Asian Américo: Paredes in Asia and the Borderlands: A Response to José E. Limón

José E. Limón's critique of The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006) raises objections of a historical nature to what he sees as my work's participation in "the globalization of American literary history" (160). The main points of his critique are two: First, the turn to transnational vectors in the study of American culture tends to ignore the persistence of the "national" as a category requiring continual analysis (Limón 162). Second, he questions the validity of my attempt to establish parallels between postwar occupied Japan and the post-1848 Mexican American borderlands. Predictably, I disagree with Limón's assessment and will explain why in the pages that follow.

In The Borderlands of Culture, I made a case for the centrality of Paredes's experiences in Asia from 1945 to 1950, the years during which he served as a member of the US Army in occupied Japan, as a journalist for Pacific Stars and Stripes, as a correspondent for the Mexico City daily El Universal, and then later as head of humanitarian supply coordination for the International Red Cross in China and Korea.¹ I argue that these years in Asia were crucial for Paredes's later formulation of the idea of "Greater Mexico," which on his return to the US in the early 1950s he would use as a core feature of his magisterial studies of the borderlands. Because of my archival research unearthing major articles, features, and essays from the pages of Stars and Stripes and El Universal, Paredes's experiences in Asia are now part of the historical record. In light of this evidence, there can be no doubt that Paredes formed an idea of Asia that he later transported to his work in the American borderlands. Paredes's time in Asia provided a defining paradigm for his understanding of racial discord and concord, the ambiguous nature of postwar occupations, the formation of modern polities and citizenries, and, perhaps most encompassingly, the role of culture in mediating national and international strife.

Limón takes exception to my argument concerning the significance of Paredes's Asian years in a curiously oblique way. He does not deny that Paredes was present in Japan, China, and Korea at a momentous period of contemporary world history, that in his writings from this era he attempted to understand the differences between the cultures of Asia and of the Americas, or that these experiences and understanding affected his later thinking about cultural and political conflict. Instead, his critique takes a different tack: "Saldívar argues for continuities and parallels between Paredes's critical understanding of the conflict in his native South Texas Mexican community and in occupied Japan, relative to their respective though comparable Anglo-American occupiers. The political and cultural domination of South Texas Mexican Americans is thus rendered akin to the fate of Japan" (Limón 169). As much as I admire Limón's work on a vast array of border topics, in this instance I must point out that his formidable critical acumen escapes him as he misses the point of my argument.

Allow me to explain. If I had made what would amount to a banal claim of "continuities and parallels" between two oppressed peoples, or of a kinship in the fates of Mexican Americans and postwar Japan on the basis of a shared experience of occupation, then Limón would be justified in his critique. But I did not. Instead, concerning the significance of Paredes's time in Asia I argued something else. The questions I ask are: What does Asia have to do with Américo Paredes, and with the US-Mexico borderlands, the crossing of which represents such a volatile issue in the contemporary cultural politics of the US? What is the Asian connection to the US borderlands? I claim that the history of Asian immigration and American interventions in the Asia Pacific global region is related to each of these questions and to the history of the US-Mexico borderlands, but...