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IN MEMORIAM
AMERICO PAREDES
Américo Paredes, professor of
anthropology and English at The University of Texas at Austin, and a
pioneer in the field of Mexican American studies, died in Austin on
May 5, 1999. This is the day called El Cinco de Mayo, the anniversary
of the Battle of Puebla in which the people of Mexico defeated the French
forces of occupation and began their expulsion from Mexico.
Born in 1915 in Brownsville, Texas,
Paredes became the foremost anthropological, folkloristic, and literary
scholar of the community he referred to as "Greater Mexico," a term
for capturing the present and historical movement of Mexicans across
the U.S.-Mexico border. Paredes earned a PhD in English and Spanish
from The University of Texas at Austin in 1956, and in the following
year was appointed assistant professor of English at UT. His doctoral
dissertation became the now classic book, With His Pistol in His
Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958) which, along with several
articles, earned him tenure and the rank of associate professor in 1961.
He was promoted to full professor in 1965. In 1983 he became the Dickson,
Allen, Anderson Centennial Professor in Southwest Folklore, History,
and Literature.
During his time at the University, Paredes
founded the highly-regarded Center for Mexican American Studies, as
well as the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology
in 1967. He worked with a group of younger scholars, namely Roger D.
Abrahams, Richard Bauman, and Joel Sherzer, developing what has become
known as the ethnography of performance. Paredes’s scholarly work
included numerous articles, three additional academic books, including
The Folktales of Mexico (The University of Chicago Press, 1970)
and The Texas-Mexican Cancionero (University of Illinois Press,
1976), several novels, including George Washington Gomez (Arte
Publico Press, 1990), and several books of poetry, including Between
Two Worlds (Arte Publico Press, 1991). He received numerous awards
and accolades, including the Charles Frankel Prize from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the Orden de Aguila Azteca,
Mexico’s highest honor awarded to scholars from other countries.
In 1998, the Austin Independent School District announced the naming
of a new middle school after Professor Paredes.
Professor Paredes’s work has
also been the subject of numerous critical works in themselves. Foremost
among those who have been engaged with his work include José
Limón, Renato Rosaldo, and Ramon Saldívar. Paredes was
dedicated to the proposition that cultures are not contained within
historically contingent things that we call nation-states. And–expanding
this idea of border-crossings as early as the mid-1950s–he believed
that scholarly disciplinary activity in the realm of culture must continually
be integrative to produce one encompassing and fluid portrait in which
history, anthropology, folklore, literature, and cultural geography
become as one.
Since 1987 the Center for Mexican American
Studies has honored Professor Paredes through an annual Distinguished
Paredes Lectureship, which serves to bring young scholars working in
the Paredes tradition to the campus. Finally, in the summer of 2000,
the folklore center Professor Paredes helped establish was renamed The
Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies. It is through Professor
Américo Paredes’s deep commitment to an integrative and
interdisciplinary understanding of scholarship, as well as his commitment
to knowledge in the service of community, that we find the link between
him and the work of cultural studies.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner,
President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared
by a special committee consisting of Professors Richard R. Flores
(chair), David Montejano, and José Limón.
Distributed to the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the Executive
Vice President and Provost, and the President on January 5, 2001.
Copies are available on request from the Office of the General Faculty,
FAC 22, F9500. This resolution is posted under "Memorials" at: http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/.
Link to Official
Publications memorial resolution.
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