Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique is an incisive articulation of the career of renowned scholar of the folklore and culture of greater Mexico, Américo Paredes. While this text is the thirty-fourth installment of the Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture from the University of Texas Press, José E. Limón uses his intellectual labor to cogently render an explication of Américo Paredes’ life and work beyond the boundaries of South Texas, critically extending Paredes’ intellectual legacy beyond the study of balladry of the U.S.-Mexico border. The author adeptly articulates the intertwining of Paredes’ life history with his trajectory as an author, academic, and public intellectual, examining Paredes’ life and work as an assertion of the political and the personal to situate him as an early contributor to the academic field of Cultural Studies.
Rather than beginning with what most readers familiar with Américo Paredes the folklorist would anticipate, chapters 1 and 2 do not begin with Paredes’ seminal work on the corrido of Gregorio Cortez. Chapter 1 delves into Paredes’ novel, George Washington Gomez: A Mexico-Texan Novel. Limón highlights a key theme in this creative work, that of cultural and social ambivalence. The author alludes to this key thematic ambivalence that makes the lead character, George, not a hero, but instead a character suffering from a kind of “racial melancholia” (22). He asserts that scholars who choose to read this character as a radical social actor, rather than one who chooses total cultural and political assimilation, often overlook this theme. Limón’s discussion is paramount for contemporary scholars of U.S. Mexican-American and Latina/o literature and folklore as they address the question: how are in-group communities interpreting and rewriting questions of historically specific notions of ethnicity and identity politics in their works?
In chapter 2, Limón continues his critique through a body of work that he characterizes as “Asian Américo” (36). This section is rooted in the journalistic works of Paredes written during his time as a staff writer for the U.S. Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, over the course of and beyond his military tour of Japan (5). Here, Limón asserts that while other scholars assess this body of work to situate Paredes as a “transnational” or “post-colonial” scholar, a close reading of Paredes’ “Asian” work actually solidifies his role as a national and regional figure theorizing about American power in the context of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands (37). Similar to his work with the characterizations of fictionalized George Washington Gomez, Limón offers correctives to interpretations of Paredes’ work that presume Paredes’ own radical politics and worldview. The author’s work offers a sharp critique to scholars who seek to claim Paredes’ work for a shared community of knowledge that would unite the narratives of disparate global subaltern communities. As Limón draws the wider arc of his narrative together, it is clear that the social and cultural politics of South Texas do not need a forced “transnational” discourse to be a valuable and critical area of study.
Limón further develops the complexity of Paredes’ academic career in chapter 3 by addressing the exclusion of his intellectual contribution to ballad scholarship from the folklore canon, particularly referencing With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958). His explication contextualizes Paredes’ ballad and joke scholarship in the context of the growing field of American folkloristics in the mid-twentieth century. Of critical import to scholars of folklore is Limón’s discussion of academic segregation, both within the Eurocentric field of academic folklore at the time, and the burgeoning field of British Cultural Studies (chapter 4). Framing With His Pistol in His Hand within the realm of international ballad scholarship, Limón highlights Paredes’ work as a central text in the development of ballad scholarship in Europe as well as the U.S., citing how his approach merges aesthetic, comparativist, historic-geographic, and relativist perspectives (73). However, Limón exposes how this contribution was never recognized, resulting in an “absence, exclusion, and erasure” (85) of Paredes from international ballad scholarship. This discussion raises serious issues for contemporary regionally and ethnically focused scholars of folklore regarding their place in the canon of American folkloristics. Limón makes several assertions as to why Paredes’ work is marginalized, ranging from his professional placement at the University of Texas to his personal demeanor and lack of aggressive ambition as a scholar. This assessment acknowledges an unfortunate scholarly legacy of the marginalization of scholars of color whose work with regional, ethnic communities is often excluded from the intellectual mainstream. Limón correlates this subtle erasure of Paredes’ place in ballad scholarship with his rise to prominence in Mexican American Studies.
In chapter 4, Limón assesses how despite Paredes’ placement within a Mexican American Studies framework, his folklore work, which emerged in tandem with Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958), remained absent, “evaded” (133), in the field of contemporary Chicano/a Cultural Studies. In this chapter, Limón’s extensive and in-depth comparative readings of scholarly trajectories calls on readers to question the past but also the future of Chicano/a Cultural Studies in the United States, particularly the methodologies of “abstracted theorization and distancing from the everyday” (132). Despite the virtual disappearance of Paredes’ work from contemporary Chicano/a Studies, chapter 5 outlines how the legacy of Paredes’ With His Pistol in His Hand circulates beyond academic narratives in a myriad of popular media, including but not limited to novels, film, poetry, and music. In a similar turn, the author re-imagines his entire project in chapter 6 to examine Paredes’ body of work as a creative writer, journalist, academic folklorist, and “progenitor of cultural studies” (161), now unified under the moniker of public intellectual. Limón makes a critical assertion here, that the role of the public intellectual is one of praxis, “direct action for social and institution change” (161). The author uses this framework to examine the intertwining of the personal and professional in the intellectual work of Paredes from 1936 to his passing. Limón leaves the audience pondering the philosophical arc of Paredes’ body of work as being fundamentally changed after his military and journalistic time in Asia, that his return to the U.S., to South Texas was a jarring integration into a new modernity, and that his career heights reflected a desire to reclaim a familiar, now long-absent past.
Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique is an intellectual intervention on multiple fronts. It challenges audiences to recall the critical connection between studies of folklore embedded in theories of relational power, and theories of cultural studies. The fundamental strength of this book is the perspective the author takes while intervening into previous critiques of Paredes’ life and work. Rather than taking an “uncritically referential” (1) perspective on Paredes’ academic contributions, Limón’s work draws on a framework he describes as “critical discomfort” (2). In this framing of Paredes’ works with a critical intimacy borne out of deep readings of texts, but also a personal relationship with the scholar himself, Limón teases out the ignored and underappreciated elements of Paredes’ body of scholarly and creative work, to reframe his wider contributions to the field of folklore. Limon’s book serves as an invaluable addition to the canon of American folklore studies, and deserves placement in introductory folklore graduate seminars across the country.
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[Review length: 1202 words • Review posted on March 4, 2015]