"On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone," Sergio Troncoso writes in this riveting collection of sixteen personal essays in which he seeks to connect the humanity of his Mexican family to people he meets on the East Coast, including his wife's Jewish kin. Raised in El Paso near the Texas-Mexico border, Troncoso crossed what seemed an even more imposing border when he left home to attend Harvard College.

Initially, "outsider status" was thrust upon him; later, he adopted it willingly, writing about the Southwest in an effort to communicate where he came from to those unfamiliar with his childhood world. Troncoso writes to preserve his connections to the past, but he puts pen to paper just as much for the future.

Crossing Borders: Personal Essays reveals a writer, father and husband who has crossed linguistic, cultural and intellectual borders to provoke debate about contemporary Mexican-American identity.