Tijuana

Set in the shadowy no-man's-land between Mexican and American culture, Tijuana explores the shifting realities of many types of borders--geographic, cultural, temporal and psychological. In ``Everything about Seals,'' the novella that begins the collection, the unnamed narrator haunts the literal and figurative borders of city streets, airport hangars and reality as he endlessly searches for Beverly--a transient American pilot who ``came from another world and possessed the ability to disappear at will at any time and in any direction.'' ``Tijuana Times'' offers a moving reminiscence of the narrator's adolescence in the 1960s, when every teenage fantasy was ``related to an adult destiny on Los Angeles's East Side.'' And in ``Insurgentes Big Sur,'' the narrator questions his cultural allegiance to either Mexico or the United States, observing ``A city... is like a person; you either know it well or not at all.'' Cornell professor Castillo's sometimes dogged introduction provides the collection's only weak spot. Her essay ``Borderlining: An Introduction,'' seeks to provide a historical context for Campbell's work and to establish the theoretical pertinence of ``Border Studies.'' The stories themselves more than compensate, however, providing a compelling illustration of a world caught in-between. (Mar.)