Dust to Dust

I took my first post-pandemic trip in May, aboard an airplane from New York City to Texas, to visit my 85-year-old mother, Bertha Troncoso, who lives in the same adobe house she and my father built in the mid-1960s. When my mother and father and their four children arrived in Ysleta, the small town was on the outskirts of east El Paso. Back then, Ysleta was a rural community with the Ysleta Mission as its anchor, established in 1682 by Spanish missionaries and a contingent of the Tigua tribe. The missionaries and tribe were fleeing the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and their ancestral home in the Isleta Pueblo, in what is now southern Albuquerque.

Ysleta with a “Y” is where I grew up, where I went to Ysleta High School, and where my heart always returns when I need to heal, when I want to hug my mother.

Ysleta is a first principle for understanding my soul—or as Aristotle would define it, a basic proposition that cannot be deducted from any other proposition. Ysleta is where I began, where I was formed. This community is at the edge of the edge of the United States, and I became an outsider and iconoclast in this country because of it. My mother belonged to the desolate landscape of Ysleta, yet she yearned to go beyond it. I admired her, yet when I left home, I knew I was traveling farther physically as well as philosophically than she ever could.

I have always loved philosophy for its wisdom beyond and maybe even against the present, and that’s also why I love Ysleta. The community seemed to exist in another time when I lived there as a child and young adult, very distinct and separate from the newer and slicker neighborhoods of El Paso. Ysleta had a