A man waits to cross la línea, the U.S.-Mexico border, as a guard scrutinizes him from behind dark sunglasses. Two grown brothers living three thousand miles apart struggle to reconnect through the static of a bad phone connection. A young mother trying to adjust to small-town life in a new country tells her children about the border city where she grew up—the dances and parties and cruises along the boulevard. The stories in Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez’s intimate conversational narrative take readers around the world, from the orchards of California to the cornfields of Iowa, from the neighborhoods of Madrid and Mexico City to the Asian shore of Istanbul. As the characters navigate borders and border crossings—both physical and psychological—they attempt to make sense of their increasingly complex memories and relationships.
Vaquera-Vásquez's stories move their characters through time, space, countries, childhood, music, languages, and relationships only to find themselves where they began--changed, perhaps--but always still in motion.
--Waxwing
These introspective stories are haunting . . . as easy to absorb and inhabit as our own.
--Booklist
These introspective stories are haunting . . . as easy to absorb and inhabit as our own.
--Booklist
With One Day I'll Tell You the Things I've Seen, Vaquera-Vásquez contributes a vital and lyrical voice to the Chicano literary canon as well as to the canon of twenty-first-century American literature.
--Concho River Review
