Ramón Saldívar is professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, Professor Saldívar received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1977. He was a faculty member in the English Department of the University of Texas, Austin before coming to Stanford in 1991. A Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Saldívar is widely recognized as one of the pioneering scholars in the field of Chicano literature, and is the author of numerous publications in the field. These include: "A Dialectic of Difference: Towards A theory of the Chicano Novel" (1979); "Chicano Literature and Ideology" (1981); Mexico and the United States: Intercultural Relations in the Humanities (1984); Chicano Narrative: Dialectics of Difference (1990); The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006); and The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn (2013). Among his many awards and honors, he is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal. In this interview, Professor Saldívar discusses: his family background and upbringing; his educational journey from high school to UT Austin; his graduate experience at Yale University as a Chicano and establishing himself in the profession; his reflections on the state of literature and Chicana/o Studies and how the field evolved over his career; the aims and contributions of his scholarship in the field; the reception of Chicana/o Studies at the universities he served; receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama; as well as his thoughts on important works, themes, and high points in the field's development over the last fifty years.