Ramon Saldivar and President Obama
By Elaine Ayala for My San Antonio [Click header to go to original article and additional information.]
Stanford professor and Brownsville native Ramón Saldívar was among the nine winners of the National Humanities Medal last week. It’s an award given to “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.”
The selection of a Chicano studies scholar is timely, as Chicano and Mexican American studies are under attack in Arizona and as anti-immigrant, anti-Latino tones continue to be struck across the country. Saldívar’s scholarship is around globalization, transnationalism and Chicano studies.
President Obama called his exploration of identity along the border “bold.”
“In his studies of Chicano literature and the development of the novel in Europe and America, Dr. Saldívar highlights the cultural and literary markings that divide and unite us,” the president said.
The director of Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Saldívar is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his master and doctorate degrees in comparative literature from Yale University. For Brownsville natives it’s probably just as important that he’s a graduate of Brownsville High School.
He’s the author of “The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary,” “Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference” and “Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce. He’s at work on a fourth book about the perspectives of ethnic writers born after the civil rights era.
In a piece on the National Endowment for the Humanities web site, he said:
“From downtown Brownsville, you can literally look across the river and, a hundred yards away or so, there’s Mexico. To me, growing up, that was always normal life, that was the way the world worked: bilingual, bi-national, transcultural in all sorts of ways.”
Saldívar comes of a large family that birthed two other scholars. One is San Antonio resident Sonia Saldívar Hull, a professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She’s director of the Women’s Studies Department at UTSA. Another sibling, José Saldívar, is professor of comparative literature at Stanford.
One other Latino scholar received the medal this year. Professor Teofilo Ruiz teaches at UCLA.
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Stanford professor and Brownsville native Ramón Saldívar was among the nine winners of the National Humanities Medal last week. It’s an award given to “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.”
The selection of a Chicano studies scholar is timely, as Chicano and Mexican American studies are under attack in Arizona and as anti-immigrant, anti-Latino tones continue to be struck across the country. Saldívar’s scholarship is around globalization, transnationalism and Chicano studies.
President Obama called his exploration of identity along the border “bold.”
“In his studies of Chicano literature and the development of the novel in Europe and America, Dr. Saldívar highlights the cultural and literary markings that divide and unite us,” the president said.
The director of Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Saldívar is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his master and doctorate degrees in comparative literature from Yale University. For Brownsville natives it’s probably just as important that he’s a graduate of Brownsville High School.
He’s the author of “The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary,” “Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference” and “Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce. He’s at work on a fourth book about the perspectives of ethnic writers born after the civil rights era.
In a piece on the National Endowment for the Humanities web site, he said:
“From downtown Brownsville, you can literally look across the river and, a hundred yards away or so, there’s Mexico. To me, growing up, that was always normal life, that was the way the world worked: bilingual, bi-national, transcultural in all sorts of ways.”
Saldívar comes of a large family that birthed two other scholars. One is San Antonio resident Sonia Saldívar Hull, a professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She’s director of the Women’s Studies Department at UTSA. Another sibling, José Saldívar, is professor of comparative literature at Stanford.
One other Latino scholar received the medal this year. Professor Teofilo Ruiz teaches at UCLA.
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