American Encounters: Greater Mexico, The United States, and the Erotics of Culture (review)

Abstract

American Encounters: The United States, and Erotics of Culture. JOSE E. LIMON. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1998, 241 pp. Jose Limon exemplifies ideal of interdisciplinary scholarship in this boundary-crossing work, which deals with emergence of an unwieldy entity, Greater Mexico, in its protracted engagement with United States. Lim6n works through an impressive array of historical and contemporary material. He draws upon literature, visual arts, political discourse, working-class expressive cultures, postmodern and postcolonial theories, and anthropological studies to bring into view specific cultural practices of people that are variously encompassed by Mexico. In examining Greater Mexico-a label that refers to Mexicans, beyond Laredo and from either side [of border], with all their commonalities and differences (p. 3)-Limon also treats the United States as an Anglo-dominant entity whose representatives have come into contact with and sometimes internalized Mexico and vice versa (p. 3). Hence, Lim6n fundamentally questions all unitary notions linked to these simultaneously mythic and real entities. Though nuanced by many wide-ranging reflections, core of this book is a series of arguments concerning relationship of these powerful cultural orders. Limon provocatively but soundly claims that the American South played a special role (p. 8) in construction of serving as something of an ungentle midwife at birth of a cultural formation that is uncontainable by national boundaries or static, essentialist definitions of culture. He makes this case both in historical and contemporary terms, relying on an impressive collection of cultural representations across a host of fields usually kept apart by academic specialization or various forms of segregation, conceptual or residential and occupational. Limon compiles and analyzes a series of engagements, encounters, performances, and articulations between peoples differently positioned in relationship between Mexico and United States. These subjects can be roughly divided temporally. Reaching back to Civil War and then up through 1960s and Chicano Movement, Limon reviews historiography on American South. He examines literary writings of Katherine Anne Porter in juxtaposition to ethnographic work of Manuel Gamio. He reflects on intriguing points of correspondence between speech styles of lower-class African American and Mexican males; and he critiques history of distorting scholarship on these subjects, and discusses films such as High Noon and Giant, as well as ballads of country western singer, Marty Robbins. Turning to more contemporary sources, Limon explores work of writers Cormac McCarthy and Sandra Cisneros, lyrics and sexuality of Selena, and intriguing plot and imagery of John Sayle's film, Lone Star. These products of popular culture are insightfully linked to developments in Texas politics and to ongoing national debates and obsessions over belonging and difference. Running through this disparate collection are resonances and rearticulations of Limon's opening argument about fundamentally intertwined, mutually informing identities of peoples on both sides of U.S./Mexico border. Limon is cautious about generic versions of border theory and stresses need to be geographically and historically specific when discussing such constructions. The border, for Limon, is not a stark divide between Self and Other. Instead, he focuses on paradoxical commonalities that surprisingly surface in various experiences of identity he relates. This perspective is established early in book as he characterizes American South and Mexico as two peoples sharing defeat, disruption, and demoralization (p. 14) He adds, The subaltern sections of both Mexico and American South thus experienced worst effects of Northern capitalist domination, a domination always deeply inflected with and complicated by racism and expressed in symbolic language and imagery that involved eroticization of self, society, and culture (p. …