Américo Paredes

Américo Paredes (b. 1915–d. 1999) was considered to be one of the foremost Mexican-American scholars of the twentieth century. Having influenced an entire generation of Chicano scholars—such as José E. Limón, David Montejano, and Ramón Saldívar—he is one of the forerunners of Chicano studies. A self-described “proto-Chicano,” he was born in Brownsville, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. Fascinated with the border tales and ballads of his youth, Paredes soon began to write poetry. During the Great Depression, he worked as a writer for a local newspaper. In 1944, he enlisted in the US Army and was stationed in Japan as a journalist for Stars and Stripes and the Mexican newspaper El Universal. After he was discharged, he served with the American Red Cross and traveled across Asia. When he returned from Japan, Paredes enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin where he acquired his doctorate degree at the age of forty-one. In 1957, he began to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. The next year, his doctoral dissertation, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero, was published. An analysis of a popular corrido, the book expands several genres, presenting a folkloric, ethnographic, and sociocultural study of South Texas Mexicans. During his time at the University of Texas, Paredes was instrumental in furthering scholarship in folklore and Mexican-American studies. He successfully founded the Center for Intercultural Studies for Folklore and Musicology in 1967 and cofounded the Center for Mexican American Studies in 1970. He continued to publish studies on border folklore, such as A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border in 1976, and Folklore and Culture of the Texas-Mexican Border in 1992. He received numerous accolades during his lifetime, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1989. A year later, he was awarded the Orden del Aguila Azteca from the Mexican government, the highest honor afforded to foreign citizens. In 1991, he received the Orden de José de Escandón. In his later life, Paredes began to publish the Creative Works he originally wrote during his adolescence and time abroad. Some of these include George Washington Gómez (1990) and The Hammon and the Beans (1994). Paredes’s works concerning border life have become the focal point for numerous scholars wanting to research folklore and the Mexican-American experience.