A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son. Sergio Troncoso

Dad. I’m gonna have Mom look at my essay first, if that’s okay.”

      “Of course.” Carlos stared at Sarah for a moment. She hadn’t looked up from her cutting board.

      “I’ll show it to you by the end of the week, okay?”

      “Yes, of course. Whenever you want. I’ll be ready.”

      Later that night, in the semi-darkness still made possible by the micro-blinds in their bedroom, when Sarah reached over perfunctorily to kiss him goodnight, Carlos noted the chill on her lips, noticed they only remained on his cheek a second (never an instant longer), noticed she never pressed her body insistently into his anymore to say, “You’re not tired, are you? What if I…you know…get ready? I miss you.” For months, and then a year, he had initiated their lovemaking until it occurred to him that she didn’t want to make love anymore, that she did it because she had slept with him for decades, but not because she wanted to be with him. There was no great argument. No smashing doors closed. No walking out. No drama at all. Just a cold, friendly kiss that burned on his lips for many minutes after he could hear her softly snoring asleep. Wiping that kiss away in the darkness was always what allowed him to get some rest. Does everybody reach a point in life when you’re dying more than you’re living?

      The fall was his favorite time in New York, breezy and cool, with that anticipation of the holidays at the end of the year, that excitement at the beginning of every academic year lingering in the air. At Columbia University, the young women still sunbathed next to the statue of Alma Mater on the steps. In front of Butler Library, a young man in a red t-shirt, with a goatee, leaped miraculously through the air and grabbed a Frisbee and slid on the grass, like an outfielder snagging a fly ball in shallow centerfield in a spectacular play for the Yankees. Carlos had never been that carefree as an undergraduate, never that fit or confident, but he liked seeing those young people. He loved teaching them Mexican history. He imagined them as selves of what he could have been, perhaps how his sons would be in college, without the abject poverty of the border like a boulder strapped to the back of their heads, without the fear of the self that does not belong, without that weakness that distrusts and dismisses its own voice. Sarah had helped him through all of that. He would always be loyal to Sarah in his heart because of her patience with him. If they could just break down these walls between them—after the kids left for college?—then maybe they could thrive again together, maybe they could recapture a new version of their relationship. Was it too late for another metamorphosis?

      A student in his seminar on “Major Battles of the Mexican Revolution,” had asked him a series of questions, which preoccupied his mind like fireflies flittering around a porch light.

      Carlos flashed his ID to the guard at the library entrance. The guard grinned at him, he knew Carlos well, he recognized him, but Carlos could not help but be formal, a mask he donned to keep anyone from bothering him. Intimidation. It worked.

      That inquisitive young woman in his seminar reminded him of Christina Sierra, a girl he had a crush on at Ysleta High School in El Paso. Chocolate brown hair. Black coal eyes. Her skin so clear and pallid that it seemed to shimmer.

      Like his seminar student, Christina had also owned a slim and pretty figure. But that’s not why Carlos had “loved” Christina, as much as a chubby, geeky high-school senior can pine for a friend without actually doing anything about it. Plenty of girls from Ysleta High were gorgeous, even voluptuous. Christina wasn’t like that necessarily. Yet she was smart, she was eloquent. She gleefully argued with young Carlos, and he never intimidated her. That was her attraction: Christina Sierra was an aggressive, intelligent, pretty Chicana who was his equal. She wasn’t like his mother, who obeyed his father out of instinct and fear. She wasn’t like many of the other girls at Ysleta High who obsessed about hair and makeup and the stupidities of fashion, or flirted with the jocks, or ass-kissed the popular teachers, or pretended to be rich when no one in Ysleta was really rich. Christina was “modern,” that’s how teenage Carlos had phrased it to himself.

      That’s why he went away to college, to find more modern women and men, to become one. That’s why he fell in love with Sarah, a confident college student, and why he still loved her. The young woman in his history seminar possessed that same magical mixture Sarah had: nerve, beauty, intelligence, and youth. Always a remarkable whole.

      Carlos thought about the exchange in class earlier that day, the past often the present in his mind.

      “Professor Garcia, I understand how Villa’s decisions before and during Celaya put him in such a precarious military position that he had to resort to desperate measures. But I have a more philosophical question. I don’t know if we have a few minutes just to talk about it, before we end our class. But…well…why do we study history, really? Why does it matter to study history in general, and why this history in particular? About Villa, for example?”

      “Well, Natalie, that’s an important question to end our discussion with. I think the broad answer is that we study history to study how people and societies work, but even more importantly, how they change. History, in a way, is a laboratory of facts, what actually happened to determine our present, and these happenings are complex, with no easy answers, and a lot of missed opportunities. This particular history we are studying in a way explains Mexico and the government formed after 1917. For example, if Villa had appreciated Obregón’s defensive postures at Celaya early, if El General had used his cavalry to outmaneuver Obregón, instead of the frontal attacks that so decimated the División del Norte…if Villa had used reserve forces to counteract Obregón’s maneuvers during the second battle in April of 1915… or if Villa had retreated to engage Obregón at a more favorable spot, where the Constitutionalists would not be so defensively entrenched… the course of the Revolution would have been different. Would Villa have eventually defeated the Constitutionalists if he had avoided the disasters of Celaya? Maybe, maybe not. But if he had avoided Celaya by adapting to and learning from the modern warfare of Obregón, then Mexico could be very different today. Perhaps a country implementing more of the Revolution, rather than paying only lip-service to it.” Carlos was in full lecture mode for a few seconds, as his over-subscribed seminar of twenty-two students listened attentively. He rarely turned away any junior or senior who wanted to take his seminar, and lately even his lecture course on Latin American social movements had been packed. The chairman of his department had just asked him if he wanted to be Director of Undergraduate Studies for the next three years.