E3W Literature | University of Texas

Ramón Saldívar
Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
Duke University Press, 2006
525 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Lydia Wilmeth

In his study, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary, Ramón Saldívar continues to interrogate what in his seminal book, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), he termed the dialectics of difference. In this most recent work he explores further the implications of both dialectic(s) and difference through a tracing of the life and career of Mexican American folklorist and scholar, Américo Paredes. In exploring Paredes’s troubled relationship with modernization/modernity/modernism and their effects on nationhood and citizenship on the United States-Mexican border, Saldívar mines, or, to use a Benjaminian metaphor that Saldívar himself seizes on, he excavates Paredes’s creative and journalistic works to uncover what he terms a social aesthetic. Clearly cognizant of the ostensibly oxymoronic nature of this term, Saldívar employs what can only be called a hybrid critical apparatus, drawing now from modernist and postmodernist philosophies of aesthetics, now from cultural materialism. As scholars of borderlands studies in general and of Paredes’s ethnographic work in particular know, Paredes insisted that the aesthetic and the social are ineluctably linked. Indeed, in his important work, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), Paredes examines “El corrido de Gregorio Cortez” as vernacular art arising organically from early twentieth century South Texas as a means of structuring the realities of Mexico-Texan and Anglo-Texan conflict. The corridos, like all vernacular arts, offered possibilities for the community in the realm of the imaginary not readily available in the “reality” of borderlands socioeconomics and geopolitics at the turn of the century.

Saldívar’s innovative insight into Paredes’s life and work, however, lies in his coupling of the social aesthetic with the idea of the transnational imaginary. Focusing his study on Paredes’s creative and journalistic works of the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s (in the first full-fledged study of these pre-ethnographic scholarship writings), Saldívar reads in them an awareness of a burgeoning transnational ethic, a conceptualization of culture that resists limitation to the civic nation or even the local community. Rather, “the individual point of contact with the imaginary, as well as the ‘national’ culture or political event, are always seen as one surface and a very local inflection of a much broader transindividual and transnational phenomenon that can be read according to a hemispheric dialectic of similarity and difference on the level of public agency and symbolic action.” In thinking through the impact and implications of the transnational imaginary on our conception of a social aesthetic via Paredes’s works, The Borderlands of Culture challenges scholars of American and borderlands studies to reconsider the role that culture, fraught as it is by the complexities of postmodernity and globalization, plays in the development of the (non-)citizen and (subaltern) subject.

As Saldívar himself avows in his introduction, to get at these crucial issues his text takes a necessarily spiral structure, “tell[ing] the same story, albeit in different ways and using different discourses.” Part I, “History and Remembrance as Social Aesthetics,” lays out the cultural geography of memory at work in the United States-Mexico borderlands in the first chapter and provides a kind of extended epitaph to Paredes himself in the second. In these chapters Saldívar powerfully captures the cultural forces at work in the borderlands in the years that came to define Paredes’s life and thought, including, in the first chapter, those centuries before the eminent folklorist was born. Saldívar astutely recognizes in the history of the border the crux of any borderlands study: the lived experiences that constitute borderlands identity. Indeed, in the second chapter, where Paredes’s own words grace the pages, overarching questions of subject formation and citizenship status in the borderlands emerge not as academic complexities, but as the very foundation of everyday life. It’s the memory of that experience, the trace that’s left once the experience has passed, that structures one’s sense of individual belonging to any group, nation, or transnational community.

Saldívar takes as the founding concern of the second and most extensive part of the text one inspired by C.L.R. James’s observation that “‘the simplest reflection will show the necessity of holding fast the positive in the negative, the presupposition in the result, the affirmation that is contained in every negation, the future that is in the present.’” In a transcultural climate in which metanarratives of all kinds are consistently overturned, Saldívar wonders:
What a truly new world order might look like in a post-cold war, post-Marxian, postcolonial, poststructuralist, postmodern, indeed, postcontemporary era. What affirmations might sublate each of these ‘posts’ and their present negations? With the denunciation of all metanarratives by postmodernists, how are we to read today the possibility of liberatory solutions to crisis and to conceive of James’s future in the present?
In seeking affirmative responses to the negations of postmodernity, Saldívar turns to a fuller understanding of the historical and cultural experiences of modernity, particularly as expressed in the works of the cultural imaginary. How did consciousness shift in the face of modernity and modernization? How does one’s status as subject (in the multiple valences of that word) shift in the midst of rapidly changing social and economic patterns? Drawing on a definition of modernity as “the attempt to make something coherent” out of relationships among changes to the economic base of a society and the ideological shifts attendant on them, Saldívar looks for the answers to these questions on the United States-Mexico border. “Chicano and Chicana discourse,” he contends, “situated on the timed-space border between North American and Latin American world experiences, constitutes a prime instance of the articulation of this [modern] interplay, in the form of discourse that has come to be known as border writing.” Paredes’s works, many of which were written during or immediately following the rapid socioeconomic shifts that came to characterize border modernity, represent radical alternatives to the “inverted millenarianisms” of postmodernity.

Because they “prefigure crucial aspects of postmodern Chicano and Chicana writing from a high modernist, premovement historical moment,” Saldívar seeks James’s affirmative possibilities in Paredes’s fiction, poetry, and journalism. Beginning with a necessarily complex and wonderfully astute analysis of subject formation in George Washington Gómez (1990), Saldívar posits the possibilities for citizen-subjects of the Texas-Mexico border. As demonstrated by Guálinto Gómez, the Mexico-Texan subject is caught between allegiance to the stories, the songs, and the experiences of Mexican culture on the one hand and the promise of the rights of American citizenship through participation in its schools, churches and politics on the other. According to Saldívar, “learning to speak across these two sets of speech genres means learning to negotiate the restrictive possibilities of what can be spoken in each set.” The capacity for speaking across, the trans-speech of the border subject, thus generates possibilities, creates a future ordered symbolically in the realm of the imaginary. One means of imagining a future for the border subject lies in Paredes’s contrapuntal response to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Juxtaposing Paredes’s collection of poetry, Between Two Worlds (1991), first with Norman Rockwell’s illustrations of the Four Freedoms and Carlos Bulosan’s “Freedom Is Not an Intangible Thing” and then with George I. Sánchez’s Forgotten People (1996) and Emma Tenayuca’s “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” Saldívar identifies in Paredes’s work alternative possibilities for modernism that “[prefigure] an era of renewed cultural integrity in the imaginary ground between two worlds in the borderlands of culture.”

For Paredes, the effacement of difference for the greater good of the nation is no possibility at all when faced with the memory of that difference and the stark realities attendant on it. In a beautiful reading of Paredes’s poem, “Guitarreros,” Saldívar suggests that the Mexican American at the turn of the century is, like el hijo desobediente, “a sign which shall be spoken against, a sign of contra-diction (desdicho), in fact the sign of his own contradiction (desdichado).” No longer capable of sustaining the traditions that have characterized his or her cultural history, nor desirous of accepting wholesale the technological, economic, and political changes that modernity brings, Mexican American modern consciousness is forced consistently to speak against itself. When Saldívar reads, in chapters nine and ten, Paredes’s journalistic writings, he sees in their veiled SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) speak an emerging awareness of a similarly bifurcated or “checkerboard” consciousness among the Japanese during post-war occupation. In the descriptions of black market economies, the ginza entertainment district, and shifts in popular culture, Saldívar recognizes the negotiation between cultural legacy and encroaching capitalistic modernity. Paredes’s poetic understanding of the inconsistencies in Mexican American life and consciousness thus rings true among other dominated cultures and nations.
Ultimately Saldívar’s powerfully nuanced and remarkably perceptive reading of Paredes’s life and works reveals the latter’s “extraordinary insight, decades ahead of its time, namely, that the transnational is not only a structure of abstract ideas and ideology. It is also an experience of transit, transition, and transitoriness from one lived experience in a particular historical place into the experience of a different geosocial structure and its altered social and emotional space.” The stakes of this discussion thus transcend the particular geography of the United States-Mexico border. The borderlands of culture in the twenty-first century are located as much in Baghdad, Iraq as in Brownsville, Texas. (Indeed, the repeated return in the text to the now defunct Mexican port city of Bagdad eerily invokes the presence less of the Southwest and more of the Middle East.) In eminently graceful and ever gracious prose, Ramón Saldívar demonstrates that the questions that Paredes formulated as constitutive of his creative, journalistic, and later ethnographic work address precisely the issues of difference and belonging faced by citizens and non-citizens of all nations the world over. Formidable and innovative, The Borderlands of Culture calls for a radical rethinking of borderlands studies and their import for a deeper understanding of (trans)culture in the 21st century.