From This Wicked Patch of Dust by Sergio Troncoso

From This Wicked Patch of Dust by Sergio Troncoso

In the border shantytown of Ysleta, 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 are just the beginning of this sweeping new novel from Sergio Troncoso.

Spanning four decades, this is a story of a family's struggle to become American and yet not be pulled apart by a maelstrom of cultural forces. As a young adult, daughter Julieta is 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 Francisco--toil in their father's old apartment buildings, serving as the cheap labor to fuel the family's rise to the middle class. Over time, Francisco isolates himself in El Paso while Marcos eventually leaves to become a teacher, but then returns, struggling with a deep bitterness about his work and marriage. Through it all, Pilar clings to the idea of her family and tries to hold it together as her husband's health begins to fail.

This backdrop is then shaken to its core by the historic events of 2001 in New York City. The aftermath sends shockwaves through this newly American family. Bitter conflicts erupt between siblings and the physical and cultural spaces between them threaten to tear them apart. Will their shared history and once-common dreams be enough to hold together a family from Ysleta, this wicked patch of dust?

Troncoso, Sergio: - SERGIO TRONCOSO is the author of A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, From this Wicked Patch of Dust, The Nature of Truth, and The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, which won the Premio Aztln and the Southwest Book Award. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and two graduate degrees, in international relations and philosophy, from Yale University. He won a Fulbright scholarship to Mexico and was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Alumni Hall of Fame. He teaches at the Yale Writers' Workshop and is president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780816530045
ISBN 10	0816530041
Titel	From This Wicked Patch of Dust
Autor	Sergio Troncoso
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	University of Arizona Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2011-09-30
Seitenanzahl	240
Preise	Commended for IndieFab awards (Multicultural Fiction) 2011
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.