In his debut short story collection, Brownsville: Stories, Oscar Casares presents a wide range of characters and voices from the Rio Grande area, each one comprising a richly developed personality that avoids the pitfalls of stereotyping Texas and its immigrant population.
But one cannot write about Brownsville as if it were not on the Texas border. To do so would be a lie. However, Casares lets us see the unique qualities that individuate where some might be tempted to see homogeneity. Every story is titled by the name of one of its main characters, emphasizing the importance of the individual.
Bony is an unemployed young man living with his parents finds a monkey’s head on his lawn and becomes bizarrely obsessed with it, to the chagrin of his parents. Mrs. Perez, a widow whose bowling ball is stolen from her home, finds herself questioning what she really wants from life and finally avenges herself in a convenience store.
In the story “Domingo,” the protagonist of the title is a Mexican father who lost his daughter at a young age and has not been able to set foot in a church since her death. As he works odd jobs across the border in Brownsville, he marks the passage of time by thinking about what his daughter would be like if she had lived:
“He was not afraid of hard work, but at seventy-three years of age he knew it was important to work slowly and be sure the job was done well. As he waited for la senora, he tried to distract himself with different thoughts of how his day would go, but his mind drifted back to the same though he had woken up with that morning: today was the birthday of his Sara. She would have been twenty-one year old on this day, a woman with her own family by now. He knew his wife was back home doing something to remember their daughter, to remember the one year she was with them.”
In “Yolanda,” the narrator fixates on a woman who lived next door to him when he was twelve years old. Yolanda was married to Frank, a brute of a husband who controlled her every move. One night fixed the memory of Yolanda in the narrator’s mind forever – the night she sought refuge by hiding in the young narrator’s bed:
“I could go on and tell you the rest of the details – how I never turned around and always regretted it, how we stayed there and listened to Frank crying in his backyard, how Lonny’s dad finally called the cops on his ass, how Yolanda had a cousin pick her up the next morning, how she ended up leaving Frank for a man who worked for one of the shampoo companies, how it didn’t matter because she’d also been seeing an assistant manager and would be having his baby soon enough, and how it really didn’t matter because the assistant manager was already married and wasn’t about to leave his wife and kids, and how, actually, none of it mattered because she’d been taking money out of the register and was about to be caught – but that’s not the part of the story I like to remember.”
Casares has brought characters into this world that any reader will have a hard time forgetting. Their humanity at once familiar, yet distinctive. Stories you could easily have overheard at the barbershop or beauty parlor. People who could have been, or who could one day be, your neighbor or your own self.
192 pp.
