A Press Built Across the Line
Binational Press / Editorial Binacional was founded in 1987 through a joint agreement between San Diego State University and the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Based in the linked border cities of Calexico and Mexicali, the project was conceived not simply as a U.S. press publishing books about Mexico, nor as a Mexican press interpreting the United States, but as a genuinely shared editorial venture.
The collaboration grew from the work of SDSU Imperial Valley professor Harry Polkinhorn and UABC professor, writer, and editor Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz. From the beginning, the press brought together emerging and established Mexican and U.S. writers and scholars whose work engaged border experience. Editorial decisions, production labor, expenses, translation, and publication responsibilities were divided across the institutions.
The resulting books are simultaneously regional and international. Literature sits beside visual art, dance, language politics, personal essay, poetry, and criticism. English and Spanish repeatedly occupy the same volumes—not as decorative signs of multiculturalism, but as working languages of the project itself.
The Binational Books
Seven volumes from the core SDSU/UABC Binational Press sequence survive here as a compact record of border studies before “the border” became an academic industry unto itself. Each title now has its own PAGER page, with expanded description, bibliographic information, purchase links where available, and editor biographies.
Harry Polkinhorn · Rogelio Reyes · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, eds.
Bilingual criticism and theory on Mexican/U.S. border literature.
José Manuel Di Bella Martínez · Harry Polkinhorn · Rogelio Reyes · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, eds.
Short fiction from Mexico and the United States in a deliberately binational frame.
Harry Polkinhorn · Rogelio Reyes · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, eds.
Border art, performance, activism, and visual culture across California and Baja California.
Harry Polkinhorn · Rogelio Reyes · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, eds.
Language policy, bilingualism, literacy, and social life in the borderlands.
Harry Polkinhorn · Rogelio Reyes · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, eds.
Eight poets, two countries, and multiple traditions of border poetics.
Harry Polkinhorn · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz · Rogelio Reyes, eds.
Dance, choreography, criticism, and performance culture on both sides of the line.
Harry Polkinhorn · Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz · Rogelio Reyes, eds.
Personal essays and crónicas exploring lived border experience.
Regional + International
The original Binational Press page described the experiment as simultaneously regional and international. That formulation still catches what is unusual about these books: they were produced by institutions close enough to share a border culture while belonging to different nations, languages, publishing systems, and intellectual traditions.
That proximity made the collaboration practical. The books made the collaboration visible.
Historical note adapted from the original SDSU Press Binational Press catalogue and Caroline Lemke, “First Binational Press Is Set to Roll: San Diego State, Baja University to Focus on Border Issues,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1987.