The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes And the Transnational Imaginary

Saldivar 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.” Saldivar 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. Saldivar 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, Saldivar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.

Ramon Saldivar 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.