The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (review)

Among the most important developments in Latino/a Studies of the past decades is a new emphasis on projects of literary recovery, which has moved the field away from a more exclusive focus on works published since the 1960s and toward a concern with the legacy of a longstanding Latino/a presence in the United States. At the center of these developments is Américo Paredes, the influential novelist, poet, journalist, and folklorist, who documented the culture of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for nearly half a century. Not only has his scholarship enabled an understanding of ephemeral cultural forms that might otherwise be lost to history, but his novels, short stories, and poetry have also been recognized for their literary accomplishment, as well as their revealing portraits of Mexican American culture. Yet despite his indisputable importance, Paredes had never been the subject of a full-length scholarly study until 2006, which saw the publication of José R. López Morín's The Legacy of Américo Paredes and Ramón Saldívar's The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. It is a formidable challenge to undertake the first such project of its kind, and the considerable length and generic hybridity of Saldívar's book reflects the burden of Saldívar's task.

Although The Borderlands of Culture tells the story of Paredes's life, it is by no means a conventional biography. However its subject is certainly interesting and significant enough to merit such attention. A pioneer in the emergent field of Chicano/a Studies, Paredes's work as an ethnographer was informed by his experiences as a resident of Brownsville, Texas, where he was born during the Mexican Revolution and witnessed first-hand the political tensions and social upheavals that transformed this vital region over the ensuing decades. His perspective on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was enhanced by the years he served in the U.S. Army as a writer for the Stars and Stripes and the Spanish-language daily, El Universal, during the post-war occupation of Japan and the opening days of the Korean War. While Saldívar incorporates many of these details into his book, he also makes clear that his work departs from the traditional parameters of biography, explaining, "I am not presenting the life of a 'great man,' although Américo Paredes was surely a most remarkable man. Instead, I wish to depersonalize that life by seeing it in context as a life pattern, a social aesthetic, and an act of remembrance" (p. 15). In other words, Saldívar aspires to commemorate Paredes by situating his accomplishments in the context of the politics and aesthetics of transnational modernism, rather than focusing on the nuances of individual personality.

As its title suggests, a pivotal claim in The Borderlands of Culture is that Paredes's thought is guided by a "transnational imaginary" that allowed him to articulate relations between North and South America at a moment when the study of American history and culture was oriented toward the East-West trajectory of Manifest Destiny and transatlantic relations between Old and New Worlds. It was from this vantage that Paredes derived his understanding of borderlands culture and sought to envision alternatives to the traditional rhetoric of citizenship and liberal democracy. Although Saldívar acknowledges that Paredes at times fell prey to the patriarchal assumptions of his moment, he argues that Paredes's embrace of this transnational sensibility was far ahead of its time, anticipating key aspects of postmodern aesthetics, as well as the current "transnational turn" in American Studies.

Individual chapters pay sustained attention to Paredes's work, locating it in relation to broader cultural developments of its time: Saldívar reads his novel George Washington Gomez as a representation of the complexities of Mexican American assimilation in the 1940s; his book of poetry, Between...