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Nepantla: Views from South 1.1 (2000) 191-195



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Interview

The Location of Américo Paredes’s
Border Thinking

José David Saldívar


Américo Paredes‚ a writer‚ ethnographer‚ folklorist‚ poet‚ novelist‚ essayist‚ as well as a highly trained corrido singer‚ pianist‚ and guitarist‚ died in Austin‚ Texas‚ on 5 May 1999. Born in 1915‚ a cofounder and first director of the Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin‚ Paredes, a professor of anthropology and English‚ published proto-Chicano cultural studies books‚ including Folktales of Mexico (1970)‚ A Texas-Mexican Cancionero (1976)‚ and Uncle Remus Con Chile (1993)‚ which explored the rich and nuanced border musics‚ transcultural jests, and jokes of what he termed the “shock cultures” of “Greater Mexico.”

In Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border (1993)‚ one of his final academic books‚ Paredes provided readers with a rigorous sample of his lifelong interest in the border traffic and border thinking between cultural anthropology and cultural studies. Traditional anthropological research (“The Folklore of Groups of Mexican Origin in the United States” and “On Ethnographic Work among Minority Groups”) mixes with personal essays on the everyday life of U.S.-Mexican border culture and society. In essays such as “The Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture‚” he theorized‚ in postcolonial fashion‚ that a border culture evolved where “the two cultures mingled and clashed” and‚ indeed, he devoted his anticonsensual work to studying the contact zones of the U.S.-Mexico frontera. [End Page 191]

As Héctor Calderón, a professor of Latin American and Chicano literature at UCLA, and José Rósbel López-Morín, a graduate student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA‚ suggest in their engrossing interview with Paredes, Paredes’s work emerges along and beyond the “bloody border” where his ancestors (both Hispano and mestizo) had settled in 1749. It was here in Brownsville‚ Texas‚ and Matamoros‚ Tamualipas (the territorial overlap of border difference)‚ where Paredes’s collective experiences of the interstices of nationness‚ community‚ culture‚ and social value were negotiated. How are subjects of U.S. “manifest destiny” and of the internal colonialism of the cultures of U.S. imperialism formed in modernity’s “shock” culture? How are strategies of empowerment formulated in antagonistic and conflictual locations?

Paredes’s border thinking thematized the conditions of hegemony and contradictoriness that attended upon the lives of those who are subaltern. For instance, in his 1935 lyrical and vernacular poem, “The Mexico-Texan,” he wrote:

For the Mexico-Texan he no gotta lan’‚
He stomped on the neck on both sides of Gran’‚
The dam gringo lingo he no cannot spik‚
It twisters the tong and it make you fill sick.
A cit’zen of Texas they say that he ees‚
But then‚ why they call him the Mexican Grease?
Soft talk and hard action, he can’t understan’‚
The Mexico-Texan he no gotta lan’….

In poems such as “The Mexico-Texan‚” Paredes suggested that the history of Chicanos/as (like other U.S. Latinos/as) is inaugurated by the loss of space. Geocultural identities, he insisted‚ must be searched for and recovered performatively. Among the many striking examples against the U.S. cultures of imperialism is “Westward the Course of Empire” (1946)‚ a poem he wrote in Tokyo while covering Hideki Tojo’s trial as a war criminal:

Favored by Rome’s solicitude
Hannibal drank his potion
while Cuauhtémoc hung from a ceiba
without benefit of a trial. [End Page 192]

You‚ Hideki‚ had your day in court
people believe in being civilized
where we are from.

Through the quickening twilight the bayonets gleam
the warheads are at ready
Carthage…
Tenochtitlán…
your time will come.

In 1941, Paredes enlisted in the U.S. Army and worked in the Pacific as a reporter, and later as political editor‚ for the Stars and Stripes. After World War II, he stayed in Japan covering the war crime trials for Stars and Stripes. In Tokyo‚ working for the American Red Cross, Paredes married Amelia Nagamine.

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