Acknowledgments --Introduction : In memoriam -- pt. 1. History and remembrance as social aesthetics -- 1. "The memory is all that matters" -- 2. A life in the borderlands -- pt. 2. Fictions of the transnational imaginary -- 3. The checkerboard of consciousness in George Washington Gómez -- 4. Transnational modernisms : Paredes, Roosevelt, Rockwell, Bulosan, and the four freedoms -- 5. Paredes and the modernist vernacular intellectuals : George I. Snchez and Emma Tenayuca -- 6. The borders of modernity -- 7. Bilingual aesthetics and the law of the heart -- 8. Border subjects and transnational sites : The hammon and the beans and other stories -- 9. Narrative and the idioms of race, nation, and identity -- 10. The postwar borderlands and the origins of the transnational imaginary : the occupation-era writings in Pacific stars and stripes and El universal -- 11. The shadow and the imaginary functioning of institutions -- Conclusion : A transsentimental journey -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index.