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