Américo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography (review)

Américo Paredes (1915-1999) is often called "the godfather of Chicano literature," but he could just as easily be considered the father of revisionist history in Texas. In 1958 the University of Texas Press issued Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, which singlehandedly challenged generations of Anglo American mythmaking. The book has since become a classic. Among Paredes's targets were Walter Prescott Webb and the Texas Rangers. Of the oft-inflated claims made on behalf of the Rangers, Paredes observed, "If all the books written about the Rangers were put one on top of the other, the resulting pile would be almost as tall as some of the tales they contain." (23) Paredes's attacks on Webb, meanwhile, have contributed greatly to the historian's tarnished reputation in recent decades.

Paredes was a courageous, often singular voice during his long career as an influential professor at the University of Texas. As a defender of his people, he inspired new generations of scholars in the field of Mexican American studies. Though his weapon was a pen rather than a pistol, Paredes came to be viewed as a legend, a figure equal to the great folk heroes of the corridos he spent his lifetime studying.

A heroic view of Paredes is the aim of Manuel F. Medrano's Américo Paredes: In His Own Words, An Authorized Biography. With the cooperation of the Paredes family, Medrano has compiled a book that focuses on Paredes's accomplishments and presents him as a man of unimpeachable integrity. As Mendrano writes at the outset of chapter five, "Throughout his professional life, Américo Paredes received numerous awards. He responded to the accolades with his usual dignity" (75).

Medrano surveys Paredes's various publications and quotes from them generously. He also includes many testimonials from those who knew Paredes, including family members, former students, and colleagues. The result is a book that reads something like the Festschrift Paredes never received during his lifetime. In this regard, Medrano's work has much in common with José R. López-Morín's The Legacy of Américo Paredes (Texas A&M University Press, 2006), which is an unabashed hagiography.

Medrano makes use of Paredes's literary papers housed at UT-Austin, and he provides new details about Paredes's personal life, including intimate glimpses of his relationship with his wife, Amelia. In this regard, Medrano's work transcends the three previous biographies on Paredes, each of which have been extremely circumspect regarding don Américo's privacy.

A great man deserves a great biography. It is understandable that the current generation of biographers who knew Paredes personally wish to honor him, but the hagiographic tone of such works promotes worship rather than understanding. As the years go by, we are losing the opportunity to gain a fuller view of Paredes's character. Clearly, he was a brilliant, complex, and contradictory man. He published fierce denunciations of Anglo hegemony while enjoying and even benefitting from numerous positive relationships with individual Anglos. How did he reconcile such a thing? His scholarly focus on cultural conflict was a necessary rejoinder to Anglo American attitudes at the time—and it certainly dovetailed with his personal perspective—but did Paredes overemphasize conflict to the point that he misrepresented the actual historical conditions of Mexican Americans? Finally, how did Paredes's romantic views of the paternalistic pastoral lifestyle square with the proto-feminist critiques issued by writers such as Jovita González and Fermina Guerra in the 1930s? (Both women, interestingly enough, were protégés of J. Frank Dobie, a man Paredes often criticized.)

I do not know the answers to these questions, but the fact that such issues are not even addressed in any of the biographies of Paredes indicates how far away we are from the book many of us...