Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography

The first, long awaited biography of Mexican-American Scholar Americo Paredes is on the shelves. However, before running out and purchasing Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, An Authorized Biography be wary. Dr. Manuel Medrano of the University of Texas-Brownsville wrote the book over a ten year period from interviews he conducted with Dr. Paredes over the last few years of Paredes's life. The book, for a comprehensive and authorized biography, weighs in at a mere 136 pages of biography and very scant bibliographical research. For Texas literature scholars, folklorists, Mexican-American scholars, or music scholars, the book adds very little in the way of probing scholarship.

Americo Paredes (1915-1999) is considered one of the leaders of 20th Century Mexican-American studies, and his work as an educator for Anglo- and Hispanic-descent students alike earned him a stellar reputation amongst educators. Paredes's work as a folklorist, especially his explorations of the Texas/Mexico Border corridos, earned him international fame. His 1958 University of Texas at Austin Master's Thesis, With a Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, challenged the Anglo version of the Gregorio Cortez story and the hegemony of Texas literature and history scholars such as J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb. In fact, Paredes two most recognized books, With a Pistol in His Hands and George Washington Gomez, challenged the reputations of Webb and Dobie by attacking the scholarship of Webb's Texas Rangers and poking fun of Dobie as a bumbling, old Texas cowboy named K. Hank Harvey in GWG. After earning his Phd in English from Austin, Paredes became a professor of folklore and spent the rest of his academic career with UT, where he founded the Center for Intercultural Studies of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.

As Virginia Woolf writes in "The Art of Biography," she states, "Almost any biographer, if he respects fact, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders" (259). Woolf's view frees the modern biographer from the constraints of sticking solely to the black and white facts. It gives biographers the ability to bring their subjects to life and bring the reader closer to the subject's mien, rather than just a distanced look at artifacts such as IRS returns and grocery lists.

Dr. Medrano falls victim to the fact-train and fails to give the reader the man, Americo Paredes, as a breathing and sentient human. We leave the biography with a sense Paredes created himself without the help of mentors and struggled against currents working to hold him down his entire life. In fact, Medrano paints a man, in some sense, as one who was simply angry and reactionary.

Medrano neglects to plumb any of Paredes essential relationships, and we seldom see a multidimensional character arise from the biographical narrative. Early relationships, like those with Texas author Hart Stilwell (who gives Paredes his first job as a writer at the Brownsville Herald), are glossed over with little mention of rather these relationships developed Paredes or not. In fact, there is strong anecdotal evidence Stilwell introduced Paredes to Dobie during the high school graduation ceremony Paredes parodies in George Washington Gomez. The relationships with influential students and colleagues, like Jose Limon and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, are only mere mentions.

"Writing this book for me was a labor of love and respect for Dr. Paredes," says Medrano. "It's a story that needed to be told, and I wanted somebody who lived and grew up in the Valley to tell it."

We only wish Dr. Medrano had parlayed his respect and love for Dr. Paredes into an evocative and thought-provoking narrative and told the story of Americo Paredes. Moreover we wish Dr. Medrano had better explored the environments and relationships which developed the man and scholar Dr. Paredes represents. Although this biography fails as a scholarly work and a erudite narrative of an interesting life, it does provide one glimmer of hope: it allows future Paredes scholars a starting point to delve deeper scholarship.