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158 American war against Mexico and after California had been placed in “the hands of an enterprising people,” Melville has Ishmael ask: “What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.” —Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages, 1979 (287–88) In the summer of 1954, Américo Paredes collected 363 ballads and other songs from the Mexican American communities of the Lower Border area in South Texas. Brown v.Board of Education was only weeks old—it had been announced on May 17th of that year. John Okada was nearly finished writing No-No Boy, and Jade Snow Wong had toured Asia the year before to talk about Fifth Chinese Daughter. Ralph Ellison had won the National Book Award for Invisible Man the year before; N. Scott Momaday, another Southwesterner, would shortly attend the University of Virginia Law School,where he would meet a different National Book Award winner—William Faulkner. Zora Neale Hurston, another famous regional folklore collector, was struggling to write a manuscript about Herod the Great and would shortly write a letter to the Orlando Sentinel denouncing Brown v. Board of Education. D’Arcy McNickle had left the Bureau of Indian Affairs a couple of years earlier, unhappy with its turn to assimilationist policies. A recent English graduate from Howard University named Chloe Anthony Wofford, who had just changed her name to Toni, would the next  Chapter 5 Américo Paredes and the Folklore of the Border Ahab’s hunt is symbolic of the American thrust toward Asia. [...] Much violence has already occurred in the American experience, as the name of the ship suggests: The Pequots were a tribe of Connecticut Indians destroyed by whites in the seventeenth century . The extinction of the Pequots, it becomes clear in the discussion on “Loose-Fish,” must be viewed within the context of European and white American expansionism. “What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?” observed Ishmael. Writing shortly after the PAREDES AND THE FOLKLORE OF THE BORDER 159 year complete a master’s at Cornell, just as Paredes in the previous year had completed his master’s at the University of Texas at Austin. In the year before Paredes’s fieldwork, Richard Wright had visited Ghana, where he was dismayed by his cultural estrangement from African ways. To so summarize this scene of minority letters in the 1950s is to begin describing a fascinating moment of transition. The protest and integrationist tradition is ascendant: books like Native Son, Invisible Man, Fifth Chinese Daughter, and No-No Boy emphatically declare their Americanness,a declaration made possible in part by the newly ethnicized and deracialized status of their heroes. The American belonging of the son, man, daughter, and boy was premised on a sociological vision that imagined severed cultural traditions and generation gaps, an imagination summarized by Michel Fabre’s account of Wright’s decidedly non-anthropological trip to Africa: In hunting for the possibility of some “precise ancestral reality,”he had, for the time being, assumed the existence of a shared identity between Africans and American Negroes, although he had always refused, as did sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, to consider the “African survivals” in Afro-American culture very significant. It was more an hypothesis, which when disproved, led him to exclaim in stupefaction: “I was black, they were black, but my color did not help me,” a refrain denoting frustration, if not anxiety. (402) The tradition that would have been able to see African culture in African American ways—which in fact had substantiated “African survivals”—was past its time, as is suggested by Hurston’s failed literary ambitions in, and denunciations of, the integrationist 1950s. But this was also a transitional moment in that, at the very moment of the triumph of the liberal, sociologically enabled ethnic model of national assimilation at the heart of the second phase of the genealogy of literary multiculturalism, it was not yet clear that in the pipeline, as it were, were people in their early twenties who would grow up to contest its solution. Within the increasingly dominant liberal consensus brewed anxieties about the loss of African American distinctiveness envisioned by Brown, for which Toni Morrison would later offer a literary refutation of the social science it entailed. Likewise, the young law student would turn away from the law so central to integrationist texts like Brown,Native Son,Invisible Man, and...

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