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1
Américo ParedesGeorge Washington Gómez (1935-40)

• Ramón Saldívar
• English 126 Twentieth Century American Fictions

2
Always Historicize!

• Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious
• History of the U.S./Mexico Border Region
• Nuevo Santander 1749
• Mexico becomes Independent Republic 1821
• Texas Independent Republic 1836
• U.S.-Mexico War 1846-48
• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 1848

3
Texas and the Southwest 1836
4
Resistance and Repression

• The Construction of the Borderlands 1848-1898
• Catarino Garza 1890s
• The Mexican Revolution 1910
• The Seditionists 1915
• Américo Paredes b. 1915

5
War of Maneuver and War of Position -- Antonio
Gramsci

• War of Maneuver Direct Action
• Culture as Symbolic Action
• Strategy of indirect cultural resistance
• Music and other Oral Forms
• Corridos/Ballads

6
Corridos/ Ballads

• Anonymous folk song narrative
• Originating in the tradition of the Spanish
  romance corrido
• Octosyllabic quatrains in 3/4 meter
• Typically relates significant events
• After 1848 one theme, one form
• Border Conflict
• Individual and Organized Resistance
• A Lone Hero With His Pistol in His Hand
• Jacinto Treviño

7
Residual Cultural Order

• Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
• The Seditionists of 1915
• The Plan of San Diego
• Reprisals

8
Identity, Naming, and the Symbolic Cultural
Order, or Whats in a name?

• Compare Faulkners process of the ideological
  construction of Identity with Paredes
• And what shall we name him? GWG, 15
• A great man who will help his people GWG, 16
• Louis Althusser interpellation
• Mikhail Bakhtin speech genres

9
Américo Paredes (1915-1999)

• With His Pistol in His Hand A Border Ballad and
  its Hero (1958)
• Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture

10
Next Steps

• Continue Reading GWG
• Pt III Good Old School Days