The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary, and: The Legacy of Américo Paredes (review)

In two new books, Ramón Saldívar and José R. López Morín examine the legacy of University of Texas at Austin (UT) folklorist Américo Paredes (1915–1999). While Paredes is often venerated in Chicana/o studies as a founding figure, he is sometimes overlooked in mainstream folklore and anthropology. Saldívar’s The Borderlands of Culture and Morín’s The Legacy of Américo Paredes demonstrate that the significance of his work reaches far beyond the boundaries of the Texas-Mexico border region and ethnic studies. Morín documents Paredes’s pioneering role in the creation of folklore performance theory and sociocultural anthropology’s postmodern turn. Saldívar, in turn, reframes Paredes as a cultural critic who foresaw current issues of cultural studies, folklore, and anthropology.

Yet both of these works are more than academic studies. Saldívar’s introduction is titled “In Memoriam,” and both his and Morín’s texts read as monuments to a beloved academic precursor. A key point of departure for understanding this reverence is Paredes’s pioneering location within Chicana/o studies. A decade before the proliferation of this field, Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand (1958) voiced the South Texas Mexican-American community’s collective critique of Anglo domination. As José E. Limón has noted, for the generation of Chicano intellectuals that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, the soft-spoken Paredes was a beloved figure, with a pen in his hand to match the ballad hero of his most significant ethnographic work. However, this is not to say that Paredes’s oeuvre is now read without ambivalence. Younger scholars have criticized his ethnographic writing for its idealized vision of the Mexican cultural past and for not addressing the experiences of women.

Both Saldívar and Morín seek to transcend the supposed limitations of their precursor’s work through detailed elaborations of aspects of it that have been underappreciated, misjudged, or overlooked. In this way, they enter the debate as his champions. For them, this effort is personal, and both view Paredes as a significant influence. Saldívar, a professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford University, was a colleague and protégé of Paredes and writes of him as a confidant and friend. Morín, an associate professor of Chicana/o studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, does not demonstrate a similarly close personal relationship with Paredes, but his work seems to emulate the folklorist’s work even more closely. He states that Paredes’s writing style, research process, and method of critique have become part of his own (p. xv). As Morín’s book offers summation of previous critical analysis of Paredes’s oeuvre, I will start with a description of his study.

Each chapter of Morín’s book is a literary and cultural essay on a particular aspect of Paredes’s life and work. Morín focuses on Paredes’s life and his ethnographic writings from the late 1950s through the 1980s. The book includes descriptions and evaluations of the South Texas border region’s history, economy, and social organization; Paredes’s early writings and their manifestation of a border style of thinking; Paredes’s contributions to performance theory and anthropology’s postmodern turn; and a focused analysis of With His Pistol in His Hand.

Like most other critics, Morín takes Paredes’s status as a U.S.-Mexican border intellectual as the basis for understanding his writings. After all, Paredes spent both his youth and young adulthood in South Texas and carried out a lifetime of research in the area. Mor...