Reflecting: One Day I'll Tell You the Things I've Seen

On September 16, 2015, Santa Fe had a visitor lecture at the Fine Arts Hall as well as my English and Humanities class. I was very excited to have Dr. Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez come talk to us because he was going to discuss about his writing process as a latin, bilingual author which fascinates me as a writer myself. He not only ended up speaking about that but also how and why latin culture is so important to him, why it should matter to those who are latino/a, and the importance of staying in touch with one's roots. He recently published a book titled One Day I'll Tell You the Things I've Seen, which has multiple short stories. My Humanities professor assigned the novel as homework for the reason being that we were going have the opportunirty to analyze several chapters with the author himself. It was honestly an unforgettable experience having spoken to an author and seeing how his book resonated with several people in my class, including myself. He and I spoke for a few minutes after he was finished with the evening lecture, but it touched me the most when he said he remembered me and pointed me out from the large crowd surrounding him. There are several themes that hit home in his novel such as the impact of social classes, fear of commitment, family expectations (especially in Latin families) and so forth. Each story focuses on a character with a backstory so powerful that it makes the reader question whether these characters exist within the author's life or perhaps it is fragments of Dr. Vaquera-Vasquez's soul pieced together. However, the theme that was most interesting to me was the fear of commitment. The way it was reflected by the characters was beautiful and truly depicted the nature of this constant phobia. Even the narrator himself was afraid to settle down and thus traveled. In his travels, he continuously met people who he knew were only temporary. Despite having been in relationships with a few of these people he met, the narrator still moved on with his life because he was well aware that life goes on and time waits for no one. The result of the narrator and the characters in the novel looking for "home" was either a lingering sense incompleteness or corruption. Dr. Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez reminds us that wherever we go, a part of those places become "one" with us, even if subtle. Experience itself is the window to our humanity and understanding what to make out of our past, present, future, thoughts and interactions greatly influence the decisions we make. As the artists of our lives, every stroke on the canvases that is our lives is just as important as the big picture, and eventually, we will create the masterpieces we envisioned from the start.