The Legacy of Américo Paredes (review)

As author López Morín writes in his opening pages, this is a book “intended for readers who know very little about Américo Paredes and wish to learn about his life and his contributions to anthropology, folklore, history, literature, and music” (p. xiii). López Morín succeeds in this objective by couching Paredes at basic levels in the geography, society, and times that affected his life. Born in South Texas in 1915, Paredes grew up in the transition of the United States from a rural society to an urban one, through the good times of the 1920s before the Great Depression set in, and, like others who gave military service in World War II, consolidated his education through the GI Bill. In rapid order at the University of Texas, he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and attained his doctorate in 1956.

By the time Paredes came to the University, however, he was already an accomplished author, editor, musician, singer, and story collector and teller. As explained by López Morín, the formal degrees were means for Paredes to have a more credible voice in interpreting the mexicano experience of the Texas-Mexican border. Paredes transformed his experience into a kind of documentary—a documentary of sound and words and music in ways that no scholar had done before. His experiential analysis of the Texas Mexican-American challenged a century of stereotypical writing of that ethnic group, as inferior and backward. Throughout this work, López Morín weaves the concept developed by Paredes of “folklore as performance.” Rather than examining folklore tales as cultural derivatives from Europe and Mexico, for example, Paredes focused on folklore as a communicative process between the folk artist and his public. A corrido was as much a story in itself as it was an extension of the voice and thought of the performer. Paredes used this approach to explain the culture of Mexican-Texans. Theirs was a mestizo voice from South Texas that preserved the past and present of their culture along the Rio Grande. Their unique expression was what Paredes heard, recorded, and interpreted. López Morín examines the meaning of “folklore as performance,” first explored in his dissertation of 2001, by analyzing several of Paredes’ early works as well as his best-known works, especially George Washington Gómez (1990) and “With His Pistol in His Hand” (1958).

As Paredes explained to this reader long ago, Mexican-American culture straddled the Rio Grande/Río Bravo and it should be viewed as a unit. In this respect, López Morín is at his best when he examines Paredes’ works in light of the shared experience that came from having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, although in very different generations. His discussion of Paredes must also be seen as an introduction to the latter’s work in various academic fields, although the author left this reader wanting to know more about Paredes’ role in the development of U.S. folklore studies in the twentieth century, issues that are presented in brief form here. Avid students of the history of the University of Texas will certainly want more explanation as to how Paredes was able successfully to challenge J. Frank Dobie’s iconic interpretation of the Texas Rangers and yet remain on the faculty and eventually help establish the Center for Mexican American Studies in 1970.

In very recent years, Don Américo’s papers have been deposited, organized, and made available to the public at the Benson Latin American Collection, at the University of Texas at Austin, so that future scholars will continue to be able to delve deeply into the underlying thought and accomplishments of such an original scholar.