The refreshing variety that characterizes the creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú stems from her intimate connection to a crucial series of literal and figurative borders. Born on 3 January 1947 in the border community of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, she moved with her family across the river to Laredo, Texas, shortly thereafter. The rich culture of the U.S./Mexican border region strongly underlies Cantú's creative and scholarly work, which itself crosses many figurative borders between genres, prescribed conventions, and subject matter. Her identity as a writer pivots on the border hybridism so central to the age of postmodernism in the late twentieth century.

Cantú, the oldest of eleven children of Virginia Ramón Becerra and Florentino Cantú Vargas, was the beneficiary of the rich heritage of her ancestors' long presence on both sides of the border. Even though her maternal grandfather...