Introduction

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