Borderlands of Culture

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915-1995) was a pioneering figure in Mexican-American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of the Mexican American people. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramon Saldivar establishes Paredes' pre-eminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the American southwestern borderlands. At the same time, Saldivar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the "new" American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and trans-national forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization. Saldivar demonstrates how Paredes' 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 of the "border studies" or "anthropology of the borderlands" for which his later work would be celebrated. Saldivar describes how Paredes' 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 the American southwest 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' own words. By explaining how Paredes' work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldivar extends Paredes' intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a trans-national perspective.