Named for the bar across the street from S.B. author Grace De Soto Ferry's childhood home in San Antonio, Hey Guy, This Is The Butterfly presents a compact and readable 24 short stories in 139 pages. The author grew up in the Mexican neighborhood of a segregated community, which she left in 1962. After returning there 50 years later, she found the home her father built, along with all of her childhood remembrances, gone, including the bar. The result of her reflections is "a collection of short stories, tall tales, some true, some not."
Short is the operative word here, as the narratives are all within one to 11 pages long, with many on the shorter side and a handful at just a paragraph. Like a batch of collected memories, they’ve been jotted down sparsely to share, to keep although that reality is now gone, and isn't that what many great American short stories do well — say a lot with very little, say more with what's not being said?
De Soto Ferry starts from the point of view of a girl reminiscing about living in a house across the street from The Butterfly bar, presumably the character most closely resembling the author herself, and from there takes off on a tour of this time and place, told from a variety of perspectives, some male, some female, some old, some young, but all Mexican American and all poor. These are characters living with the sad facts of prejudice, being unhappy with something about themselves, oppressive heat as well as oppressive poverty … but there's humor, a positive tone, and clear nostalgia for De Soto Ferry’s girlhood days, even a sadness that the neighborhood is now so changed by "what some call progress" (development and commercialization).