Background

Americo Paredes was born on September 3, 1915, in Brownsville, Texas, United States. He was the son of Justo and Clotilde (Manzano-Vidal) Paredes-Cisneros.

Education

Paredes studied at the University of Texas, in Austin, where, in 1951, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, Master of Arts, in 1953, and Doctor of Philosophy, in 1956.

Paredes began writing poetry while still a high school student, but his school counselor assumed that, as a student of Mexican background, he would not go on to college. His persistence first showed itself when he sought out a more sympathetic teacher to plead his cause; after he won first prize in a statewide poetry contest he applied and was admitted to Brownsville Junior College.

Career

Paredes landed a job as a writer, translator, and proofreader with the Brownsville Herald newspaper, and by the time he was 20 he had seen some of his poems published in San Antonio's La Prensa.

In 1937, Paredes published a book of poetry, Cantos de adolescencia. He continued to write for the Herald, but he encountered discrimination there and was increasingly restless. Continuing to write poetry and short stories (many of which were first published only at the end of his life), he searched for new opportunities and worked for Pan American Airways for a time.

In 1944, Paredes enlisted in the U.S. Army as an infantryman. After the war, he was sent to Japan to write for the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, where he covered Japanese war crimes trials and served as political editor. Paredes had lived in Japan for five years, doing public relations work for the Red Cross after his discharge.

He had taught for a year at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) and then returned to Austin to teach folklore and creative writing at Texas. In 1958, his landmark study With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero was published; it covered an actual incident, the 1901 death of a Mexican agricultural worker, Gregorio Cortez, who was hunted down and killed after he shot a Texas sheriff.

Paredes published several more well-received books as well as numerous articles, however, and he served as editor of the prestigious Journal of American Folklore from 1968 to 1973. His books included A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, an annotated songbook that has since served as a standard reference for the traditional corrido repertory.

After his retirement, Paredes authored several more research studies and saw many of his early writings published. The stories he had written as a young journalist in Brownsville were collected and published as The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories (1994) and a novel from the same period, George Washington Gómez, which several publishers had originally rejected, appeared in 1990. In 1998, he published a new book of fiction, The Shadow.

Américo Paredes died on May 5, 1999, in Austin; the date was perhaps an appropriate one for a man who was in his way a modern-day hero of Mexican Americans.

Achievements

• Paredes was well known for the publication of his doctoral thesis (With a Pistol in His Hand), which later became an underground classic and was reprinted nine times. The thesis told a revisionist version of the story that inspired the ballad that the book takes its title from. Folklore scholars consider the book a cutting edge effort in Chicano and folklore studies.
  
  Surely the only scholar to have had a corrido - a Mexican-American border ballad - composed in his honor, Américo Paredes was a pioneer in the academic study of the Mexican-American experience in the United States and of the culture of the U.S.-Mexico border.
  
  In 1989, Paredes was honored with the Charles Frankel Prize by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 1991, he received the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government - that country's highest honor given to citizens of foreign countries.

Works

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  • George Washington Gomez

    (In the 1930's, Americo Paredes, the renowned folklorist, ...)

    1990
  • The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories

    (The culture conflict that dominated the border region dur...)

    1994
  • With His Pistol in His Hand, a Border Ballad and Its Hero

    (Américo Paredes tells the story of Cortez, the man and th...)

    1958
  • Between Two Worlds

    (This landmark collection is a life's work in poetry by th...)

    1991
  • Cantos de adolescencia: Songs of Youth

    (Cantos de adolescencia: Songs of Youth (1932-1937) by fam...)

  • Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border

    (For this book, the noted folklorist Richard Bauman has se...)

    1993
  • The Shadow

    (Antonio Cuitla has a date with destiny. But it is not the...)

    1998

Views

Paredes fought to expand the Mexican-American presence at the University of Texas over his long career there and inspired countless students who went on to create the discipline of Chicano Studies.

Quotations: "Deep, detailed, nuanced understanding of the local will illuminate and inspire a more global vision."

Membership

Paredes was a member of the American Folklore Society and Academy Norteamericana de la Lengua Espanola, Mexico Academy History.

Personality

Paredes was named after Amerigo Vespucci, the 16th-century Italian mapmaker who lent his first name to the lands of the Western Hemisphere - because, family legend had it, of a promise his mother had made to a sister who had married an Italian sailor.

Connections

On August 13, 1939, Paredes married Consuelo Silva, a singer, but they divorced and Paredes married Amelia Sidzu Nagamine, a Red Cross worker, on May 28, 1948. From the first marriage Paredes had one son and from his second marriage, he had four children - Américo Jr., Alan, Vicente and Julia.

Father:

Justo Paredes

Mother:

Clotilde Manzano-Vidal Paredes-Cisneros

ex-wife:

Consuelo Silva

Wife:

Amelia Sidzu Nagamine

Son:

Américo Paredes Jr.

Son:

Alan Paredes

Son:

Vicente Paredes

Daughter:

Julia Paredes

References

• Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique 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.
  2012
• Border Folk Balladeers: Critical Studies on Américo Paredes Border Folk Balladeers: Critical Studies on Américo Paredes contains a full-length introduction and eleven essays written exclusively for this volume by scholars in the fields of folklore, literary criticism, and critical race theory, and who are renowned authorities on the work of Américo Paredes.
  2018
• Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography
  2010