From This Wicked Patch of Dust
eBook - ePub

From This Wicked Patch of Dust

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

From This Wicked Patch of Dust

About this book

In the border shantytown of Ysleta, Mexican immigrants Pilar and Cuauhtémoc Martínez 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?

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Yes, you can access From This Wicked Patch of Dust by Sergio Troncoso in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literature General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication Page
  5. Contents
  6. The Beatles in Ysleta: July 1966
  7. A Chance to Prove Himself: August 1967
  8. The Leaves of Rancho Seco: The Day Before Easter, 1970
  9. Four Children, Four Worlds: September 1974
  10. Thousands of Planets from Ysleta: Late Summer 1978
  11. Little Napoleon: April 1982
  12. Something to Hold on to: January 1984
  13. Each an Island Adrift: June 1986
  14. New Worlds: April–May 1989
  15. The Noblest of Blood: September 1992
  16. Two Brothers: February 1997
  17. The New Jerusalem: November 2001
  18. The War in Ysleta: March 2003
  19. Lost in the Desert: December 2005
  20. About the Author