Books at Duke University Press

The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
Ramón Saldívar

536 pages (March 2006)
33 b&w photos, 1 map

Cloth - $94.95	0-8223-3776-2
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3776-8]

Paperback - $26.95	0-8223-3789-4
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3789-8]

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Américo Paredes (1915–1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramón Saldívar establishes Paredes’s preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldívar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the “new” American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization.

Saldívar demonstrates how Paredes’s poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the “border studies” or “anthropology of the borderlands.” Saldívar describes how Paredes’s experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldívar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes’s own words. By explaining how Paredes’s work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldívar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.

“A major work of literary and cultural criticism, The Borderlands of Culture weaves together an insightful and thorough study of Américo Paredes’s career with sustained reflections on the larger lessons and contemporary contexts of his writing. This is an original, wide-ranging, and provocative piece of scholarship by one of the profession’s leading scholars of transnational literature.”—Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Columbia University

“This is a magnificent book. Ramón Saldívar situates Américo Paredes as the founder of an aesthetic and an epistemology for the world at large by those who dwell in the borders—not just the borders between Mexico and the United States but the borders of Western imperialisms. His years of research, personal acquaintance with Paredes, and passionate scholarship have produced a work of lasting value and one that will no doubt become a canonical volume of Latino/a scholarship.”—Walter D. Mignolo, author of Local Histories/Global Designs

Ramón Saldívar is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of English, and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is the author of Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce and Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference.

See Reviews

2006 Prize in U.S. Latina/Latino and Chicana/Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies
   Modern Language Association

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: In Memoriam 3
Part I. History and Remembrance as Social Aesthetics
1. “The Memory Is All That Matters” 23
2. A Life in the Borderlands 64
Part II. Fictions of the Transnational Imaginary
3. The Checkerboard of Consciousness in George Washington Gómez 145
4. Transnational Modernisms: Paredes, Roosevelt, Rockwell, Bulosan, and the Four Freedoms 190
5. Paredes and the Modernist Vernacular Intellectuals: George I. Sánchez and Emma Tenayuca 226
6. The Borders of Modernity 241
7. Bilingual Aesthetics and the Law of the Heart 264
8. Border Subjects and Transnational Sites: The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories
9. Narrative and the Idioms of Race, Nation, and Identity 318
10. The Postwar Borderlands and the Origins of the Transnational Imaginary: The Occupation-Era Writings in Pacific Stars and Stripes and El Universal 344
11. The Shadow and the Imaginary Functioning of Institutions 395
Conclusion: A Transsentimental Journey 432
Notes 439
Works Cited 477
Index 503