Winner · ABS Best Book Award 2026

Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter’s Slow Approach

University of Texas Press

Domino Renee Perez is a Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Mexican American Studies, where her scholarship sits at the intersection of literature, film, and cultural studies. Her work is animated by a sustained attention to how popular narratives construct – and constrain – identity, and to the racialized logics that govern which stories are told, and whose. Across her research, Domino has developed a distinctive critical voice that moves fluidly between close reading and broad cultural analysis, asking not just what texts mean, but what conditions make certain meanings possible.

Domino’s research spans Mexican American and Latine literature, Young Adult fiction, film and popular culture, and the intersecting dynamics of race, class, and gender in the American borderlands. Her approach is notably integrative, drawing folklore, memoir, literary criticism, and cultural history into conversation with one another rather than treating them as separate scholarly registers. This willingness to work across forms and genres reflects a deeper commitment: that the most important questions about culture resist the boundaries of any single discipline.

Her scholarship has found expression across a rich body of work. Her earlier book There Was a Woman: La Llorona From Folklore to Popular Culture (University of Texas Press, 2008) examined one of the most enduring and contested figures in US-Mexican folklore, tracing La Llorona’s transformation from oral tradition into popular media. She co-edited Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and has published widely in book chapters and articles ranging from film and Indigeneity in Mexican American studies to the politics of young adult fiction.

Domino’s most recent book, Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter’s Slow Approach (University of Texas Press), the winner of the ABS 2026 Book Award, brings together these threads with particular force. Part cultural history, part literary criticism, part memoir, it examines the nuanced and often constrained portrayal of Mexican American fathers in contemporary literature and film.

Fatherhood in the Borderlands brings readers right to the intersection of the white cultural mainstream in the United States and Mexican American cultural productions, carefully considering the legibility and illegibility of Brown fathers in contemporary media.

The book reveals a shifting tension in the literal and figurative borderlands of popular narratives, showing how form, genre, and subject work together to determine the roles Mexican American fathers are allowed to occupy – and calling attention to the cultural landscape that has allowed such racialized representation to persist, largely unopposed, for so many years.

Domino is also a dedicated and celebrated teacher. She holds the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, a University of Texas system-wide honor recognizing excellence in undergraduate teaching, and in 2023 was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers: a distinction that reflects the same qualities that animate her scholarship: intellectual rigor, genuine curiosity, and a commitment to making difficult ideas genuinely accessible.

What perhaps most distinguishes Domino’s work is that it grows from a deeply personal orientation toward cultural life. Growing up in Houston, Texas, she spent her childhood consuming books and films, thinking carefully about what they revealed. That early habit of attentive, unhurried engagement became the methodological core of her scholarship: a “slow” approach to race, class, and gender in the borderlands that trusts the accumulation of careful observation over the quick resolution of theory. It is an approach that makes Fatherhood in the Borderlands not just a work of criticism, but a model for how meaningful cultural inquiry can be done.

This book is exceptional…It sheds light on [borderlands concepts] in a very poetic way and envisions lines of inspiration from all the lost academic explorers who do research in different ways to find truths…The narrative of the book is deep and…it picks, winks, and gifts references, like the Easter eggs in video games – allusions through the pages for us to discover. These mentions of literature and films give you an idea of a different identity of a father, a family, a tribe, or union of people with the concepts of origin, class, gender, role, and opportunity having valor in life – all of them from the eyes and memory of a daughter’s slow approach into the fatherhood in the borderlands. -Journal of Borderlands Studies