American Encounters: Greater Mexico, The United States, and the Erotics of Culture (review)

Jose Limón exemplifies the ideal of interdisciplinary scholarship in this boundary-crossing work, which deals with the emergence of an unwieldy entity, "Greater Mexico," in its protracted engagement with the United States. Limón works through an impressive array of historical and contemporary material. He draws upon literature, visual arts, political discourse, working-class expressive cultures, postmodern and postcolonial theories, and anthropological studies to bring into view the specific cultural practices of the people that are variously encompassed by Greater Mexico. In examining "Greater Mexico"-a label that refers to "all Mexicans, beyond Laredo and from either side [of the border], with all their commonalities and differences" (p. 3)-Limón also treats "the United States as an Anglo-dominant entity whose representatives have come into contact with and sometimes internalized Greater Mexico and vice versa" (p. 3). Hence, Limón fundamentally questions all unitary notions linked to these two simultaneously mythic and real entities.

Though nuanced by many wide-ranging reflections, the core of this book is a series of arguments concerning the relationship of these two powerful cultural orders. Limón provocatively but soundly claims that "the American South played a special role" (p. 8) in the construction of Greater Mexico, serving as something of an ungentle midwife at the birth of a cultural formation that is uncontainable by national boundaries or static, essentialist definitions of culture. He makes this case both in historical and contemporary terms, relying on an impressive collection of cultural representations across a host of fields usually kept apart by academic specialization or various forms of segregation, conceptual or residential and occupational. Limon compiles and analyzes a series of engagements, encounters, performances, and articulations between peoples differently positioned in the relationship between Greater Mexico and the United States. These subjects can be roughly divided temporally. Reaching back to the Civil War and then up through the 1960s and the Chicano Movement, Limón reviews historiography on the American South. He examines the literary writings of Katherine Anne Porter in juxtaposition to the ethnographic work of Manuel Gamio. He reflects on intriguing points of correspondence between speech styles of lower-class African American and Mexican males; and he critiques the history of distorting scholarship on these subjects, and discusses films such as High Noon and Giant, as well as the ballads of country western singer, Marty Robbins. Turning to more contemporary sources, Limón explores the work of writers Cormac McCarthy and Sandra Cisneros, the lyrics and sexuality of Selena, and the intriguing plot and imagery of John Sayle's film, Lone Star. These products of popular culture are insightfully linked to developments in Texas politics and to ongoing national debates and obsessions over belonging and difference.

Running through this disparate collection are resonances and rearticulations of Limón's opening argument about the fundamentally intertwined, mutually informing identities of peoples on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. Limón is cautious about generic versions of "border theory" and stresses the need to be geographically and historically specific when discussing such constructions. The "border," for Limón, is not a stark divide between Self and Other. Instead, he focuses on the paradoxical commonalities that surprisingly surface in the various experiences of identity he relates. This perspective is established early in the book as he characterizes the American South and Greater Mexico as "two peoples sharing defeat, disruption, and demoralization" (p. 14) He adds,

The subaltern sections of both Greater Mexico and the American South thus experienced the worst effects of Northern capitalist domination, a domination always deeply inflected with and complicated by racism and expressed in symbolic language and imagery that involved the eroticization of self, society, and culture (p. 18)

The powerful insights Limón develops from this perspective should lead other scholars to question why the conceptual model of Otherness predominates over more intriguing forms of attention to the construction and misrecognition of sameness.

In this regard...