American Encounters

The idea of crossing the border between the U.S. and "Greater Mexico" has always conjured images of racial hostility and exclusion. In American Encounters, award-winning anthropologist LimUn offers an alternative history of attraction and des ire between the U.S. and Mexico that both embraces the Taco Bell chihuahua and envisions hope for the future of border relations. From the writing of Katherine Anne Porter to the life of the late Chicana pop star Selena; from the career of the distinguished Mexican anthropologist Gamio to Henry Cisneros and the 1990 Texas gubernatorial campaign, LimUn explores history, literat ure, film, song, and dance to understand the deeply entwined and ambivalent relationship that has existed between those on both sides of the Rio Grande over the last 150 years. "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. At the end we begin to realize how unfinished the American encounters are." -David Carrasco, author of Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire "Probing beyond cliches and stereotypes, Limon writes with passion and precision." -Gustavo Perez Firmat, author of Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?

José 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.