[Many, many, many times over the last year, I’ve wished that more Americans would have the chance to read my writing and learn even a few of the many lessons I believe it offers for us in 2025. So for my annual Wishes for the Holiday Elves series, I wanted to revisit my six books, highlighting something specific from each that I think we could takeaway today. Leading up to a special post on my awesome wife’s Christmastastic new book!]
Largely because I had started this blog in the meantime, by the time I published my second book, Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (2011), I was already thinking and working actively on the goal of creating public scholarship. I thus hope and believe that the whole book would be of interest to broad audiences in 2025, and certainly would argue that we all desperately need to engage with the book’s overarching thesis, my vision of cross-cultural transformation as a foundational and shared element of American identity. But the book is focused on individual American identities and stories (as captured in autobiographical works by those individuals), and if I were to highlight just one of them that it would especially important for all Americans to read & remember here in 2025, the answer is a no-brainer: Gloria Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa is not an easy read (to put it very mildly), but she has so much to tell us about not only the border (although that would be enough, given how much it has become a metonym for so many things America), but also what it really means to be American (in contrast to the simplistic visions we often have). If folks aren’t gonna read my book, they sure should check out Borderlands/La Frontera (1987).
Next wish tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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