Introduction
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2012
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Journal of American Folklore
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Abstract
américo paredes published his now classic work, With His Pistol in His Hand: A
Border Ballad and Its Hero, in 1958, and a group of scholars—former colleagues and
students of Paredes; let’s call them “disciples of Paredes”—seized on this fiftieth
anniversary of that august event to commemorate and celebrate his intellectual
legacy and to assess its impact on folkloristics and related fields of inquiry. Paredes
put forward a new way of thinking about folklore and provided a new orientation
for the discipline, embracing social difference and contestation as central concerns.
A witness to struggles played out in South Texas between people of Mexican descent
and their Anglo-American invaders, Paredes was deeply aware of expressive culture
as an arena of social struggle, and his studies of corridos, coplas, décimas, casos, and
other traditional forms were embedded in a perceptive reading of power relations
defining their contexts of production. Paredes, a native son of the border, naturally
cast his gaze in two directions—northwards to the Anglo-American ascendancy,
and southwards to Mexico and Latin America as the locus of cultural roots. His
emergence from a border zone that was then (and remains today) a point of international
conflagration conditioned him to appreciate deeply the factors that draw
peoples together and set them
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Published as McDowell, John Holmes. "Introduction." Journal of American Folklore, vol. 125 no. 495, 2012, p. 3-4. © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
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McDowell, John Holmes. "Introduction." Journal of American Folklore, vol. 125 no. 495, 2012, p. 3-4.
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