A scientist travels across North America in search of a rare beetle, collecting stories along the way.

Altagracia, a middle schooler from Mexico, is cruelly and suddenly stolen from her home and trafficked to the United States. At the first chance she gets, she runs as fast as she can.

Assuming that they were here to invade, mankind massacred the aliens whose ships landed on Earth. Now, the aliens and humans have an uneasy peace together. The aliens who landed on earth love to fly kites. One kite-maker sells them despite harassment from skinheads who hate the aliens and anyone who does business with them.

When a young couple spend a few months in Mexico to learn Spanish for their teaching jobs, they're surprised to receive warnings and threats about the country's dogs.

A modern Puerto Rican parrot meditates on why humans seek intelligence in other corners of the universe while they neglect the refined communicative capacities of their neighboring parrots.

At a space frontier, infected humans are turning into alien moth creatures and the government considers mass executing them all. A scientist who has seen signs of the moths' intelligence must fight for their lives.

When a sick father tells his son a new story of how he came into the United States from Mexico, different from the one the whole family was familiar with, an argument ensues between mother and father about the true history of their family.

A landlady says a tearful farewell to one of her Mexican tenants, who must leave due to an expired visa.

A boy finds a mysterious caterpillar-like creature in the forest one day. He brings it home and kills it to add to his wildlife collection, but becomes haunted by creatures he can no longer control.

When an aging, white, American man flies to Mexico on a mission to search for gold in the 1950s, his plane crashes, leaving him stranded and injured in the wilderness with few resources and only so much time left to survive.