Héctor Calderón
Biography
Professor Héctor Calderón is a specialist in Chicana/o, Mexican, and Latin American literature and cultures. He began his career in Latin American literature and early modern Spain. His Conciencia y lenguaje en “El Quijote” y “El obsceno pájaro de la noche” (Pliegos 1987) examines two classic novels within their respective modern and postmodern contexts. However, Calderón is most widely known for his contributions to Chicana/o literary studies. He is one of the field’s leading figures. His co-edited anthology with José David Saldívar, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Duke 1991) is considered one of the founding works in the field. In 2021, the anthology was celebrated with a special round table discussion at the MLA Convention, “Criticism in the Borderlands at Thirty Years.” Panelists discussed the history and impact of the anthology informed by feminist, cultural studies, and Marxist theories as well as a catalyst for later scholarship in the field. His Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders (Texas 2005) is a hemispheric study of Chicana/o literature. His recent The “Aztlán” Mexican Studies Reader, 1974-2016 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press 2018), which highlights the contributions of Chicana/o Studies to the study of Mexico, received three international book awards, two for Academic Themed Book at the 21st Annual International Latino Book Awards and Bronze Award at the Independent Publishers Book Awards–Book Series. His numerous articles, book chapters, and interviews have concentrated on border studies and the Mexican cultural diaspora of North America. In 2022, he contributed essays to The Many Voices of the Los Angeles Novel and the five-volume Brazilian Temas para uma Historia da Literatura Hispanoamericana. His current research projects include Mexican literature, film, and rock, and Mexican American fiction of Los Angeles. He has completed book manuscript, “América Mexicana: Essays on the Mexican Cultural Diaspora of North America.”
At UCLA, Professor Calderon was Inaugural and Founding Chair of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana/o Studies (1994). He has also served as Director of the University of California, Education Abroad Program’s Mexico Study Center (2004-2008) and Founding Executive Director of la Casa de la Universidad de California en México, Asociación Civil. (2006-2008), a UC campus in Mexico City. Prior to coming to UCLA in 1991, Calderón was Professor at Scripps College (1989-1991) and Associate Professor at Yale University (1983-1989).
Professor Calderón has a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature with a Minor in Comparative Literature from Yale University (1981) where he studied with Peter Brooks, Alfred J. MacAdam, and Emir Rodríguez Monegal. As a graduate student at Yale, he was accepted to The School of Criticism and Theory (1978) working with Wolfgang Iser and Fredric Jameson. He has been Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center (1986-1987) and Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University (1996-1997).
During his career at UCLA, Calderón has mentored many graduate students and produced eleven PhDs all working in their respective fields and serving as administrators, such as Dean of Faculty Affairs, Vice President of Instruction, and Director of University Honors. After leaving the UCLA campus, his students have gone on to publish on transborder Indigenous culture, Mexican border narratives, the novel of the Central American diaspora, Peruvian diaspora in the U.S., Afro-Mexico, and Latino Jewish relations.
Professor Calderón was born and raised on the U.S.-Mexico border in Calexico, CA.
Education
- Ph.D. (1981) Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature, Yale University
- The School of Criticism and Theory, University of California Irvine, 1978
- M.A. (1975) Spanish Literature, University of California, Irvine
- B.S. (1968) UCLA Graduate School of Business
Research
- Chicana and Chicano Narrative
- Mexican Literature, Film, and Music
- Border Studies
- Rock en Español
Selected Publications
Books
Conciencia y lenguaje en el Quijote y El obsceno pajaro de la noche
Editorial Pliegos, 1987
Criticism in the Borderlands
Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology
Duke University Press, 1991
This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts—both old and new—draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the “canon”; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume as a whole aims at generating new ways of understanding what counts as culture and “theory” and who counts as a theorist. A selected and annotated bibliography of contemporary Chicano literary criticism is also included. By recovering neglected authors and texts and introducing readers to an emergent Chicano canon, by introducing new perspectives on American literary history, ethnicity, gender, culture, and the literary process itself, Criticism in the Borderlands is an agenda-setting collection that moves beyond previous scholarship to open up the field of Chicano literary studies and to define anew what is American literature.
Contributors: Norma Alarcón, Héctor Calderón, Angie Chabram, Barbara Harlow, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Leal, José E. Limón, Terese McKenna, Elizabeth J. Ordóñez, Genero Padilla, Alvina E. Quintana, Renato Rosaldo, José David Saldívar, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Rosaura Sánchez, Roberto Trujillo
Narratives of Greater Mexico
Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders
University of Texas Press, 2005
Author(s): Héctor Calderón
Once relegated to the borders of literature—neither Mexican nor truly American—Chicana/o writers have always been in the vanguard of change, articulating the multicultural ethnicities, shifting identities, border realities, and even postmodern anxieties and hostilities that already characterize the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is Chicana/o writers’ very in-between-ness that makes them authentic spokespersons for an America that is becoming increasingly Mexican/Latin American and for a Mexico that is ever more Americanized.In this pioneering study, Héctor Calderón looks at seven Chicana and Chicano writers whose narratives constitute what he terms an American Mexican literature. Drawing on the concept of “Greater Mexican” culture first articulated by Américo Paredes, Calderón explores how the works of Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, Rolando Hinojosa, and Sandra Cisneros derive from Mexican literary traditions and genres that reach all the way back to the colonial era. His readings cover a wide span of time (1892-2001), from the invention of the Spanish Southwest in the nineteenth century to the América Mexicana that is currently emerging on both sides of the border. In addition to his own readings of the works, Calderón also includes the writers’ perspectives on their place in American/Mexican literature through excerpts from their personal papers and interviews, correspondence, and e-mail exchanges he conducted with most of them.
The Aztlan Mexican Studies Reader, 1974-2016
Author(s): Héctor Calderón
This set of essays explores the ongoing cultural and political connections between Chicana/o and Mexican history. Edited and introduced by Héctor Calderón, The Aztlán Mexican Studies Reader, 1974-2016 presents thirteen previously published essays together with three essays written specifically for this collection, making a rigorous case for the contributions of Chicana/o studies to the transnational study of Mexico.
The first essay, by Tomás Almaguer, which was also the first to be published, sets the stage with a historical overview that relates how the Chicano movement was rooted in the soil of conquest and colonialism in Mexico. Subsequent essays discuss a range of topics that stress interconnections between Chicana/os and Mexicans: transborder issues such as immigration and labor; Chicana/o and Mexican fiction; femicide and racism in Mexico and their reverberations on both sides of the border; and the development of Mexican art forms-including muralism, cinema, and music-in Mexico and the United States.
HÉCTOR CALDERÓN is a professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is Narratives of Greater Mexico.
Dissertations
Bridget Kevane,” The Autobiographical Voice and the Making of the Self in Bernardo Vega, Sandra Cisneros, Rigoberta Menchú and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,” 1996. Professor of Spanish, Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, College of Letters and Science, Director of Liberal Studies, Montana State University.
Jeffrey Lamb, “Identities on the Margin: Perspectives on Sandra Cisneros, Rosina Conde, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, and Alejandro Morales,” 1997. Professor of Spanish, Vice President of Instruction, Merritt College.
Juanita Heredia, “Latina Writers in the United States: At the Borderlands of a Pan-American Boom,” 1998. Professor of Spanish, Global Languages and Cultures, Northern Arizona University.
Sandra Pérez “The Nuevomexicano Literary Tradition: From Spanish Conquest to Statehood,” 2002. Professor of Spanish, Modern Languages and Literatures, Director University Honors Program, Cal State Fullerton.
Ariel Tumbaga, “Yaqui Warrior Myth: Representations in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Chicana/o and Mexican Cultural Productions and Literature,” 2009. Assistant Professor of Spanish, Antelope Valley College.
Oriel María Siu, “Novelas de la diáspora centroamericana y la colonialidad del poder: Hacia una aproximación de-colonial al estudio de las literaturas centroamericanas,” 2012. Author of Rebeldita la Alegre en el mundo de los Ogros/Rebeldita the Fearless in Ogreland (2020).
Carolyn González, “Las Insometidas de la Ciudad de México: The Novel of Prostitution in Antonia Mora, Sara Sefchovich, and Cristina Rivera Garza,” 2014. Assistant Professor, Cal State University, Monterrey Bay.
Sandra Ruiz, “Escrito con Tinta Roja: The Feminist Investigator in the Fiction of María Elvira Bermúdez, Myriam Laurini, and Patricia Valladares.” 2014. Assistant Professor of Spanish, Founding Faculty for Latin American/Latino Studies and Social Justice Degree Programs, West Los Angeles College.
Audrey Harris, “De lo más pobre y de los más lindo: Transnational Borges and Sandra Cisneros.” 2016. Assistant Adjunct Professor, UCLA, Spanish and Portuguese, 2016-2019; Lecturer CCAS UCLA; Translator with Matthew Gleeson, Amparo Davila’s The House Guest and Other Stories (New Directions Press, 2018).
Alejandro Ramírez Méndez, “Trans-Urban Narratives: Literary Cartographies and Global Cities in the Urban Imagination of Mexico and the U.S.” 2018. Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Cultures, and Race, Washington State University; Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Christian Yanaí Bermúdez-Castro, “Black Mexico’s Sites of Struggle across Borders: The Problem of the Color Line.” 2018. Lecturer, UCLA, Spanish and Portuguese, 2018-2019; Spanish Educator Geffen Academy; Visiting Assistant Professor of Latinx and Chicanx Studies, Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, Texas Christian University.
