Immigrant Values Brought Over Are Important To The Success Of This Country. Author Sergio Troncoso on Immigration

SERGIO TRONCOSO

Your positive, positive stories are everywhere. People and their positive action inspire positive achievements. Your P.I. Could mean the world to you. Get ready for your positive imprint.

Connect with me on LinkedIn. Sign up for email updates from my website. Yourpositiveimprint.com. Thanks for listening.

Your positive imprint. What's your PI. Well, everybody, the t-shirt design contest has ended and the votes are in. But before I announce the winner, I want to share with you a little bit about each of the designers.

I asked each of the designers to be featured on the podcast because I think it would be amazing to hear their positive imprints.

Well, 19 year old S.L. Aditya is an aspiring designer who is in his freshman year of college university design school in India. He is currently studying new media and entertainment, which includes communication design. Aditya says. "If I win this contest, I'm planning to buy myself a gimbal , which will allow me to follow my passion."

He further says "I came across your contest and learned about your mission, and I love it. I'll try to get the event printed on my local newspaper about your company and work. You are genuinely creating an impact with your hard work and dedication. Kudos to you, yours, thankfully, SL Aditya. Well S. L. Aditya did accept the invitation to be featured on the podcast.

Design B is designed by Cha. It is the colorful design with the words rising to the challenge, and then the heart hand print. She wrote below her design, these words, "imprint, positivity to what surrounds you."

Cha is from the Philippines where she is in college, pursuing a journalism degree from the Philippines. She enjoys designing so she chose to enter contests due to her academic requirements.

She says "to try my luck and help with my academic needs. I entered your competition. I appreciate you Ms. Catherine for giving me the chance to submit my entry and for everything that you are doing to improve the community. I hope that we could inspire more people to imprint positivity, to what surrounds us, to make this world better.

Thank you. And best wishes for the podcast."

Well, Cha accepted the offer to be featured on the podcast, but at this time she is so busy with school. Perhaps she will join the show because certainly I would love to feature her and her positive imprints.

Design C opted to remain anonymous.

Design D is by designer Dhawal.

His design shows a figure listening to a podcast in receiving information that is important. The words read, "keep calm and listen to your positive imprint podcast." This designer designed the back of the shirt, which was not a requirement,

and it read " rise to the challenge all as one", the colors are in my blue logo color. 22 year old Dhawal Anand is a medical student in India who has a keen interest in art and creativity. During his free time, he paints, draws, sketches, listens to music, and he says, "recently I started listening to your podcast and I like your stuff.

ALL OF IT!. I mean, it's all awesome. Full of positive vibes. I will share my feedback once I'm done listening to all of it. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to show you my creativity,

Dhawal has accepted the invitation to be featured on the podcast. But right now he is extremely busy with his medical school studies and exams, which are happening right now, but hopefully soon, and you can learn more about Dhawal at his Instagram page.

My_artz_palace

Design E is by designer Jaakko.

This design depicts the urgency to fight climate change as a world. And not as individuals alone, individuals cannot do it alone. Jaakko uses the red in the earth and the words ""rise to the challenge" to depict that we are in a red alert and it is urgent to rise to the challenge NOW!. Jaakko is a concept designer and graphic designer in Finland.

He actively participates in various design projects around the world. He has been honored with his work and has won numerous contests for his graphic artwork. He says, "closest to my heart is poster art and especially solidarity and humanity subjects in them."

His work is a visual depicting societal worldwide issues. He declined to be featured on the show right now because he prefers his artwork to be in the forefront. Maybe someday he will be ready to share his positive imprints on the show because Jaakko is amazing. You can view his portfolio at www.aadra.FI.

. Well, you know, there's so many reasons why I love doing this show for you and meeting such amazing positive imprints around the world is just one of those. And it is so awesome, rad and fantastically thrilling for me to share those imprints with you. Thank you to all of the designers for joining this contest with your positive imprint designs, I will be in touch with each of you soon and a big, huge thank you to YOU for taking the time to vote.

I appreciate the notes that you sent as well. And YOU as a listener, thank you so much for your support. Well, the winning design will be announced following my guest today.

Your positive imprint. What's your P.I.?.

Sergio asks the unpopular questions that modern society today and continues until maybe recently has ignored. He weaves societal issues into his stories with his characters experiencing a wretched hell; a hell that you and I hope to never endure, but you know, truly reality for some citizens of our world..

Well, there are pressing issues within our communities worldwide that need to be addressed. Sergio writes with the hope that the reader will become involved with the characters and when the story ends that the reader will continue to ponder the issues, different perspectives and question, what is the basis of morality within our own communities?

So I welcome. Sergio Troncoso. Welcome to my show. Your positive imprint. I am so excited to have you here. I've loved your books. Love you.

Thank you so much, Catherine, for inviting me to your program. I love chatting with you right before the program, and I'm eager to talk about my work or my new novel nobody's pilgrims.

And, uh, I wish I could be there.

And that's really what makes your writing what it is.

Um, but you know, I grew up really poor in Isleta, which is a little shanty town, or it was a shanty town. It's, it's a working class neighborhood now in El Paso and I was a chubby kid who loved books. I loved to read, I loved S.E. Hinton. You know, That Was Then, This Is Now; the outsiders. And, and that sort of propelled me to places like Harvard and Yale.

Yeah. But, but the outsiders was definitely one of those books that, that I think that one. And are you there? God, it's me, Margaret. No.

And they're totally different of course, but for our era, that's, those are the two books that a lot of us kids turned to for societal issues and how to talk about them and, right. You know, not ignoring. Today, I think society ignores and back then we were handed those books.

We, we read those books in schools,

Uh, but they were, and there were poor kids involved in gangs. And I was growing up in Isleta in a, in, in shanty town, uh, working class, or basically below working class neighborhood in which, uh, there were gangs in their neighborhood. I identified a lot with Pony Boy and that kid who sort of loves, uh, books and loves words, but doesn't really quite fit in the neighborhood

that that you grew up in. And so for me, that that's what, what appealed to me about the outsiders. Mm-hmm that many of these poor kids and kids, I knew in my neighborhood cholos, you know, tough kids. They were good kids. They had hearts of gold. They would defend you in a way that that's, you know, a fancy kid who was more well-to-do wouldn't.

And, and, and it was because they had tough family lives and people didn't really look at them. And, and so I think for me, that was a very early motivation for me to get the stories of people, from my neighborhood, from my family, that I did not see in libraries that I did not see in, in universities later when I became older.

So that was always a very primary motivation for me.

I think for, for most kids, there was a connection because bullying existed, no matter where you were bullying existed. Right. But also it, it connected because we talked about things. We talked about what would happen, what could happen?

And, and then, are you there? God, it's me, Margaret, of course more for, females. It was a point for discussion and it allowed for discussion, which I think is important. And I think that is something in your own writing. You are bringing up issues that have been ignored for so long in the classroom in families until of recent years, still ignored, they may be talked about, but they're ignored in the sense of what do we do or in the sense of the different, the differing perspectives of what we're seeing and how it's happening.

So I do wanna talk about that, but I, I would like first to continue hearing the story about you growing up, because that is what formed your writing and who you are today, especially getting into the Ivy league. I mean, how do you, how could, yeah,

when I was a kid that made a difference. The first thing both my parents were from Juarez, from Mexico and they had these in incredible values of hard work. You work until you drop. You do it again the next day and you do it again the next day. And that is what you do.

And, and what it meant literally was I would come home from school in grade school, 3:30, and then I would have to go do construction work for two or three hours. And then only after that, would I get to do my homework. And my parents were on me. Saturdays and Sundays was no different.

It was no I'm gonna go to the mall and relax. Uh, and during the summer it was, you're gonna work. You're gonna work every summer. And all of this in many ways, I think about Friedrich Nietzsche's , later in, in once I was at Yale, you know what he said, " what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger" Uhhuh

And, and my father and my mother were like that. They were very much disciplinarians. They believed in hard work. And my mother was very Catholic, but that, that value of hard work, I eventually learned to translate it into mental work;

into pushing myself, uh, to reading extra books, reading in the summer, doing things that my high school, colleagues were not doing because for me, it was, as my mother would say, there is no tired in my house. You are not allowed to get tired. And I was a good writer, I was writing for the school newspaper, and I had won some state awards.

And, and I think those early days when I was in Isleta and very poor, I think the biggest influences were probably my Mexican grandmother from my mother's side, who was as tough as nails, older lady who told these violent, exciting stories about the Mexican revolution as a teenager. And, and I loved hearing her stories because of course, part of it was, they were unfiltered.

And I, as a kid said, oh, tell me more violent stories and exciting stories about when you, you know, Pancho Villa would come into town and, and take over the banks and take over the stores. And, and she was there. She had two uncles who, who died fighting for Villa and, and she would talk about how, Villa's men would, would take people and conscript them.

You know, if, if they were able bodied men, you were gonna fight. And if you didn't fight, you were executed right there. It was sort of like call of duty Mexican style from this grandmother who had no social filters. And she would be telling these oral stories for hours

on Saturday nights under the desert stars and 10, 12 people will come down from her tenement in downtown El Paso and hear her stories. And so she was a great oral storyteller, and I learned a lot about storytelling from, from just listening to her. And, uh, I think the other early influence in high school was my paternal grandfather who was a very well known Mexican journalist.

, his name is if you go to Google and type his name you'll find the big Boulevard named after him in Juarez. His name was Santiago Troncoso, and he was editor and publisher of El Dia the first daily newspaper in Juarez. And so he was this sort of rebel, rousing, Mexican journalist, who was thrown in jail like 28 times for, for writing anti-corruption articles.

And, um, , I didn't know him that well, I didn't know him as well as my, my maternal grandmother, but I knew him pretty well. And, and when I told him I wanted to be a writer in high school, he said, don't be a writer, because if you tell the truth, people will hate you forever. Um, you know, which is sort a way true, but I didn't really listen to him.

And so I think that that's kind of what propelled me to the Ivy league. And I didn't know what the Ivy league was, by the way. I didn't know what I'd never been to the state of Massachusetts. My high school counselors told me, apply to Harvard, apply to Stanford, apply to, Princeton, Yale, uh, cuz you'll, you know, you, you have a good chance.

Your grades are very good. And I was very good at math and still am. And I was a good writer. And so I think for all of these reasons, they, they took me. But when I arrived, I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I didn't even have a, a coat. I had only, t-shirts from favorite bands like America and led Zeppelin.

Oh. I had bell bottom jeans and, and, and suddenly like I'm in Boston and it starts snowing and I didn't have anything but t-shirts. I was cold. I had to go to a used clothing store to find a coat, a used coat because it started getting cold. So I really had no clue what I was getting myself into.

And, and that was sort of the beginning.

And, and suddenly now in, in Cambridge, I'm the minority. And so as I, I describe it in essays, I was suddenly brown against a white background and, and I had never experienced that. And so a lot of it was just a acculturation and not giving up and, and feeling very lonely and very out of place. But I, I remember calling my Mexican grandmother, this great grandmother,

Freshman year, fall semester, I said, you know, what am I doing over here? I should go back to El Paso. Nobody, , knows anything about Mexicans or Mexico and I'm not even sure I should be here. And she told me, you know, she said, Sergio,, don't come back with your tail between your legs.

This is what you wanted, show them who you are. And, and that was her. She didn't know Harvard and she didn't know the Ivy league, but she knew how to fight. She knew how to fight for yourself, have respect for yourself. And, and I think that's what she taught me, I think one of the reasons why certainly I'm a feminist is because of her.

I thought this kind of person should be in literature because you'll learn so much from a person like that. You know how to fight and survive when, when people don't, don't think you'll you'll survive when people don't give you the benefit of the doubt, but her character was so instrumental in thinking about, for me in my mind, how to pay attention to people you would otherwise ignore like this poor Mexican grandmother who had, carácter as they would say in Spanish.

Uh, and that, that character, that grit,

and, and that's not measured by the way in, SAT scores, for example,

And I know that one of the things that you've said, and, and I, I get this, you said that, you felt that you were condemned in academic circles and overlooked by those in society. How do you feel today? I mean, Some of these issues that you have really talked about in your books, so that you can get the reader to ponder and ask the questions, what is the basis for morality in my society

when this stuff is going on in other societies or other communities.

Now it's more common. I, was sent by Harvard back to, to El Paso during Thanksgiving for three or four years, I did this to recruit other Mexican kids. Oh, wow. Wow. So that was the only way I could afford going back home by way.. Harvard would say, get more kids like you over here.

Now it's, maybe it's not common, but it's not a surprise anymore. We've had kids from the border, from my high school, and the high schools near us, go to MIT, go to Yale, go to Princeton. And so I think that that has changed. Um, and I, and I think one of the things the schools, notice is that there's a lot more to being successful than just having a good SAT score.

That grit and toughness and work ethic count, but are very difficult to measure. If you can get a kid that is really focused, that has a good family, you know, supporting them not financially because my parents certainly couldn't send me more than a few hundred dollars when Harvard was costing tens of thousands of dollars.

But, they supported me with their values and with their encouragement, but all of this meant that over time I would be very successful. And, and now, now I've somewhat become an insider in the Ivy league, but, but it took a long time. And, and I think it has changed that

there are, benefits to diversity, to having a, a kid with a voice that's very different from, let's say an Andover Exeter kid, you know, from, from very rich prep schools, and that , these other kids coming from working class, or even lower working class, uh, parents will have a lot to bring to the table in terms of, how they approach school and, and the work ethic that they have.

I, I mean, one of the things I I'll tell you, cuz my kids grew up. I have two boys, Erin and Isaac and they're New York city kids. And, and I met my wife at Harvard. We are now the, the quote unquote, well-to-do couple. And I told my kids when they, they went to a really good school in New York city, I said, you guys don't know how to work and your friends don't know how to work.

and I'm gonna teach you how to work. Like a, like a Mexican immigrant. And so Saturdays and Sundays and the summers, my kids, I, I gave them extra essays, extra math every summer they had to take an extra. Uh, math course. So they both did two years of calculus before they left. So I, I, what I did is I translated the Mexican immigrant values that I learned from my parents into intellectual work, for my kids in New York city.

It's really because of the work ethic that I had, that was very different from the work ethic of their peers.

And I think that this is one of the things I'm trying to say that the immigrant values brought over by immigrants are so important to this country, to the success of this country, that, we overlook that we overlook how important immigrants look at the world in a very different way than let's say somebody who is second, third, or fourth generation here.

And, and I think those immigrant values, mean success and mean, uh, a better country for us. And we often forget that.

You have so many books out, I haven't been able to get to all of the books, but I have gotten to some of them. And of course your most recent book "nobody's pilgrims", which is truly, that is a masterpiece, but you said something and I, I, I'm not gonna do any, any spoilers, so don't worry about that because there's some things, but one of the things that you said that I mentioned, or that's about you, that I mentioned in the introduction is that there's a lot of issues still

it's getting better, but there's still a lot of issues that are ignored by society. And most of us are never going to experience the hell that your characters experience, and what you're trying to get across is that this isn't just a book to entertain. It's a book to let the reader know this truly is the reality of somebody's hell in our world.

You want something to remain with a reader so that change can be implemented. So talk about how you do that in your writing and how you weave it.

Well, right now, I'm going to announce the winner of your positive imprint t-shirt design contest.

Again, there were five top designs that you voted on and thank you again to everybody around the world who participated in the contest as voters. And of course, again, a huge thank you to the designers who entered their work. The winning design will be displayed in my shop@yourpositiveimprint.com.

I think this is just so exciting. I'll let you know when the shirt is up there in the, your positive imprint shop.

Okay. So now the winner. The winner of the t-shirt design contest is Design A. S.L. Aditya. Congratulations to all of you. And thank you again for entering

again. I'll be in touch with each of you soon. . Don't forget next week, continuing with Sergio Troncoso., your positive imprint. What's your P.I.?