As this landmark anthology confirms, charting the intellectual influence of Américo Paredes is a filial obligation in an academic lineage of at least three generations of scholars and cultural activists since his retirement from the University of Texas in 1984. Twelve scholars include three from the cohort of his doctoral students, two converts from biology and engineering to the humanities, one family friend and biographer, and the others who demonstrate the scope and global reach of don Américo's ideas and ideals. Interdisciplinary perspectives include literary criticism, comparative literature, feminism, history, anthropology, folklore, sociology, and regional and border studies.
In 1958, Paredes's feisty, innovative, and rock-solid dissertation became a book, With his Pistol in his Hand, which sold less than 1000 copies by 1965, then exploded into dozens of editions as it became a foundational text and primer for the emerging academic movement of Chicano studies. In graduate school, his mentors encouraged him to explore other ballad traditions, and other borders. He abandoned the diffusionist and motif-driven currents of traditional folkloristics and became a pioneer of performance studies, paying unprecedented attention to the historical and social contexts of expressive culture. Two of his most durable contributions are the paradigm of intercultural conflict and resistance at the heart of Tejano culture, and a new borderless geography of a Greater Mexico.
In the present anthology, Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sánchez, noting the response of Chicana critics to the bristling male construct of pistol-packing border conflict and cultural nationalism, deconstruct and historicize the notion of Greater Mexico, not so much as the transnational imaginary that later critics propose, but as an evolving point of reference across many decades of research.
Three Paredes PhDs offer prodigious displays of scholarship, all theorizing and striving towards more comprehensive frames for their work, the work of their mentor, and his place in the tradition of pensadores in the Latin American intellectual tradition. Richard Flores admits his delight with his early reading of With his Pistol in his Hand and the merciless, almost satirical attacks on the revered Texas Ranger historian and apologist Walter Prescott Webb. Later, he realizes the role of both contending scholars in forging the dialectic of Texas modernity. José Limón wrestles with the lionization of his mentor as a founder of Chicano studies and public intellectual, even though his "valor cívico" is largely absent at the most critical political crossroads of Tejano history in his lifetime. John Holmes McDowell deploys the hybrid border methodology he learned from Paredes to construct a carefully wrought frame of "transitionality" to appreciate the poetic iconicity of the décima and corrido as border genres; to chart the transformation of the corrido protagonist of "Valentín de la Sierra" from counter-revolutionary martyr in Mexico to Chicano hero in the borderlands; and to understand the prodigious bilingual verbal play of Austin school children as emergent counter-hegemonic discourse.
Noted Chicana folklorist María Herrera-Sobek revisits Paredes's innovative analysis of bilingual jokelore as a true folk critique that unmasks and exposes the dark legacies of racism and discrimination along the border. His studies helped transform the static notion of folklore as cultural maintenance to an expressive response to cultural conflict, using the rhetorical power of sarcasm and satire.
Sociologist Alfredo Mirandé adds to another celebrated focus of Paredes's research, the politics of ethnography in minority communities, from Mexico City to Manila, with examples from his renowned work with the Muxes of Juchitán, Mexico. Central to the argument is the proviso that what is recorded in the field should never be interpreted literally, but rather as performance by members of the minority community, some of whom are quite ready to trick the ethnographer.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith and José R. López Morín globalize the example of Paredes's conception of the border. Sadowski-Smith contends that Paredes created a trope for border writing and vocabulary on racial and ethnic conflict that opened the way for world literatures. Writers of Europe, Africa, and Asia document their borders and how refugees cross them, whether they are fences, walls, rivers, oceans, or deserts. López Morín links the intercultural experience of Paredes to El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega as members of two conflicting cultural groups at distinct moments in Latin American history. When one group perceives itself as superior and subordinates the other, many cultural parallels emerge.
Two scholars, Monika Kaup and Omar Valerio-Jiménez, follow the tradition of ballad scholarship that Paredes pioneered. Although he was familiar with the everyday contraband in his day and the portrayal of the smuggler as border hero, chances are good that he would group most modern narcocorridos in the same "pseudo-corrido" category as the ballads that emerged with the Mexican film industry. For his analysis, Valerio-Jiménez selects three key corridos that express political ideology, ethnic identity, and nationalism. The exemplary heroes include Juan N. Cortina, the border patriot and raider, Ignacio Zaragoza, the Tejano hero of the Battle of Puebla, and General Ulysses S. Grant, the scourge of the Confederacy.
Historian, Paredes biographer, and loyal friend of the family, Manuel Medrano offers a heartfelt, personal testimony and reflections on his border scholar hero, having been present at the poignant moment when the ashes of Américo and his wife were released into the currents of his beloved Río Bravo. A majority of the authors also offer a testimonial dimension to this commemorative anthology.
This reviewer will likewise take the same liberty. When I first met Paredes at his 1994 homenaje in Austin, he greeted me warmly as he would an old friend. I was surprised to learn he had consulted with my late father, the applied linguist Enrique E. Lamadrid, in his many visits to the University of Texas. Don Américo was careful to dedicate his new book to Enrique R., the folklorist, to distinguish us.
Roberto Cantú cast his editorial net wide to gather together this anthology, but such collections ultimately are defined as much by what they exclude as by what they include. Unlike the merciless philippic redolent with sarcasm directed at Walter Prescott Webb, Paredes was much more moderate and respectful toward his fellow Mexican American and Mexican colleagues, the folklorists Aurelio M. Espinosa and Vicente T. Mendoza, and Arturo Campa. Paredes credits Mendoza's work for clarifying the history of the balladry of Greater Mexico, including New Mexico and California, but takes him to task for his Mexico-centric diffusionist views of corrido traditions.
Don Américo is a bit more colorful in his critique of pioneer southern Colorado linguist and folklorist Aurelio M. Espinosa, almost reveling in his sarcastic portrayal of his Hispanophile leanings. While fully acknowledging his contributions, Paredes persists in dueling with a ghost, since Espinosa died in 1958, the same year that With his Pistol in his Hand was published. Paredes correctly surmises that the early twentieth-century identification with Spanish heritage was part of a larger political strategy to achieve statehood after seventy-four long years as a U.S. Territory, since the powers in Washington, D.C., considered us too Indian and too Mexican to be American. It is important to note that Paredes never conducted fieldwork in Nuevo México. If he had, he would have noticed the erasure of the Genízaro heritage of Hispanicized enemy Indian captives and freemen, of fully one third of the population, whose favorite ballads were the female-gendered inditas.
To this day, every time I lecture in Texas, I am puzzled by persistent questions about the Spanish and Conquistador fantasy heritage we supposedly cultivate. Somehow Nuevo México became a blank space on the map of Chicano studies, although the cultural influence and example of Américo Paredes runs as deep in the Upper Río Grande as it does in El Valle.
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[Review length: 1268 words • Review posted on October 11, 2018]