the borderlands and all that they have lost to the cartel war. Some of the entries narrate the history, some are reportage, some are just pained reflections of what has happened to favorite places and families. Most affecting of the personal stories is Maria Cristina Cigarroa's story of being forced to sell her grandmother's house, a gathering place and spiritual focus of the many grandchildren amid cartel seizures of other property around it in Nuevo Laredo. Jose Skinner writes of the effect of how the cartel wars have affected his students in a border college. Liliana Blum reports the terrifying descent of the northern state of Tamaulipas into violent chaos from Tampico, six hours south of the border, but from which she used to cross it to shop in McAllen. Most shattering is the Diego Osorno's account of how the Zetas and Gulf Cartel made the historic, picturesque town of Mier into a front line in a way that seems closer to Syria than Mexico. I know their loss. Having crossed that border more times that I can remember at a dozen spots along its thousand miles, I, too lost, places that were precious to me: an elegant Nuevo Laredo restaurant with the inimitable name "His Majesty, the Taco"; the back of a drive-in screen there painted with scenes from Mexican film's Golden Age; the church of old Guerrero, which has reappeared during the drought from beneath the retreating Falcon reservoir; bookstores, restaurants, calm plazas, lovely churches, all beyond reach, perhaps forever. Of course, my loss is trivial besides that of the writers in this book, and, even more so, the victims they write about. But it is grief nonetheless.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

TOP SHELF review, originally published in the May 9, 2013, edition of The Monitor.

Over the past dozen years, our beloved frontera has gone from a delightful pastiche of cultures and languages intermingling in promising, positive ways (with undercurrents of dreams deferred) to a battle zone where innocents die and too many young people aspire to narcohood. In the important new anthology Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence, editors Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso help us to understand how we got where we are and just how much we have lost.

Part I of the collection (The Tortured Landscape) consists of essays that trace the origin and spread of recent border violence. In “The Widest of Borders,” Liliana Blum shatters myths (e.g., Mexican drugs are exclusively consumed by Americans) and demonstrates that there is blame enough for multiple parties. Lolita Bosch, in “The War, Us, the Peace,” explores the impact that racism, classicism and lack of opportunity have had on Mexico. Diego Osorno narrates the horror that basically eradicated an entire town in “The Battle for Ciudad Mier.” María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba closes the section with “Mirrors, Ghosts and Violence in Ciudad Juárez,” which examines how narco-violence has obscured the plight of the dozens of women murdered in that border city.

In Part II (The Personal Stories), authors share the devastating impact the Mexican cartel wars have had on a once vibrant way of life. Nearly every one of these pieces contrasts the writers’ experiences growing up, crisscrossing a blurry border whose colors and people shaded into each other, with a present reality that breaks abruptly with those memories. From abandoning beloved trips into the old country to selling off family property in Mexico, from musical genres twisted by a rough and gaudy new cultural trend to empty streets of once teeming towns, from young boys with AK-47s to bridges that loom ominously, the heart-breaking images of these bittersweet memoirs moved me deeply.

Two of the more impactful essays were by the editors themselves. Sarah Cortez, a former law-enforcement officer, powerfully proclaims herself part of a group of individuals “who stand against the wholesale execution of decent human beings by thugs for illegal gain, sanctioned by a government too weak or too dirty to act.” Sergio Troncoso closes the collection with a poignant sentiment: “It was a better life than what we have today, and we understand that fact mostly in retrospect, as we often do, when we lose what we value before we had a chance to appreciate what it meant.”

Informative and stirring, Our Lost Border is an invaluable tool for engaging in the sorts of conversations and behavior that will allow us to turn the tide of violence along the border. A must-read for those who dream of a return to the border that was.

[Connie Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, published by Arte Publico Press, University of Houston, Houston Texas, 2013.

This book is divided into two sections: The Tortured Landscape, consisting of four academic-level essays written in Spanish and translated into English; and The Personal Stories, eight essays in English about the changes in various towns along the 2,000-mile border separating Texas and Mexico.

The border is not a thin line on the map; it's a 60-mile-wide strip of land that used to be crossed easily from one side to another. Mexico offered entertainment, restaurants, and shops to Texans, and Texas offered employment. People went back and forth, and the economy was boosted. Narcotic trade existed, but not with the violence of today.

When Felipe Calderon became president of Mexico, he tried to crush narcotic trade, but the drug cartels reacted with revenge. The first four essays discuss the terrible results. Dozens of people were killed, including many police officers. Visits to Mexico decreased, and the economy suffered.

In the personal essays in the second section, writers remember their lives in better days compared to life in their damaged border towns today. Some grew up in Texas, but family visits in Mexico were frequent. There are descriptions of life in Mexico, then and now. Visits have diminished. They're difficult to make. As Richard Mora wrote about visiting Tijuana, "I return to my tormented city when I can. As I must."

[Miescha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent, nuanced look at many different perspectives along most of the border. Also, very cathartic to those of us who have had to wrestle with the choice of how to respond and still wrestle with the implications of whatever path we've chosen. I'd like to see a sequel now considering how all of this has continued to unfold and have it include more voices from the center of Mexico and the southern border, specifically Suchiate which has always been directly connected to the great northern migration but only recently has begun to be factored into the equation of political strategies and discourse.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sad commentary on the current state of our two nations. Honest tales ,told by those on the streets,not in public offices. Plenty of blame to go around here.

[Iliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very interesting, you get a real insider of what it's like to live between two countries, the border separating two different worlds. So many people were forced to leave a part of home behind due to all the violence and danger.