In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • New Border Voices: An Anthology ed. by Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson, Erika Garza-Johnson
  • Cristina Herrera
Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson, and Erika Garza-Johnson, eds., New Border Voices: An Anthology. College Station: Texas a&m UP, 2014. 265pp. Cloth, $45; paper, $25.

“When the ‘counter-canon’ itself becomes canonized, it’s time to reload,” states the back cover of Border Voices. This theme of rewriting, reloading, and reconceptualizing what we mean by the border drives this collection, featuring a compilation of forty-seven writings: essays, poetry, and short stories, as well as an introduction by renowned Latino scholar José E. Limón.

The collection is divided into two parts. Part 1, “The Border’s Literary Tradition and Its Sense of Place,” presents essays by scholars José Limón and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. Part 2, “De las voces de muchos,” contains the bulk of the work’s poetry, short stories, and creative essays. The volume’s strength is found in the diversity of [End Page 80] its contributors. Well-known voices such as Christine Granados, Richard Yañez, Carmen Tafolla, Ray Gonzalez, and Pat Mora appear alongside newer writers and include Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans, a fact lauded in Limón’s introduction.

In their preface, editors Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson, and Erika Garza-Johnson state the anthology’s mission, and it is here that readers may begin challenging their premises. The editors’ desire to construct a new volume of Borderlands writings stems from a belief that the field of Borderlands studies “faces an identity crisis of its own” (xii). Recalling a conversation with a colleague that left him unable to recommend a suitable anthology of Borderlands studies, Brandon D. Shuler asserts that the impetus behind the creation of a new volume was to fill the gaps of existing Borderlands anthologies, to “provide an accurate portrait of the Texas/Mexico Border at the beginning of the twenty-first century and help refocus Borderlands studies to a collected discipline of area and not of ethnicity” (xiii). Scholars of Borderlands studies may object to the editors’ view that the field has become synonymous with ethnic studies, a “de facto ethnic studies” (xiii). Is this an accurate assertion? If, as the editors believe, the struggles Borderlands studies face arise from the “short-sighted view that area studies effectively become a practice of ethnic/cultural studies” (xiv), I wonder why they allude to Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s well-known metaphor of the border as “una herida abierta /an open wound”? While Anzaldúa called for the blurring and crossing of borders, she did not deny the ways in which borders were constructed to justify racism (as well as rights and privileges) across sexuality, gender, race, and identity. Can Borderlands studies ever be separate from ethnic/cultural studies? Is it possible to conceive of this discipline as a study of place without discussing how place is undergirded by race, class, ethnicity, gender, or ability? The editors believe this to be possible, and in fact, necessary.

New Border Voices will no doubt spark animated exchanges on the state of Borderlands studies; as such, this text can be useful for scholars of western American literature and border literature as well as interdisciplinary studies. [End Page 81]

Cristina Herrera
California State University, Fresno
...

pdf

Share