E3W Literature | University of Texas

Dedicación a raúl “tapón” Salinas: From Pine Ridge to Chiapas, from the barrios of Osten to los de Havana y Vieques, your poems and songs chanted in tones of distinctive timbre, you challenged us to stand up, to shout out, to use our voices, fists, and feet to resist prisiones de piedra and mind jails that incarcerate us all. Master maestro you were a man of steadfast ideals challenging us to be real, reminding us that it was necessary to be dogmatic on behalf of la otra realidad, that of los de abajo, even if it meant being in opposition to la universidad. You were our poet-philosopher who showed us that a life worth living was one lived in total resistance to injustice, one in which we should use our voices loud and proud con plena dignidad.

- Louis G. Mendoza

Edited by Amara Graf

From an interview with Ramón Saldívar, one of the founding members of the Ethnic and Third World Literature concentration at UT, to a review of the Américo Paredes archive, and reviews of contemporary fiction and scholarship in the field of Mexican-American Studies, this section reflects the ways in which borderlands studies have evolved alongside and as an integral part of Ethnic and Third World studies over the last twenty years. The title of the section, ¿Estamos Post-Borderlands o No? (Are We Post-Borderlands or Not?), highlights a central question within Mexican American studies today. When Olga Herrera poses this question to Saldívar in her interview he responds that “‘post’ asks us to move beyond the merely local and regional, but I would add that we must look at the local and regional in concert with the hemispheric and global.” As Lydia Wilmeth points out in her review of Saldívar’s The Borderlands of Culture, his book “calls for a radical rethinking of borderlands studies,” which transcend the particular geography of the United States-Mexico border and “in the twenty first century are located as much in Baghdad, Iraq as in Brownsville, Texas.”

The transformation of borderlands studies is evident in the variety of reviews in this section. While, as Alberto Varon states, John-Michael Rivera’s The Emergence of Mexican-America “is an excellent study of how the inclusion of Mexican-American narratives helps scholars to re-imagine US literary history,” David Dorado Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution is an example of such a text. As Luis A. Marentes explains, Romo’s book provides a “microhistory” of “El Paso and Juárez and the Mexican Revolution that swept through them.” Border narratives like Ana Castillo’s The Guardians, according to Christina Garcia, “reveal shifts in contemporary discourse regarding the nation-state and its boundaries.” While Castillo addresses issues of labor and migration in Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena María Viramontes, as T. Jackie Cuevas notes, examines the “experiences of poor and working-class Chicanas/os displaced by the increased urbanization of East LA.”

Initially focusing specifically on the US-Mexican border, the rural community of South Texas, and folk art such as the corrido, borderlands studies have expanded to include a broader concept of the transnational border between the US and the rest of the world, the urban context of East LA, and a variety of contemporary art forms, including as Laura E. Pérez indicates in Chicana Art, film, digital, print, and interactive CD-ROM. While Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera was first published over twenty years ago, Ana Castillo reminds readers in the new introduction to the third edition of this seminal text, to “remember that the social and political struggles of our sisters in the workforce” are still critical. Borderlands studies, like Ethnic Third World studies, have radically changed since their inception twenty years ago, and continues to pose difficult questions within a larger global context, to which scholars in the field provide brave and challenging answers, attempting, as Viramontes states, to dismantle the border “one word at a time.”