Encaminándonos: Américo Paredes as a Guiding Force in Transcending Borders

Américo Paredes was a prolific transdisciplinary scholar and an extraordinary humanitarian whose life's work focused on challenging, crossing, and bridging borders of various kinds. In this essay, I demonstrate that Paredes carved an incredibly fertile intellectual path that yielded copious theoretical insights and inspired new generations of scholars to pursue, and expand upon, his groundbreaking revisionist scholarship. Noting that his activities in Mexico and Latin America remain relatively unexplored, I also contribute to the scholarship on Paredes by asking, What research projects did he pursue in Mexico de adentro? With whom did Paredes work and interact in Latin America? What was the nature of his relationships with Latin American scholars? Drawing primarily on the Américo Paredes Papers at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries at Austin, I examine the nature and scope of Paredes's scholarly and personal experiences south of the US-Mexico border.