Drawing from the UT-Austin collection of Américo Paredes’ papers, as well as from scholarly responses to Paredes’ work, José López Morín has created a concise and revealing biography of the author, musician, and scholar from Brownsville, Texas. Morín’s is one of the first book-length studies of Paredes’ life and work, and it comes at a welcome moment, as students of culture continue to look to border zones for insights into cultural heterogeneity, hybridity, conjuncture, and conflict. The Legacy of Américo Paredes contributes to these discussions of the borderlands by clarifying their intellectual debts to Paredes. The book also makes a strong case for the broader relevance of Paredes’ thinking within contemporary anthropology, folkloristics, and cultural studies. Supporting both positions--and at the heart of this book--is the line that Morín draws between Paredes’ lived experiences on the Texas-Mexico border and his scholarly insights into the everyday expressions of cultural conflict.
Morín specifies in his introduction that he does not aspire to an exhaustive or definitive reading of the Paredes oeuvre . This is, by design, more of an introductory text, aimed at making Paredes’ work "as accessible as possible" for a broad readership (xiv). Accordingly, the first of this book’s four chapters undertakes a general history of the Lower Rio Grande region, from the earliest Spanish settlements to the aftermath of the U.S. annexation of Texas. Morín paints this history in broad strokes, leaving intact Paredes’ somewhat idyllic portrait of the Lower Rio Grande’s egalitarian, oral, mestizo ranching culture prior to Anglo incursions. Later in the book, Morín acknowledges some scholars’ objections to this portrait, but here his discussion could have been enriched by the recent historiography that emphasizes the violent and conflictual dimensions of mestizaje .
Like Paredes himself, though, Morín is most interested in a subsequent period of conflict--the period that began in the nineteenth century, when racially inflected ideologies of U.S. manifest destiny pushed Anglo settlers into the Lower Rio Grande region. The political and economic changes that ensued, and the cultural conflicts that accompanied them, marked Paredes’ formative years in Brownsville, Texas. To contest the derogatory images of Texas-Mexicans that surrounded him, Paredes would turn to the oral traditions that he experienced as a child, emphasizing both their artistry and their spirit of defiance.
Morín develops this claim further in chapter 2, which is a well-illustrated personal biography of Paredes from his birth in Brownsville in 1915 to his death in Austin in 1999. Readers from anthropology and folklore should appreciate this chapter’s close attention to Paredes’ work as a poet, novelist, and journalist, for one discerns in this early work the seeds of the intellectual program that followed. Morín illustrates, for example, how Paredes’ first collection of poems, Cantos de Adolescencia (1937), probes the "in-betweenness" not only of adolescence itself, but also of border identities that can claim to be neither Texan nor Mexican. Paredes’ reporting from post-WWII Japan, meanwhile, finds him reflecting poignantly on Japan’s experience with the U.S. imperialism that he already knew well.[1] As Morín moves through Paredes’ return to the U.S., his doctoral work at UT-Austin, and his subsequent extended tenure as a professor there, focus falls frequently--and rightfully--on Don Américo’s willingness to challenge his academic predecessors as he lobbied for substantive programs of study in both Folklore and Mexican American Studies.
The book’s final two chapters offer a closer assessment of Paredes’ scholarship. Chapter 3 centers on With His Pistol in His Hand , Paredes’ widely influential 1958 study of Gregorio Cortez and the ballad that came to commemorate him. Morín offers an insightful assessment of the book’s significance, combining his own readings with commentary from a number of other scholars. He notes, for example, Paredes’ conception of corrido balladry as a "literature of resistance" (70) that may even have originated along the Lower Rio Grande to contest dominant images of the courageous Texas Ranger and the cowardly Mexico-Tejano. Here Morín also begins to develop his claims regarding the importance of performance in Paredes’ conception of folklore. In particular, he wants to foreground Paredes’ sensitivity to the ways in which Texas Mexicans consciously "played" to Anglo stereotypes, using the figure of the dumb Mexican to ridicule and/or take advantage of Anglo interlocutors. For Morín, Gregorio Cortez’ brother Ramón merits closer attention as just this type of performer; it was, after all, Ramón’s ability to trade a lame mare to an Anglo that brought Sheriff Morris to the brothers’ door. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the achievements and the (manifold) shortcomings of The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez , the 1984 motion picture adaptation of With His Pistol in His Hand .
The issue of performance continues to hold center stage in chapter 4, as Morín argues that Paredes’ reflections on the ethnographic enterprise foresaw by a decade or more what has been called, variously, anthropology’s "crisis," "experimental moment," or "Writing Culture Movement" of the 1980s. Like his socio-cultural history of the Lower Rio Grande, Morín’s intellectual history of anthropology here is quite broad, but it suffices to demonstrate Paredes’ foresight on issues that subsequently came to dominate anthropological debates. The centerpiece of this discussion is Paredes’ 1977 essay, “On Ethnographic Work Among Minority Groups: A Folklorist’s Perspective,” which examines Anglo ethnographers’ tendency to re-inscribe dominant stereotypes of Texas-Mexicans. For Paredes, such misinterpretations arise because ethnographers fail to realize that their informants are performing; consequently, they mistake as transparent reference the many joking and storytelling genres that reflexively deploy Anglo stereotypes of Mexicans. Here, Morín stresses, Paredes has used the folkloristic conception of performance to critically re-assess the situatedness of ethnographic interpretation, the agency exercised by ethnographic informants, and the need for a more robust accounting of context in the analysis of social practices. This chapter concludes by casting welcome light on Paredes’ career as a public intellectual, detailing his critiques of such figures as Octavio Paz and José Vasconcelos for their proclamations regarding Mexican and Mexican-American character.
Given this book’s goal of introducing Paredes to a broad readership, I would have liked to hear the voice of Paredes himself more frequently and forcefully. This is not to say that the book is devoid of all quotation; in chapter 2, for example, Morín has selected some highly revealing excerpts from Paredes’ poetry and reporting. Throughout the book, however, he tends to transpose into the third person the two interviews with Paredes that provide much of the book’s biographical information.[2] This choice, combined with Morín’s tendency to cite the source of such passages only in his endnotes, often makes it difficult for the reader to know that Paredes is "speaking" at all.
Morín has nevertheless succeeded in presenting Américo Paredes as a highly original scholar whose contributions to the disciplines of folklore and anthropology were as significant and lasting as they were consonant with his commitments to the Chicano movement. While this book should prove particularly helpful in introductory courses, more expert audiences will also find multiple points of interest. To begin, the text’s only appendix is a helpful year-by-year bibliography of Paredes’ work from 1937 to 1999. But Morín is also to be congratulated for some provocative claims that merit continued discussion. While I agree with the central argument of chapter 4, for example, I also wonder where the comparison between Paredes and what Morín terms "the postmodern movement in cultural anthropology" (107) would begin to break down. Morín defines the latter term by making reference to both Marcus and Fischer (1986) and Lyotard (1984), and I would argue that while Paredes shares some of these authors’ epistemological concerns, his politics come, quite literally, from a different place. That Morín has managed to raise such questions, of course, is testament to this book’s contributions to the multiple fields of inquiry that Paredes has influenced.
[1] Paredes’ early poetry, fiction, and journalism occupy a more central place in the analysis of Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary . Durham: Duke University Press. 2006).
[2] The more recent of the two interviews was conducted by Morín himself. See Héctor Calderón and José Rósbel López Morín, "Interview with Américo Paredes," Neptantla: Views from the South . 1:1. 2006. 197-228.
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[Review length: 1357 words • Review posted on December 5, 2007]