Américo Paredes (1915 - 1999) was born and raised in Brownsville. He was the first Mexican-American to receive a doctorate from the University of Texas. Paredes worked in broadcast and print journalism, including The Brownsville Herald. He was drafted into the US Army during WWII and served as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. After the war, Paredes resumed his education at UT-Austin, where he became active in the Chicano movement. Paredes insisted that a distinctive culture evolved where ''the two cultures mingled and clashed,'' and he devoted his scholarly life to exploring the folklore and culture of the area. As a UT professor, he founded the Center for Folklore Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies.
This research guide is intended to provide general information and access to resources about Dr. Paredes, especially for students who are looking to learn more about his academic and cultural significance. The guide features related books, photographs, newspaper clippings, and external resources.
Book plate from: Medrano, Manuel F. Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography. University of North Texas Press, 2010. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/266.
Book plate from: Medrano, Manuel F. Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography. University of North Texas Press, 2010. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/266.
Book plate from: Medrano, Manuel F. Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography. University of North Texas Press, 2010. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/266.
Book plate from: Medrano, Manuel F. Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography. University of North Texas Press, 2010. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/266.
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Americo Paredes by
Americo Paredes (1915-1999) was a folklorist, scholar, and professor at the University of Texas at Austin who is widely acknowledged as one of the founding scholars of Chicano Studies. With the publication of With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero in 1958, Paredes soon emerged as a challenger to the status quo. His book questioned the mythic nature of the Texas Rangers and provided an alternative counter-cultural narrative to the existing traditional narratives. He is credited with introducing the concept of Greater Mexico, decades before its wider acceptance today among transnationalist scholars. The author, Manuel F. Medrano, interviewed Paredes over a five-year period before Paredes death in 1999, and also interviewed his family and colleagues."
The Shadow by
Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. "This taut little novel is set in postrevolutionary Mexico. For years, Antonio Cuitla fought to wrest the land away from the aristocracy. Now he leads a small village, but he feels the people there don't give him the respect he deserves for his efforts as a soldier. Cuitla's annoyance blossoms into rage when the people reject his counsel for that of Del Toro, who argues for greater land distribution. Del Toro's enemy is Don Jose, a wealthy landowner. A man of breeding and privilege, Don Jose represents everything the Revolution opposed--and yet Cuitla yearns for the respect and power he possesses. Eventually, Cuitla's inner demons push him into an unwanted confrontation with Don Jose. In the larger sense, Paredes' tale is about the enduring legacy of class warfare, but in his Cuitla, there's a compelling sketch of a warrior trying to readjust in peacetime"--Brian McCombie, Booklist.
Between Two Worlds by
This collection comprises poems written in the 1930s and 1940s by a famous folklorist, novelist and mentor of at least two generations of Chicano scholars and writers.
The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories by
The culture conflict that dominated the border region during the time of Texas' transition from Mexican political status and culture to that of the United States is the dominant inspiration for these stories.
A Texas-Mexican Cancionero by 
Uncle Remus Con Chile by
Put aside those other Mexican folklore collections of treasure legends, short stories, weather lore and sentimental lyrics. This one is truly picante! Paredes, the preeminent authority on the intercultural jest and Mexican-American folklore, collected most of these humorous, often bawdy, tales along the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in central Mexico and in the U.S. Midwest during the 1960s The versions he selected were those performed with the greatest artistry.
With His Pistol in His Hand by
Gregorio Cortez Lira, a ranchhand of Mexican parentage, was virtually unknown until one summer day in 1901 when he and a Texas sheriff, pistols in hand, blazed away at each other after a misunderstanding. The sheriff was killed and Gregorio fled immediately, realizing that in practice there was one law for Anglo-Texans, another for Texas-Mexicans. The chase, capture, and imprisonment of Cortez are high drama that cannot easily be forgotten. Even today, in the cantinas along both sides of the Rio Grande, Mexicans sing the praises of the great "sheriff-killer" in the ballad which they call "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez." Américo Paredes tells the story of Cortez, the man and the legend, in vivid, fascinating detail in "With His Pistol in His Hand," which also presents a unique study of a ballad in the making. Deftly woven into the story are interpretations of the Border country, its history, its people, and their folkways.
Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border by
"Americo Paredes, in a distinguished career spanning the last forty years, has often set the pace and the standard in the two fields with which he is most strongly identified: folklore and Chicano studies. In folklore, he has been instrumental in establishing a new theoretical and methodological framework; in Chicano studies, he has exerted a seminal influence, inspiring an entire generation of scholars." "For this book, the noted folklorist Richard Bauman has selected eleven of Americo Paredes's most significant scholarly articles. The selected articles, first published during the years 1958-1987, faithfully reflect the depth and breadth of Paredes's scholarship, as well as the rigor and eloquence of his writing. They represent scholarly discourse at its best: at once erudite and clear, demanding yet accessible, rich in both substance and style." "Throughout his career, Paredes has centered his work on the folklore and culture of the Lower Rio Grande Border of South Texas and northeastern Mexico. His studies have always been contextualized, though, by a deep knowledge of Greater Mexico, and by the comparative scope of the folklorist. The essays collected here illustrate the transdisciplinary richness of Paredes's perspective - a synthesis of folkloric, anthropological, literary, and historical theory and method. They also demonstrate the revisionist power of his analysis, which challenges traditionalist conceptions and constructions of Texas-Mexican culture, the social base of folklore, and folklore genres." "Paredes is best known for his studies of the corrido, and several articles on this ballad form are included in the collection. Other essays focus variously on decimas, jokes, legends, and the "neighborly names" of ethnic slurs. More general subjects are also addressed, including the nature of the ethnographic encounter, machismo in the United States and Mexico, and the clash of cultures along the Lower Rio Grande Border. What emerges is perhaps the most well wrought and subtle portrait to date of the life and culture of the Mexican American people." "An introduction by Richard Bauman discusses the principal themes and focuses of Paredes's work, and his substantive, theoretical, and methodological contributions to scholarship. In addition, the volume includes a complete bibliography of Paredes's scholarly writings, compiled by Linda Adams."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Américo Paredes by
Several biographies of Américo Paredes have been published over the last decade, yet they generally overlook the paradoxical nature of his life's work. Embarking on an in-depth, critical exploration of the significant body of work produced by Paredes, José E. Limón (one of Paredes's students and now himself one of the world's leading scholars in Mexican American studies) puts the spotlight on Paredes as a scholar/citizen who bridged multiple arenas of Mexican American cultural life during a time of intense social change and cultural renaissance. Serving as a counterpoint to hagiographic commentaries, Américo Paredes challenges and corrects prevailing readings by contemporary critics of Paredes's Asian period and of such works as the novel George Washington Gómez, illuminating new facets in Paredes's role as a folklorist and public intellectual. Limón also explores how the field of cultural studies has drifted away from folklore, or "the poetics of everyday life," while he examines the traits of Mexican American expressive culture. He also investigates the scholarly paradigm of ethnography itself, a stimulating inquiry that enhances readings of Paredes's best-known study, "With His Pistol in His Hand," and other works. Underscoring Paredes's place in folklore and Mexican American literary production, the book questions the shifting reception of Paredes throughout his academic career, ultimately providing a deep hermeneutics of widely varied work. Offering new conceptions, interpretations, and perspectives, Américo Paredes gives this pivotal literary figure and his legacy the critical analysis they deserve.
(Dissertation) El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez : a ballad of border conflict by 
George Washington Gómez (Spanish) by 
The Borderlands of Culture by
Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Américo Paredes (1915-1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramón Saldívar establishes Paredes's preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldívar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the "new" American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization. Saldívar demonstrates how Paredes's poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the "border studies" or "anthropology of the borderlands." Saldívar describes how Paredes's experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldívar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes's own words. By explaining how Paredes's work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldívar extends Paredes's intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.
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