E3W Literature | University of Texas

Borders, Documents, Archives

Edited by Olga Herrera

The increasingly xenophobic rhetoric in the U.S. media on issues of border security and immigration demands a more thoughtful consideration of the borderlands in question, as well as of other border struggles across the world. This special section examines the contested nature of borders, as well as its implications for life in the borderlands, whether physical or imagined. Life Along the Border promises to establish Jovita Gonzalez as one of the forerunners of borderlands critical analysis, while the Gloria Anzaldúa Papers reminds us of this groundbreaking theorist’s own rootedness in the Texas/Mexico border. The cultural hybridity permeating Anzaldúa’s work is vividly dramatized from a Vietnamese standpoint in Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet. A flashback review of Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez recalls the Texas/Mexico border’s history of violence and cultural conflict. That history led to the birth of the heroic corrido, which as the Migrant Border Ballads Project archive demonstrates, continues to evolve to reflect the changing struggles of the Mexican-American community. Juan Felipe Herrera’s Mayan Drifter and the Jim Sagel Papers offer two perspectives from the metaphorical borderlands, as each author wrestles with being both observer and participant in a culture that has been traditionally marginalized. Finally, Joshua Forrest’s Subnationalism in Africa documents the internal borders between regional and ethnic groups, and proves that they can be as divisive as those between nations.