Con su pluma en la mano: The legacy of Americo Paredes

Américo Paredes, the eminent folklorist and man of letters, passed away on 5 May 1999 in Austin, Texas. One cannot help but surmise that Paredes, who had spent most of his life exploring and safeguarding the culture of Mexican Americans, had somehow chosen the day: Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday that has come to be celebrated more by Mexican Americans than by Mexicans themselves. Seemingly, even in death he was aligning himself, as he had in life, with his pueblo.

A rancher’s son, Paredes was born in Brownsville on 3 September 1915, during the chaos of the Mexican Revolution, a few months before Pancho Villa’s incursion into U.S. territory. The Texas-Mexican border was different then, more fluid; relations were closer among Mexicans on either side of the border. And the divisions were wider between Anglos and Mexicans on the Texas side. It is plain that the young Paredes, with the eyes of the journalist, artist, and scholar that he was becoming, keenly observed, and absorbed, this medio ambiente fronterizo, which would in turn suffuse his scholarly and literary work.

Paredes’s affinity with the world of music and letters manifested itself at an early age. As a young man, he wrote poetry and fiction and sang professionally. He also worked as a journalist, writing for both the Brownsville Herald and its Spanish-language edition, El Heraldo de Brownsville. Stationed in the Pacific theater during World War II, he served as a reporter and editor for Stars and Stripes. In 1951, at the age of thirty-six, he returned to Texas and resumed his studies, receiving his doctorate in English at the University of Texas at Austin in 1957.

In 1958, after a stint at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), Paredes returned to teach at UT Austin, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he was instrumental in the founding of the Center for the Intercultural Studies of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, in 1967, as well as the Center for Mexican American Studies, in 1970.

The year 1958 also saw the publication of Paredes’s book “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, which arguably did more to establish the field of Chicano studies than any other work. A study of the genesis and evolution of “El corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” the book remains as relevant and vital today as it was when it was first published, forty-one years ago. (It is now in its eleventh printing.)

One can only admire Paredes’s unerring instinct in choosing Gregorio Cortez as his subject. Cortez was a South Texas ranch hand who in June 1901 was wrongfully accused of stealing a horse. The Anglo sheriff who came to question Cortez was dealt a bad translation by a deputy ill equipped to serve as interpreter. It was a fatal case of miscommunication. Wishing only to defend himself and his family, Cortez wound up shooting the sheriff dead. Over the next ten days, Cortez eluded hundreds of men for hundreds of miles of arid South Texas brush country, displaying uncanny ingenuity, valor, stamina, and horsemanship—and, in the process, becoming a folk hero.

When the Chicano movement arose, some seven years after the publication of With His Pistol in His Hand, the book, with its hero, was waiting, con su pistola en la mano, ready to inspire an entire generation of young scholars and activists. It was a potent antidote to years of skewed Anglo-Texan history written by the likes of Walter Prescott Webb. It was the first work to place Mexican Americans front and center in the world of intellectual discourse.

For those of us reading it for the first time in the heady late 1960s, it was a call to arms. It linked our past to our present. It affirmed our sense of place—physically, culturally, and intellectually. The ethnomusicologist Manuel Peña, who studied under Paredes in the late 1970s, describes his first encounter with this book:

I...