E3W Literature | University of Texas

The Evolution of a Career and a Field of Study: An Interview with Ramón Saldívar

This interview with Dr. Ramón Saldívar, currently the chair of the Department of English at Stanford University, was conducted over the telephone during the month of January 2008 by Olga Herrera.

Olga Herrera: I’d like to start with asking you a bit about the history of the e3w concentration in the English Department at UT and your role in starting that program.

Ramón Saldívar: I did my undergraduate work at the University of Texas, from 1969-1972, so I knew the English department as a student. I came back in 1977 as an assistant professor after getting my Ph.D. at Yale, and in five years very little had changed—there was still a very traditional notion of what constituted American literature. Despite the presence of faculty such as Américo Paredes and Rolando Hinojosa, the department had not made a dramatic change. But the department was on the verge of change—there was a reconsideration of history and studies of the new American West; borderlands theory was being developed with new levels of conceptualization. Feminist studies and theorization was greatly influencing change in the field, as was work in Native American studies and African American studies.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, UT started hiring new faculty who brought new paradigms to literary and social aesthetic modes of understanding. The transformation of the field had to happen before any program changes could take place. With the arrival of Barbara Harlow and Waheema Lubiano, it became apparent that here was a cohort to make connections not just about literary cultural studies, but across cultural studies more broadly; our contacts from English to other departments were broadly based—to government, anthropology, history, for example. It was a charged political climate—these were the culture wars, and it was clear that there was a need for curricular reform.
After that there was room for emphasis within the department for a Ph.D. in ethnic and third world literature, tied to broader national movements, and it was formally instituted in 1988.

OH: That means you wrote Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) during the time you were at UT.

RS: Yes, in fact the development of the e3w program absolutely coincided with the writing of that book, and it channeled those currents of thought and collaboration. Chicano literary criticism had gone through various phases—there was a move away from a US-based focus and a very nationalistic identity, toward a more hemispheric, transnational stance. There was an emphasis on looking at Chicano literature in relationship to other social and political movements in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Looking back at the 1980s through the 1990s, it was important that Chicano Narrative came out of UT—it was influenced by the classes I was teaching, and many conversations with Harlow, Lubiano, José Limón, and Bernth Lindfors, all of whose work was crucial for the development of ethnic studies in the US One of the big changes was looking at larger global structures, racial/ethnic lines, struggles for justice, and national origins. Literature and cultures were emerging from those struggles in the era of decolonization. Other important changes—the change to notions of determinism that gender studies, but feminism in particular, brought about. Queer studies, too, precipitated a need to revisit the whole of Chicano literature. It created a whole area of literary research distinct from the 1960s and 1970s, which served as the impetus for the creation of the e3w curriculum. Looking back, these changes are still playing out and we’re still considering the implications of gender and looking at Chicano literature in relation to a larger world paradigm. The real significant development has been extending into a historical past, issues of struggle we’re still dealing with. What differentiates Chicano studies today is the definitive study of it in an international context, and a Latino context, together with the political and social struggles of Puerto Ricans and Cubans, for example. I’ll end that by saying that the two biggest changes in the field have been the internationalist movement and feminist studies.

OH: In what direction do you think the field of Mexican American Studies is going? What do you think of the notion of post-Chicano, or post-borderlands?

RS: Those terms imply that we’re beyond what have been central concerns, but I would say that it’s not that they’re no longer relevant, but that the field may be moving toward different structures of development. My new book, for example, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary, makes a polemical case (that I hope everyone challenges) that borderlands theory has to be related to Asia. We now have to think in a global and not just hemispheric context. “Post” asks us to move beyond the merely local and regional, but I would say that we must look at the local and regional in concert with the hemispheric and global.

OH: What brought you to this latest project on Américo Paredes?

RS: Américo Paredes was on the faculty when I arrived as an assistant professor, but with a work load that included teaching four courses each semester, I didn’t really have time to get to know him well. But I introduced myself, and over time we established a collegial relationship. This changed in the mid-‘80s, when he began to have more time to do things that he hadn’t been able to do as an active professor, and this included spending more time with colleagues. At that time, three of us—Ricardo Romo, a professor of history (currently president of UTSA), David Montejano, also a professor of history (currently at UC Berkeley) and myself—would meet with Paredes for coffee, just to talk. From those early conversations, the idea for the book emerged. It was a chance to learn about his biography and family history, and we were fascinated with the question of how he was able to formalize his theoretical interventions in the exceedingly hostile environment of the University of Texas in the 1950s.

I started thinking about Chicano literary history and the relationship between Mexico and the Southwest—the period of high modernism. Don Américo emerged from that era in a very identifiable way—what happened in Latin America between the two world wars. I did a series of interviews with him, and in 1988, he came to my office and asked if I would read this manuscript, which was later published as George Washington Gómez. Later he showed me a set of other early manuscripts, including poetry, and I, along with José Limón, Nicholas Kanellos (publisher of Arte Público Press) and others, urged him to have this work published. In describing that body of literature, that was how The Borderlands of Culture started. I put the project aside when I moved to Stanford and served as vice provost there. When I came back from that work in 1999, I picked up the book project again. I was thinking about his work from the 1930s and 1940s, which no one had really looked at before. I deliberately was not looking at “With His Pistol in His Hand” (1958), and his work after that, because that had all been well covered by others. There was the one big thing about Paredes that everyone knew but had looked through: he spent five years in Japan and came back with a wife who was half-Asian. Why did we ignore that? Thinking about that question and its implications became the origins of the project.

OH: The book really pushes against the boundaries of any one genre—it’s part literary criticism, part biography, part history. What were some of the challenges of putting a project like that together?

RS: Really, it could have been many books, or at least two big books—one is a book more like a biography, and one is a book more like literary criticism. What I hope the book shows is the embeddedness of these two parts within each other. I really had to ask the question—what is a “biography”? What is an “autobiography”? What I came to realize about his autobiographical writing was that it was more than just about his life—it was about his family, and the region. What is auto-bio-graphy—this question challenges what it means to write a history, to write a family’s history, and speaking about one’s relationship to theirs. I was interested in how that explains Paredes as an ethnographer and as a literary historian—that became the guiding concern that was able to bring the different parts of the book together.