Maya Conquistador CL

These cultural excursions into the ""conflicted yet enamored history"" of Mexican American interchange sporadically catch fire, but more often they're too thinly researched and too dense with theory to do more than set off sparks. It's not for lack of subject matter. Limon, a professor of English and anthropology, is interested in how everything from the meteoric rises of Texas politicians Henry Cisneros and Ann Richards to the fiction of Cormac McCarthy speaks to a complicated history of border crossings and power politics. In the face of repeated Anglo romanticization of Mexico as sensual and fatalistic, he wonders, how can artists and intellectuals on both sides of this divide present affirmative imagery? Limon finds answers in the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, such classic Westerns as High Noon and Southwestern kitsch as expressed in the ballad ""El Paso,"" in whose cross-cultural love affair he discerns ""a kind of victory for that culture and its people at a time when such recognitions were few and far between."" Yet only his discussion of the career of pop singer Selena (""at a moment of absolute perceived political failure,"" she provided ""the only remaining possibility of freedom and triumph with integrity"") fully supports his arguments. Some readers will enjoy the author's theoretical play, but others will prefer an interpretation capable of more than suggestion. (Dec.)