This paper examines the linguistic and cultural development of three US university students in a one-month study-abroad program in Mexico, as represented in their bilingual journals. Through narrative analysis, the paper explores students' varied evaluations of their study-abroad experiences, as well as how these evaluations seemed to affect their individual investments in crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries. The paper connects these qualitative findings to a quantitative analysis of the amount and quality of the Spanish in the journal narratives of each of the three students, especially in reference to two Spanish verb tenses (preterit and imperfect) that are key to narrative structure. The paper concludes by discussing implications of this research for language and culture learning in the context of short-term study-abroad programs. (Contains 7 notes, 2 figures, and 6 tables.)