"First Verses I Ever Knew": Américo Paredes and the Border Décima

While Américo Paredes is justly celebrated for his studies of the corrido, his interest in Hispanic folk poetry extended to other folksong genres as well. Paredes’s publications on the décima develop some of the same insights explored in his corrido scholarship, but go beyond the latter in a number of significant ways. In this article, I examine Paredes’s scholarship on the décima, based upon his published articles and materials he gathered for a projected monograph, to suggest what his work on the décima might offer to the study of vernacular poetry and culture on the Texas-Mexican border and to our understanding of Paredes’s life and work.