American Encounters

The idea of crossing the border between the United States and what award-winning anthropologist José Limón calls "Greater Mexico" has always conjured images of racial hostility and exclusion. Through literature, film, song, and dance, American Encounters explores an alternative history of attraction and desire between the U.S. and Greater Mexico, offering a vision of hope for the future.[Limón] has proven that Chicano critics are the new players in the field of cultural studies.--Rafael Castillo, San Antonio Express-News

"[A] powerful and graceful book, as alive to the seductions as it is to the dangers of inevitable encounters."--Doris Sommer, author of Proceed With Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas

"José Limón's American Encounters is the beginning of a critical hope fulfilled. Cultural critics can move over and make room, listen up and encounter a Chicano critic who not only speaks about social and symbolic borderlands but who speaks from within the borderlands of race, nation, class, and the Chicano/Mexican/Gringo imagination. Limón writes a new map of cultural relationships-southern culture and Greater Mexico, Katherine Anne Porter and Selena, Manuel Gamio and Gary Cooper, Sandra Cisneros and the other Cisneros-and shapes it with a new sensibility of erotic perversions and creativities."--David Carrasco, author of City of Sacrifice

"[Limón's] approach is not only nondogmatic but deliciously eclectic, building bridges between popular culture and the highbrow, between literature, politics, and the social sciences."--Ilan StavansJosé E. Limón, author of Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas, is professor of English and anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.