At the January 2026 Modern Language Association (MLA) Awards Ceremony, MLA President Tina Lu presented Ramón Saldívar with the MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. A professor of English and comparative literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, Saldívar is renowned as a scholar of Chicano studies and narrative form. What follows is a transcript of his acceptance speech outlining his trajectory from reading an encyclopedia as a child in a Texas border town to probing questions of the transnational imaginary, race, and literary form across his scholarly career.

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Thank you, Tina. I am deeply moved and honored to receive this award. In my everyday teaching, as I look out at the eager, excited, and marvelous students at Stanford, I have always reminded myself to make their experience in my classroom worth their while, to teach them something that matters that they can take into their everyday lives. It is how I bring my scholarship and my pedagogy into deep connection.

Across my career, I have focused on the idea of the literature of the Americas, especially of the borderlands as transnational social spaces for hybrid, multi-voiced aesthetics, and the complexity of identity. Borderland stories, through their transnational imaginaries, have intrigued me for the ways they reveal how marginalized aesthetic traditions reimagine emancipatory possibilities. 

The question that drives me is: what is so special about transnational imaginaries?

One thing that makes narratives written from the transborder regions important is that they escape the binary narrative of race relations. While “race” in the U.S. context has usually, and rightly, referred to the social and legal patterns of hierarchy characterizing the black-white racial binary, the multi-racial realities characteristic of contemporary transborder regions worldwide create social structures and discourses articulating a related, but different, narrative. It is one based on multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference. With a sense of this transborder difference—shaped by regional, hemispheric, and global parameters—borderlands stories often challenge us to imagine and then create a future unlike the present. 

Let me tell you a story, one that I hope encapsulates a sense of the utopian possibilities of the border narratives I am speaking about. 

One day in the late spring of 1958, my sister Sonia and I came home from school to find that our mother had done something completely out of character. There, in the middle of the tiny front room that we used as a combination TV room, den, living room, and dining room, sitting in partially unwrapped splendor, like a Mexican Christmas in July, was a gift: a splendid stack of magnificently gleaming, white faux-leather, gilt-edged, World Book Encyclopedias. 

Now, I’m not sure that I can easily convey to you that we were not an encyclopedia sort of family. As some of you know, both my sister Sonia Saldívar-Hull and my brother José David Saldívar are also academics, literature professors to be exact. And so it still sometimes happens when someone figures out that we’re not three random Saldívars but are in fact related, that they imagine that we’re from an academic family. Surely, they say, your father was a professor of romance philology, or maybe an English teacher. He was not. My father had a fourth-grade education and was a laborer all his working life. My mother graduated from high school and was an avid reader, but she was not an academic.

In fact, up to that moment in 1958, I don’t remember any books around the house other than maybe schoolbooks, or perhaps a random comic book, or maybe a few copies of House Beautiful magazine.

Ok, I’m exaggerating. There were two books in the house before the encyclopedia. One was the Bible, but that book was not for reading; it was for venerating. So, the Bible didn’t count. 

The other one was a textbook on plumbing. Our father must have considered changing careers at some point. But since the book was in pristine condition when I discovered it in the dark recesses of a back closet, and looked unread, it must have represented an abandoned project. I tried to read the book on plumbing but couldn’t get into it. Over the years, there have been numerous times that I have regretted not having read that plumbing book. But back to the encyclopedia.

What had gotten into my mother? What was she thinking to have spent an outrageous sum of money for the encyclopedia, money that we certainly did not have. For books!?! Who in the world had sold her this utopian dream? For that is certainly what it represented.

That spring and summer, Sonia and I started reading the encyclopedia. I started at the beginning, Volume 1, A, “aardvark.” It took a while, but I eventually made it all the way to Z, “zygote.” I read that encyclopedia like a novel, charmed by the contingency that each volume was measured and ordered by a different letter of the alphabet. Twenty-four volumes in one fell swoop. It made reading Proust and Trollope and Balzac in later life seem normal. It probably also explains my love of reading Victorian novels. I like to tell people that the result of that reading is that I have encyclopedic knowledge. The only problem is that it ends in 1958, the year our encyclopedia was published and never updated, in our household. 

But back to my story: Who was that door-to-door salesman who sold my mother that Book? And what was he doing in the Villa Verde section of the barrios of Brownsville, Texas, selling encyclopedias, for heaven’s sake? And how had he been able to lure my mother into the wonderland of the Book? What stories had he told her about what was in store for those who opened those magic portals to utopia? How many other lives had he disrupted by introducing the promise of encyclopedic knowledge into everyday experience? Why books and not plastic slip covers? 

My reading and re-reading of that World Book Encyclopedia took me eventually to libraries where I discovered the sublimity of sports biographies and the romance of science fiction, the passions of my imaginative life during my early teenage years. As Fredric Jameson, one of my intellectual heroes, once famously said, “science fiction” allows us to re-imagine the real. 

In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson argued that science fiction, like utopia, is “a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right” (2005: 232). 

Border narratives are like that. They offer just such meditations on the impossible and unrealizable. Even while sobered by the legacies of late-capitalism; the return to old-style white supremacy; renovated policies of economic immiseration; and the outright manifestation of unbridled state power against Black, Native, Asian American, and Latinx communities, in those narratives the desire for a Utopian future remains undiminished. It does so even in the realization of its compromised potential. 

This seeming contradiction between the lack of belief in a utopian future and an undiminished desire for it propels border literature to find ways of conceiving the future otherwise.

I didn’t know it at the time, but as a child and later as a young scholar, I was trying to re-imagine the real. God knows it needed it. Without even being aware of it, I was forging an appreciation for stories and tales, formalized in books. In short, I was beginning to live by the Book.

By the Book, I grew up wondering whether it was possible to be different from, and yet part of, the world. What difference does difference offer? How do different people manage to live together? And what do books have to do with these questions? I began looking for answers in the Book.

After high school, I left the world of my Mexican family for that of white America when I went away to college at The University of Texas at Austin. There, I became a Chicano by choice, when I understood that the world was not the one that I had experienced as a child in Mexican-American south Texas. 

I realize now that the most important experience of my college life was the reading of two books my first semester at UT Austin:

One was Shakespeare’s The Tempest: especially the scenes with Caliban.

The other was The Autobiography of Malcolm X (co-authored with Alex Haley).

Both books transfigured my thinking about race, politics, and literature. In these books and others, I found a different kind of imaginary speculation about the real: a contradictory mixing of the imaginary and the real that I have in other places called “speculative realism.” 

This is both an intellectual and a personal issue for me, one that I have used throughout my scholarly life as a guide. Over time, the Book opened the door to my ability to re-imagine reality.

Lately, I have been thinking about migration, diaspora, and the continuing crisis in the US/Mexico/Central American and now Caribbean and South American transborder regions, especially concerning forced migration, asylum, mass incarceration, and the urgent considerations of racial and social justice. As I do so, I ask myself: what should be the function of literary history and theory under today’s conditions of the relentless dismissal of cultural and literary studies, scorn for critical work, the demonization of critical race studies, and even of political disdain for scientific knowledge? 

Such questions lead me back to another weird and wonderful book from 1958, one that I read later, after Shakespeare and Malcolm X, Américo Paredes’ With His Pistol in His Hand. 

Recording the evanescent complexities and fabulous obscurities of events in history, in both imaginative and analytical modes, the great folklorist, ethnographer and fabulist Américo Paredes understood that the crucial question a writer must ask is: What emotional needs and desires are fulfilled in remembering and recording a specific history in a distinguishable way? 

It was a question that Paredes, another of my intellectual heroes, pursued as a social and a political aesthetic project for the entirety of his intellectual life. His literary writings, his ethnographic and folkloric texts, his autobiographical works, and his Cold War era writings from the Transpacific Asian borderland regions, pursued how impulses originating from local histories are transformed into structures of feeling that link them to transnational designs. 

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, those structures of feeling are articulated into actions that matter. They do so most powerfully when they are concretized as knowledge that makes its way into books. 

As I stand here with you tonight, I’m imagining what difference knowledge makes, all that knowledge that all of us in this room have assembled over the past half century. 

The MLA Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award really recognizes our mutual efforts, the creation of our collective knowledge. It honors all of us, our joint venture of imagining and creating a new world, and how that knowledge about our various specific, local, and global communities, making its way into books, makes a difference. 

I’m imagining that some border child somewhere is reading and using our accumulated, shared knowledge to change her life. 

I’m imagining her reading a NEW-World Book Encyclopedia. 

I hope that she’s loving it. 

Thank you very much.