Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez's fine collection of stories begins and ends at la línea, the long border that separates the United States and Mexico. In the first story, "Over There on the Other Side," the narrator, waiting at the Mexicali checkpoint, reflects on how easy it had been for his parents to cross over illegally and start a new life, and how, once on el otro lado, immigrants gradually lost connection to their pasts: "Some stayed, others came back, and a few went missing." One Day I'll Tell You the Things I've Seen contains stories of the Mexican diaspora and its members' tenuous ties to family in Mexico, family in the U.S., family throughout the world. In the words of one character describing himself to a Peruvian girlfriend at a Madrid café: "Made in México, born in the USA, chica.... I'm just passing through."
Vaquera-Vásquez (Luego el Silencio), assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, has published several nonfiction articles about his own cross-border experiences. The stories in this collection focus on Latinos wandering through places like Iowa, Mexico City, Madrid, Istanbul and even college town Ithaca, N.Y. His lonely male narrators drift from woman to woman ("partners had no names: they were merely Things, Cosas. Sometimes, most times, they were Caos"), like Mexico City's elusive title character in the story "Carmen Whose Last Name I Don't Remember." Easily mixing English and Spanish words without any italic designation of "foreign" words, Vaquera-Vásquez creates a world where we are all citizens, but none can completely escape his origins. As he says of one character named Rodríguez: "No way to hide that nopal nailed to his forehead." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan