Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique

6. Valor Civil

six Valor Civil W e have come to know Américo Paredes as a creative writer; a journalist, largely in Asia; an academic folklorist; a progenitor of cultural studies with its dual beginnings in the interesting year of 1958; and, through his writing, as a paradoxical influence on the creation of more and contemporary expressive practices of everyday life. With some inevitable overlap, these identities occurred in a rough chronological order over a multifaceted and immensely productive career spanning a good portion of the twentieth century—a career centered on writing in various forms. In this final substantive chapter, I want to bring together these themes and identities, but in relation to yet another that might be associated with Paredes, that of public intellectual. Most would agree that Paredes produced a corpus of work committed to social change largely on behalf of the people of Greater Mexico. Such a commitment might then lead some to think him to be what has been called “a public intellectual,” meaning one involved in praxis. By the latter term we mean something like drawing from one’s intellectual and artistic commitments and practices to engage in more direct action for social and institutional change, even as that action also acts back upon such commitments and practices. For public intellectuals, direct action may also, and usually does, involve writing and other forms of discourse, but a critical discourse now addressed to a general public on behalf of social change. One of the foremost exponents—and examples—of this particular intellectual stance, the late Edward Said, describes it in this manner: . . . the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a criti- « 162 » Américo Paredes cal sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or readymade clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively, but actively willing to say so in public. (1994: 23) Raymond Williams is another example of such an intellectual. Earlier I noted his ambivalent return to his Welsh ethnic culture in contrast to Paredes’s forthright defense of Greater Mexico. But to note this particular ambivalence may be a small criticism—if at all—a criticism that shrinks when one considers Williams’s direct involvement in English public life from the stance of a Marxist, which took him into adult education, journalism , and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, among other such activities (Williams 1979). Drawing on Greater Mexican culture, Américo Paredes also offered his own close version of Edward Said’s formulation with the concept of valor civil, with civil meaning much as it does in English, or better yet, civic. A more interesting semantic load occurs with the word valor, which again can certainly and easily translate as “valor” in English, synonymous with “bravery,” but in Spanish also carries the meaning of “value” or “virtue.” Valor civil, said Paredes (1977: 125), “is courage that requires no weapon but the will itself; it is the courage of the unarmed and peaceful citizen who will not flinch before threats of violence. Valor civil is the ability to stand steadfast for what you think is right, come what may.” In his formulation Paredes was defining the work and person of George I. Sánchez, the great activist, historian, and long-time professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin, Paredes’s friend and colleague . Beyond their professional proximity at UT-Austin, Paredes has been compared to Sánchez as this kind of public intellectual (Saldívar 2006: 227–240). In this chapter I want to explore this and other comparisons to define the manner and degree of Paredes’s own identity in this regard, anchoring this exploration to the identities and time periods we have already noted. And since most of his career was devoted to Greater Mexico, my comparative inquiry will take up other intellectuals from this transnational sphere, beginning with Sánchez but not ending there as we also return to a rough chronological arrangement corresponding to epochal moments in the history of Greater Mexico and Paredes’s own life. For Paredes and Greater Mexico the first and originary moments would have been the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the SouthTexas uprisings of 1915. Except in writerly retrospection, Paredes, not yet or barely born, had nothing literally to do with these momentous events surround...