Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico in 1961 to a middle-class Jewish family; his father's ancestors had immigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement.

Stavans's work includes both scholarly monographs, such as The Hispanic Condition (1995), and comic strips, as in his graphic book Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000).

He has written influential essays on the Mexican comedian, Mario Moreno ("Cantinflas"); the lampooner José Guadalupe Posada, the Chicano leader César Chávez, and the Tejana singer Selena.

Stavans traces the artistic development of Márquez from childhood to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish in 1967 (it was translated by Gregory Rabassa and published in English in 1970).

It includes pieces on writing On Borrowed Words, the legacy of the Holocaust in Latin America, the growth of Latino studies in the U.S. academy, Stavans's relationship with The Jewish Daily Forward, and translation in the shaping of Hispanic culture.

[8] He also includes pieces on writers Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodríguez, Isaiah Berlin, and W. G. Sebald, and close readings of Don Quixote and the oeuvre of Roberto Bolaño.

[12] Stavans says Spanglish first developed after 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed after the Mexican–American War ended and a large portion of Mexican land was ceded to the United States.

He describes various distinctive varieties of Spanglish, such as Cubonics (Cuban-American), Dominicanish (Dominican-American), Nuyorican (Puerto Rican in New York), and Chicano (Mexican American).

[14] In 2002, Stavans published a Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia.

Stavans stated that Spanglish is today's manifestation of "mestizaje," the mixture of racial, social, and cultural traits of Anglos and Latinos, similar to what occurred during the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century.

These translations cannot be the result of a poor attempt at mimicking bilingual speech, since Stavans is proficient at producing realistic code-switched language in his other writings.

It also features a section with samples by Latin American writers, such as Octavio Paz and Roberto Fernández Retamar, discussing the United States.

Among the featured writers in the anthology are Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Giannina Braschi, Julia de Burgos, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Junot Díaz, Cristina García (journalist), Oscar Hijuelos, José Martí, Octavio Paz, Luis Rodríguez, Rolando Pérez (Cuban poet), Esmeralda Santiago, and William Carlos Williams.

Stavans also coedited The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry, (2011) a 728 page volume that contextualizes the history of Latin American poets, including José Martí, Rubén Darío, César Vallejo, Oswald de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Luis Palés Matos, Octavio Paz, Giannina Braschi, and Roberto Bolaño.

Mordecai Drache, who writes for Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, discusses with Stavans the Bible as a work of literature in With All Thine Heart (2010).

Steven G. Kellman published The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside (2019), the first book-length study of the author and his work (Latinx and Latin American Profiles, Pittsburgh).

[26] Conversations with Ilan Stavans (PBS, La Plaza)[27] Morirse está en hebreo / My Mexican Shivah (2006) Directed by Alejandro Springall.