The Legacy of Américo Paredes

Chapter 1: The Lower Rio Grande Border

Chapter 1 The Lower Rio Grande Border The truth seems to be that the old war propaganda concerning the Alamo, Goliad, and Mier later provided a convenient justification for outrages committed on the Border by Texans of certain types, so convenient an excuse that it was artificially prolonged for almost a century . And had the Alamo, Goliad, and Mier not existed, they would have been invented, as indeed they seem to have been in part. —Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand” W hen the forty-year-old Américo Paredes was writing his dissertation, which would become the basis of his best-known book, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), he drew on memories of his youth. He was especially mindful of those quiet “summer nights, in the days when there was a chaparral,” when his father and the old men sat around and talked in “low, gentle voices about violent things.”1 These stories, especially the performances of corridos, were never forgotten by Américo Paredes. They nurtured his imagination as a young boy and became the subject of some of his most important research in his adult life. Among the rich family oral history were tales of the arrival 1 from Spain of his father’s clan, a colony of sefarditas (Spanish Jews), in 1580; heroic exploits such as the participation of his great-grandfather at Palo Alto against Gen. Zachary Taylor’s troops in the Battle of La Resaca; and other bitter recollections of the abuses by the Texas Rangers against the Lower Rio Grande border folk. These stories fascinated Américo as a child, and they inspired a large corpus of his writings. The heroic events of popular song and legend offered him a different picture of historical events than the formal history he learned in school. For centuries Paredes’s ancestors had celebrated life through music and related events through the spoken word. Oral tradition represented the collective memory of his people, and ballads of heroic events, legends of fabulous treasures, and tales of supernatural apparitions were all an integral part of the cultural forces that shaped Mexican life. Face-to-face interaction was more important to the people than the written word, and the presence of a singer or storyteller was everyday practice. Folk poets would often recall an experience (either their own or that of others) and narrate a story with that particular idea in mind. In the process the folk poets—engrossed in the re-creation of the event—made the experience come to life for the people. Américo Paredes’s Concept of Folklore as Performance Today, this interaction between the storyteller, audience, and the context in which a story is told is understood as the “performance-oriented” approach in folklore studies.2 But Américo Paredes was writing before such a concept was articulated and appreciated in the field. Early folklore in general consisted of collecting songs, legends, and tales without serious consideration of the people that provided such information. Too much emphasis 2 Chapter 1 was given to the origin of a tale, how it traveled, or the different versions that existed in a specific region. But Américo Paredes thought differently. He felt that in order to arrive at a more reliable reading of folklore and to fully appreciate its meaning, the material needed to be studied and understood within its natural context and with the folk artist in mind. For Paredes, folklore was not divorced from daily life—something to be observed and preserved in its essence. He considered this expressive art—first and foremost—as the performance of songs, legends, and tales in keeping with the oral legacy of the Lower Rio Grande region. His take on folklore as performance emphasized the functional aspects of this expressive behavior, which, in turn, shed new light on the experiences of Mexicans in the United States. One of Paredes’s main contentions in his long life as a scholar was that North American literature had long presented a distorted view of the history of his region and people. He knew that English policy toward the Indians in the New World was different from that of the Spanish settlers. The first group traveled overseas with their families and belongings for political and religious freedom, and the Indians had no place in the creation of the...