Abstract
Casares's Brownsville Stories is not just a novel. Instead of following one protagonist through a long series of events, the text presents the reader with a series of vignettes about multiple protagonists. Casares situates all of his anecdotes in the small Texas town of Brownsville, yet the town, in itself, has a minimal presence in the novel. Rather, the story focuses more on short narrations of small incidents in the lives of the characters. However, as a piece of Chicano literature, it is necessary to read Casares's text not only in a literal form, but to also read the text for the qualities of the Chicano movement. If the city of Brownsville is not important as a direct key player in the text, then why is it so necessarily the unifying setting of the short stories?
