The Border Heritage Center is a department of the Main Branch of the El Paso Public Library. The department specializes in the preservation and dissemination of El Paso and Southwestern history.
Sergio Troncoso (born 1961) 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.
During their first years in Texas, his family lived with kerosene lamps and
stoves and an outhouse in the backyard. He attended Ysleta High School and
became
editor of the school newspaper. (His paternal grandfather was
Santiago Troncoso, editor and publisher of
El Día, the first daily newspaper in Juárez, Mexico.)
In Ysleta, Texas, Pati visits La Tapatia, a restaurant serving
border-influenced tortilla, tamales and tacos since 1950. She sits down with
acclaimed author, Sergio Troncoso – known for his many books and essays on
border life – to discuss what it’s like to live in the middle of two
cultures. Length 4:05 Sergio Troncoso on Border Life
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 is also a member of PEN America, a writers’ organization protecting
free expression and celebrating literature, and the
Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest professional organization of writers. 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. Later the author established the annual
Troncoso Reading Prizes
for middle school and high school students in Ysleta.
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