3
With His Pistol in His Hand:
The Essay as Strong Sociological Poem

Américo Paredes's classic work of corrido scholarship, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), offers us the poetically mature and politically engaged resolution of the dialectical tensions between the precursory tradition and contemporary creativity that "Guitarreros" articulates but does not resolve. But to speak of scholarship as poetically mature requires that we blur genres, a tendency already evident in Georg Lukács's "On the Nature and Form of the Essay" ([1910] 1974) and requiring Clifford Geertz only to "poetically" label and conceptualize that which by 1980 was a growing, if not quite "mainstream" intellectual practice (Geertz 1980). Here, then, I want to examine the poetics of the anthropological essay With His Pistol in His Hand .

It is not often that an anthropological study becomes a poetic performance, if by the latter we at least imply, following Mukarovsky (1977), that a textuality partakes of "poetic designation," meaning "every use of words occurring in a text with a predominant aesthetic function" (p. 65) which renders "the sign itself the center of attention" (p. 72). However, Mukarovsky does not wish to be misconstrued on two important issues. First, poetic designation and function apply not only to formal poetry or other figurative language; rather, "this function participates, at least potentially, in every human act" (p. 69), whether poem, ritual, conversation, or anthropology. Second, this focus on the sign "itself," while weakening the relationship to any immediate reality, "does not preclude a relation between the work and reality as a whole; on the contrary it is even beneficial to this relation" (p. 71). His summary statement is a charter for the kind of analysis I wish to undertake:

The aesthetic function . . . is potentially present in every utterance. The specific character of poetic designation, therefore, rests solely in its more

radical exposure of the tendency inherent in every act of designation. The weakening of the immediate relation of poetic designation of reality is counterbalanced by the fact that the poetic work as a global designation enters into relation with the total set of the existential experiences of the subject, be he the creative or the perceiving subject. (1977:72–73)

My analysis also proposes to restore Mukarovsky's full formulation, the second half of which—the matter of social intent—is often repressed in much contemporary analysis. There is in such contemporary analyses a too singular concern with the first half of his formulation, with the text as pure sign, and a relative lack of concern with the poetically designated text "as a global designation" which "enters into relation with the total set of the existential experiences of . . . the creative or the perceiving subject."

In the present case, I want to take Paredes's poetically designated text beyond its obvious reference to an immediate reality—the Mexican corrido and a community of corrido specialists—to its more global designation as a political poetics that, marshaling the influence of the ballad, addresses and helps to form a generation of poets, intellectuals, and activists. Thus to understand the poetics of With His Pistol in His Hand , we must turn to the social experiences of those political creative and perceiving subjects involved in the textualization of this author and his work.

The Appearance of with his Pistol in His Hand

As we have seen in chapter 1, With His Pistol in His Hand is substantively a study of the heroic corrido as it appears and develops along the lower Texas-Mexico border—south Texas—since the Spanish settlement of the area in the mid-eighteenth century. More specifically, it is a study of the life, legend, and corpus of ballads generated by the activities of one individual, Gregorio Cortez. The historical facts of Cortez's life, as set out by Paredes, are as follows.

Until June 12, 1901, Cortez was a rather ordinary Mexican-American in Texas, an agricultural laborer like so many others who, from his own perspective, was witnessing the intensification of a largely Anglo-American and capitalist domination of Texas, including the predominantly Mexican-American region of south Texas. This domination of the native population, which was increasingly comprised of immigrants

of Mexican descent, took the form of class and racial subordination, the latter evidenced in part in the rough-and-ready lynching "justice" often administered to Mexican-Americans accused of crimes (Limón 1986a).

Such was the fate that Cortez undoubtedly expected on June 12 in the moments after he killed Sheriff W. T. Morris in Karnes County in central Texas in an exchange of pistol fire that also left Cortez's brother, Romaldo, seriously wounded. In his last official act, Sheriff Morris, a former Texas Ranger, had come out to the farm where the Cortezes, migrants from the border, were sharecropping. The sheriff was looking for reported horse thieves. Because neither he nor his accompanying deputy spoke Spanish well, if at all, they mistakenly accused the Cortezes of the thievery, and Sheriff Morris drew his gun to arrest Cortez. Probably fearing they were about to be gunned down in cold blood, Romaldo charged the sheriff, not knowing that his brother had a gun hidden behind his back. Morris shot Romaldo, but in the next instant was himself cut down by Gregorio. As Morris's deputy ran for his life and help and the sheriff lay dead before him, Cortez knew that he faced certain Texas justice.

Entrusting his brother to his family, Gregorio began a long horseback ride south, toward the Mexican border. Along the way he evaded numerous posses, through skillful riding and help from local Mexican-Americans. He also killed a second sheriff. When he eventually learned that the authorities had incarcerated his wife and children and were carrying out reprisals against those who had helped him, he turned himself in to the authorities near Laredo, Texas, where Mexican-Americans still had some measure of political control. Nonetheless, he was returned to Karnes County where, under constant threat of lynching, he was tried and convicted. In one of those paradoxes that has always characterized Texas, Cortez was eventually pardoned by an Anglo Texas governor. The governor was not reelected.

Cortez's adventurous ride to freedom stirred the folk imagination of the Mexican-Americans of Texas, who had already experienced half a century of domination. Soon after, or perhaps even during Cortez's ride, the community's corridistas began to compose and sing the ballad of Gregorio Cortez. As Paredes says, they sang "in the cantinas and the country stores, in the ranches when men gather at night to talk in the cool dark, sitting in a circle, smoking and listening to the old songs and the tales of other days" (p. 33).^[1] Paredes offers this English trans-

lation of one of the better short versions of the ballad as a representative text.

          El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez

In the country of El Carmen
A great misfortune befell;
The Major Sheriff is dead;
Who killed him no one can tell.

At two in the afternoon,
In half an hour or less,
They knew that the man who killed him
Had been Gregorio Cortez.

And in the county of Kiansis
They cornered him after all;
Though they were more than three hundred
He leaped out of their corral.

Then the Major Sheriff said,
As if he was going to cry,
"Cortez, hand over your weapons;
We want to take you alive."

They let loose the bloodhound dogs;
They followed him from afar.
But trying to catch Cortez
Was like following a star.

All the rangers of the county
Were flying, they rode so hard;
What they wanted was to get
The thousand-dollar reward.

Then said Gregorio Cortez,
And his voice was like a bell,
"You will never get my weapons
Till you put me in a cell."

Then said Gregorio Cortez,
With his pistol in his hand,
"Ah, so many mounted Rangers
Just to take one Mexican!"

Cortez's epic counter was neither the first nor the last of such encounters with Anglo-Texan authority, nor was it the first or last to inspire corridos. Ten years earlier, Catarino Garza, journalist and guerrilla leader, had taken up organized arms against the Texas Rangers and inspired a balladry. And fourteen years later new corridos could be heard along the border about los sediciosos (the seditionists), bands of

Mexicans who rose up in armed rebellion in 1915–16 against Anglo-Texan authority. In reprisal the Texas Rangers carried out massive killings of combatants and civilians alike, a practice that even an eminent champion of the Rangers, historian Walter Prescott Webb, felt obligated to criticize as an "orgy of bloodshed" (1935:263).

When it appeared in 1958, With His Pistol in His Hand received its principal attention from the communities of folklorists and scholars of the Southwest and certain elements of the Anglo lay public in Texas. As such, the book might have remained another circumscribed scholarly text for specialists. However, in the 1960s the book found a wider audience when the first significant groups of largely working-class Mexican-American youth attended colleges and universities in the Southwest and joined with other youth in movements of political protest and cultural rebellion. (As we will see in chapter 4, this activity among Mexican-American college youth evolved into the Chicano movement, which, in addition to its practical politics, also generated a great deal of intellectual and artistic work within the Mexican-American community.) Published on the eve of this political, intellectual, and artistic florescence, Paredes's scholarly anthropological study became a powerful influence on a new generation of Chicano writers, intellectuals, and activists as they produced a new critical social discourse. It was able to exert such an influence precisely because Paredes had by this time worked out a subtle and complex relationship of content and form to the epic corrido. With His Pistol in His Hand is, in effect, a new kind of corrido, one whose complex relationship to the past enabled it to speak to the present. Let us first appreciate the balladlike form of With His Pistol in His Hand .

The Return of the Mexican Ballad: a Formal Analysis

Paredes's book opens with a dedication to his father and to an older generation and their folklore:

To the memory of my father,
who rode a raid or two with
Catarino Garza;
and to all those old men
who sat around on summer nights,
in days where there was a chaparral,

smoking their cornhusk cigarettes and talking
in low, gentle voices about
violent things;
while I listened.

Even as the imagery of this dedication establishes the writer's special authority to recall and transform the past, his use of English language, meter, and free verse establishes his authority to speak to the new generation, to Mexican-Americans educated in a modernist and postmodernist climate.

Following the dedication, we encounter a quite brief introduction, as if the author is anxious to move quickly to the main text. Yet its precise economy—its tight form—alerts us to the traditional cultural precursors that inform this text:

This book began as the study of a ballad; it developed into the story of a ballad hero. Thus it became two books in one. It is an account of the life of a man, of the way that songs and legends grew up about his name, and of the people who produced the songs, the legends, and the man. It is also the story of a ballad, "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez," of its development out of actual events, and of the folk traditions from which it sprang. (p. 3)

With His Pistol in His Hand preserves its dual origins: part i narrates the story of Gregorio Cortez, while the formal scholarship and technical analysis of the Mexican ballad are reserved for part 2.

To more explicitly alert us to the style of his text, even as he provides useful scholarly information, Paredes offers a brief, general definition of the corrido: "Corrido , the Mexicans call their narrative folk songs, especially those of epic themes, taking the name from correr , which means "to run" or "to flow," for the corrido tells a story simply and swiftly, without embellishments" (p. 3). This style is precisely what we will recognize when we begin the main text, a story told "simply and swiftly, without embellishments."

Finally, he tells us that his is not a simple story about just any balladry or, for that matter, any Mexican balladry; it is a story about the balladry of borders and conflict, particularly the conflict between the Anglo and people of Mexican descent in the United States. With this rhetorical move Paredes "locates" his Chicano readers and, as a corridista would, appeals to their understanding of the social relations and historical context for his story.

On the page following the introduction, Paredes presents a partial version of a corrido printed without commentary. For Chicano readers

the verses and musical notation are more than a useful example of the topic at hand; they evoke all our memories and experiences of the style of our traditional folk form and its sound. "In the country of El Carmen," we read and the entire world of the corrido opens before us. As we then begin to read the first chapter of part 1, "The Country," we sense that a new type of corrido, one in the form of scholarly prose, is developing before us. For like a corridista, Paredes quickly establishes the "scenic structure," the geographical locale and opposing social forces. Here is Paredes's own analysis of the traditional corrido's opening stylistic devices, taken from part 2:

a scenic structure . . . is typical of the Border heroic corrido . The setting in motion of the action is a few swift lines, the introduction of the hero speaking out his boast in the second scene, after his first exploit, thus giving the whole narrative a middle-of-things feeling, the tendency to tell the story not in a long continuous and detailed narrative but in a series of shifting scenes and by means of action and dialogue. . . . a couple of stanzas get the story going and then the hero appears shouting out his boast or his defiance. From that moment on, the story moves swiftly to its conclusion, with point of view shifting rapidly from the hero to his adversaries and back again, and from one position in space to another if the action covers a great deal of ground. (p. 187)

Quite conscious not to use too many words, lest he lose his audience or distort the clarity of the situation, Paredes gives us twenty-six simply and elegantly written pages that provide the essentials we need to grasp the full social significance of the Cortez incident. But while a corridista could assume that his folk audience would have immediately understood the full signification of stanza 1 of the actual "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," where a sheriff has died, and stanza 2, where the killer is identified as Cortez, Paredes knows that his contemporary Chicano audience requires a few more words to delineate the social structure and cultural relationship that may have been obscured by the passing of time. Chicanos coming of age in the 1950s knew about segregated barbershops near the University of Texas at Austin, about Texas Rangers breaking up Mexican farmworker strikes in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and about appalling social conditions for Mexican-Americans, but they may not have known about the violence of 1915. So Paredes recounts an interview he had with Mrs. Josefina Flores de Garza in 1954. Mrs. Garza, he explains,

gave me some idea how it felt to be on the receiving end of the Ranger "orgy of bloodshed" of 1915. At that time Mrs. Garza was a girl of

eighteen, the eldest of a family that included two younger boys in their teens and several small children. The family lived on a ranch near Harlingen, north of Brownsville. When the Ranger "executions" began, other Mexican ranchers sought refuge in town. The elder Flores refused to abandon his ranch, telling his children, "El que nada debe nada teme" (He who is guilty of nothing fears nothing.)

The Rangers arrived one day, surrounded the place and searched the outbuildings. The family waited in the house. Then the Rangers called the elder Flores out. He stepped to the door, and they shot him down. His two boys ran to him when he fell, and they were shot down as they bent over their father. Then the Rangers came into the house and looked around. One of them saw a new pair of chaps, liked them, and took them with him. They left immediately afterwards.

From other sources I learned that the shock drove Josefina Flores temporarily insane. For two days her mother lived in the house with a brood of terrified youngsters, her deranged eldest daughter, and the corpses of her husband and her sons....

The daughter recovered her sanity after some time, but it still upsets her to talk about the killings. And though forty years have passed, she still seems to be afraid that if she says something critical about the Rangers they will come and do her harm. Apparently Ranger terror did its work well, on the peaceful and inoffensive. (p. 27)

The recounting of this terrible incident is the rhetorical climax of what Paredes wants to accomplish in his first "stanza": to succinctly and graphically establish the social scene of his poem. Yet if women are usually excluded from the corrido, in these most charged lines of Paredes's opening stanza, it is women, particularly a mother with her brood, who are at the dramatic center of the narrative. In this most moving and substantial way, Paredes introduces women into his discourse, women driven to madness by state terrorism in the service of social domination.^[2] This particular gendered point of oppression could not but foster deep resentment among Paredes's Chicano readers, whose patriarchal culture viewed the mistreatment of women as a particularly reprehensible thing. Though Paredes's new corrido continues to be a patriarchal tale, its composer has allowed us to glimpse that repressed dimension which also endures domination—a theme to which we shall return.

Once the scene is set, the traditional corrido usually introduces the hero in its next few stanzas, and does so in legendary proportions: Three hundred Texas Rangers are said to surround Cortez, yet he escapes; "But trying to catch Cortez / Was like following a star"; and later Cortez is said to directly address and taunt his pursuers. These are the

fictive elements permitted to the corridista in the exercise of his poetic license. As such, they draw on a larger story of legendry with its own independent oral existence, a body of legends known to his listeners that enhances and fills out their appreciation of the sparse, sung ballad.

So, too, Paredes introduces us to the legendary Cortez in his second chapter, "The Legend." Here Paredes employs an omniscient narrator to recount the legends for readers unfamiliar with them. Amplifying on the ballad, this account tells us that Cortez was a quiet, polite, good man; both a fine horseman and a knowledgeable farmer; a superb rifle and pistol shot. He had been living a quiet life along the predominantly Mexican border country when his brother, who "was just like the young men of today, loud mouthed and discontented," persuaded him to "move away from the river and go up above, where there was much money to be made" (p. 36). Again, Paredes needs a few more lines to accomplish for his audience what a traditional singer in 1901 could assume about his; namely, that the legend of Cortez was already taking hold in the community's consciousness, and that this consciousness would inform their appreciation of his ballad. Paredes's Chicano audience, however, needed a direct and elaborated, albeit economical and fictive, rendition of this legendry.

Like much folklore, however, the corrido is not simply a narrative of totally mythic fictions. It is at the same time, a historical account that, within a mythos and an ideological perspective, nonetheless permits its audience to discover a remarkable range of social reality. Whatever the fictive dimensions of this particular ballad, its audience would at the same time learn that, in fact, Cortez had killed a sheriff in a place called Karnes County and afterward had claimed his right to do so in defense of his life and that of his brother. They would also learn certain factual details of the southward flight, of which the most general and important is that Cortez did outride and outshoot the vaunted Texas Rangers, that they "captured" him only when he turned himself in after learning about the reprisals taken against his family and community.

Adapting the corrido's narrative conventions, Paredes presents his primary research on the historical facts of the case in chapter 3, "The Man." Here we learn, interestingly enough, how remarkably close the legendary aspects of the ballad correspond to the emergent historical narrative as Paredes discovered and constructed it. In presenting his historical reconstruction, Paredes is also attentive to another corrido convention, to tell the story "with point of view shifting rapidly from

the hero to his adversaries and back again." Unlike the Anglo historical reconstructions of Texas society, in which the Mexicans are presented as stereotypes, Paredes's narrative tells a great deal about both sides and, like the corrido, brings both sides to life. What we discover to some extent in the original corrido and to a larger extent in Paredes's new corrido is that Anglos are people: they are capable of fear, doubt, anxiety, anger, fairness, meanness, pettiness, and generosity, although the negative qualities predominate in their treatment of Mexicans.

In the fourth and final chapter of part 1, "The Hero's Progress," Paredes reviews the fact and fancy, the variants and versions, of the Cortez legendry and balladry and demonstrates their intertwined relationship. As a postnarrative review, this chapter is a prose equivalent of the conversations that men may have after a corrido performance, as they evaluate the corrido, its hero and his circumstances, and try to get at the truth.^[3]

With His Pistol in His Hand: the Return of the Dead

Paredes's close integration of corrido aesthetics with the shaping of his prose poem represents a final coming to terms with the precursor. The expressive potency that so suffused the relatively young poem "Guitarreros" has now been fully integrated into this much later, extended, and mature poem. We may read With His Pistol in His Hand as an extended exercise in the final revisionary ratios that Bloom calls askesis and apophrades .

In "Guitarreros," we observed, Paredes stopped short of a full Rebellion save for that of form. In the short dedicatory poem that appears at the beginning of With His Pistol in His Hand he chooses not to dwell on that Rebellion, but instead to represent a more mature relationship in which he reacts to the precursor's influence by a seemingly almost total acceptance of his dominance.^[4] Not to be confused with the earlier stage of Withdrawal, this acceptance reflects the ephebe's positive presence and control, even as he appears wholly generous to the precursor. This is the phase Bloom calls askesis , or what I shall call Perspective. For Bloom there is an equivalence between askesis and the Freudian psychic defense of sublimation, in which desire—sexual or aggressive—is transformed into the opposite, that is, into a controlled selflessness and a studied acceptance. The trope that corresponds to

sublimation, in Bloom's scheme, is metaphor, poetic images that speak of one thing but refer to something else.

Paredes's dedicatory poem is about his father's generation, those who rode "a raid or two" with Catarino Garza and sat around the campfire talking about "violent things," but it is also an extended metaphor for the precursor himself, as in a sense was "Guitarreros." There are two critical differences here. First, the formal character of the dedication—its metrics, diction, and tone—is "modernist" and yet is also a more subtle approximation to the character of the corrido than "Guitarreros." It is as if to say, "I do not need to rebel in my form; I can come perilously close to your influence without being swallowed up whole as a formal poet." Second, the dedicatory poem quietly substitutes the poetic son for the old man of "Guitarreros." Now it is the poetic son, not the old man, who listens, and he listens not as a passive audience to the discourse of the precursors, but as a young ambitious poet actively gathering and synthesizing in preparation for his own strong poem. Though he sits passively, his active prediscursive reflection is itself the poetically rendered taking of Perspective.

Seemingly cast as a dedication to the father and the precursor generation's political poetics, this short poem is an important coming to terms with them. The poetic son is no longer Swerving, no longer in Withdrawal, nor in open Rebellion, but is in mature comprehension of their presence as preparation for his own distinctive yet even more fundamentally indebted poetic discourse. In the intellectual prose poem that follows, Paredes then carries us beyond Perspective into the later revisionary move that constitutes a yet more mature and final encounter with the precursor. This is how Bloom describes this most mature of revisions of the precursor's power, the apopbrades , or Return of the Dead: "The wholly mature strong poet is peculiarly vulnerable to this last phase of his revisionary relationship to the dead. This vulnerability is most evident in poems that quest for a final clarity, that seek to be definitive statements, testaments to what is uniquely the strong poet's gift (or what he wishes us to remember as his unique gift)" (1973:139–40). With His Pistol in His Hand has to be thought of in just these terms—definitive statement, testament, the strong poet's gift.

In this phase of poetic struggle against the precursor, the latecomer poet achieves the nearly impossible: he fully integrates the precursor into his own poem and yet, at the same time, stands fully in control of himself. The precursor master poem appears to speak again, but only

in the words of the latecomer as the reader senses both their distinctiveness and their uncanny resemblance. The dead, says Bloom, have returned to inhabit the house of poetry, though its construction is not their own. Bloom believes that the latecomer poet achieves this effect and this introjection of the precursor's influence through the trope of metalepsis, the substitution of a trope for a trope, a figure of speech for another figure of speech (Bloom 1975a:101–3). If we conceive of the extended performance called the essay as a trope and view it as a poetically endowed, condensed representation of a reality, as Lukács suggests, and if a folk ballad is of the same order, then in this case one extended trope—Paredes's essay—has been substituted for another—"The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez." Ultimately, it seems, this metaleptic substitution is what the apophrades , the Return of the Dead, is all about in purely linguistic terms, although in psychoanalytical terms, it also represents introjection, the nearly total absorption of the anxiety-producing issue as a way of warding off its influence and creatively managing our aggressiveness toward it (Bloom 1975a:102).

In poetic terms the imagistic and technical yield is that the precursor is wholly and magically contained within the later poem, simultaneously endowing it with its power and yet paradoxically in its control. In this final revision, Bloom tells us, the later poet "holds his own poem so open again to the precursor's work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet's flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios" (1973:15–16). That is, we may have the momentary sensation of returning to the phase of kenosis , or Withdrawal, where the later poet appears wholly dominated by the precursor. But in the much more mature phase of apophrades , "the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work" (1973 :16).

By the end of Paredes's text, "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez" has become wholly identified with Paredes's rewriting of it, and he wholly identified with "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez." Or, put in terms closer to Bloom's, one has the eerie sensation that "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez" could not have existed until the strong writing of With His Pistol in His Hand , in the same way that the latter could not exist without the ballad. Through Paredes's corrido in prose the Dead return

to inhabit the Living, thereby renewing the poetic life of each. But, I would add, revising Bloom, it is poetic life with social purpose as well.

The Return of the Dead and the Politics of the Living

With His Pistol in His Hand is simultaneously a scholarly study of the greater Mexican corrido and a prose poem deeply influenced by the poetics of its subject. In it we see the precursory dead come alive once more in a mature, paradoxical later poem. But the Return of the Dead is also a political poetics, and here Bloom's figure of speech is quite apt, though in a way his neoformalism did not intend.

As we saw in chapter 1, literal death—flesh-ripping death—abounds everywhere in the social world of the corrido and deeply informs its thematics, and it is death as a consequence of politics. By 1958, when With His Pistol in His Hand appeared, Texas Rangers no longer gunned down Mexican-Americans as often. Yet in an indirect and perhaps metaphorical way, violent death continues to figure as a political issue in their lives,^[5] Drawing on the poetics of the corrido, Paredes's prose poem gives aesthetic life to the precursory dead in order to reengage them in a struggle for cultural life and death.

As José Saldívar (1991) has brilliantly noted, one specific site of such a struggle is to be found in the way that Paredes's book contests the authoritative depiction of the Texas Rangers as law-abiding, fearless, virtuous warriors of the plains, a portrait whose principal source is the writings of the eminent historian Walter Prescott Webb. At issue is the historical exculpation of the Texas Rangers for the cold-blooded killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of border Mexicans. Paredes brings back the Dead to haunt those, like Webb, who would shelter history's murderers.

But there is another kind of murder that Webb's version of history commits, and that is to ideologically erase the culture of its victims by casting them as social and cultural inferiors, cowardly mixed-blood bandits wholly deserving of their deaths and their culture's extinction. As such, Webb's book is but one example of a field of dominating discourses chiefly, but not exclusively, historical and social scientific that prevailed in the post-World War II period. The net ideological effect of this discourse is to continuously delegitimize Mexican-American culture and to present it as a wholly internally generated and shaped

constellation of socially dysfunctional values (Romano 1968; Vaca 1970).

Later in his career Paredes offered his own explicit assessment of this body of literature (1978), but his study of Gregorio Cortez constitutes a poetically constructed critique of these hegemonic discourses at a critical historical moment. Taking its poetic influence from a socially influential folk poem, Paredes's own poem also works its own social influence.

In this particular struggle against the discourses of domination, Jameson's first level of political history—"of punctual event and a chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time"—Mexican-Americans, at that historical moment, any record of the events of their history was of great political significance. For those who had been told that Mexican-Americans had no history or, worse still, a history of social deviance, the mere knowledge of a heroic figure like Cortez and of the formal complexity of the corrido could have a decisive counterhegemonic effect. Departing from this initial, literal kind of political awareness, Paredes's book then places these cultural performances in a context of class power relations. Using what Rosaldo (1985:410) calls a fine nonreductive sense of the relationship between culture and power, Paredes's prose poem offered the Mexican-American intelligentsia a level of analysis in which class and social domination became the principal lenses for reading. Both Cortez and the Texas Rangers become ideologemes for class, as does Paredes's prose corrido itself; as a text, it represents a continuing race and class struggle by Mexican-Americans against domination. The potency of the book's ideology did not escape the University of Texas Press, which, according to Paredes, at first refused to publish the book unless he deleted all critical references to Walter Prescott Webb and the Texas Rangers. He refused, the Press eventually relented, and the book appeared.

However, Paredes's book accomplishes its first two political missions because it fundamentally relies on its ideology of form, Jameson's third level of reading. As we have seen, With His Pistol in His Hand is, to a considerable extent, like its precursor, a story told "simply and swiftly, without embellishments." Yet With His Pistol in His Hand also offers an early example of what is now called the "experimental moment" in anthropological writing (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986).^[6] Arguing the need for a critically reflexive postmodern ethnog-

raphy, Fischer, for example, recommends the practice of "intertextuality, inter-reference, and the interlinguistic modalities of post-modernist knowledge," the use of "multiple voices and perspectives, the highlighting of humorous inversions and dialectical juxtaposition of identities/traditions/cultures, and the critique of hegemonic discourses," creative techniques that can "contribute to a reinvigorated ethnographic literature, one that can again fulfill the anthropological promise of cultural criticism" (1986:202).

By "intertextuality" Fischer refers partially to the tendency in some ethnic autobiography to shape the present text as an often transforming repetition of "behavior patterns previously established toward some prior significant other," often a father figure. This is the psychoanalytical concept of transference, "the return of the repressed in new forms" (p. 206), which results in the generation of the ethnic text as the "conquest of an anxiety . . . that cannot be articulated in rational language but can only be acted out" (p. 204)—relations, Fischer notes, that are the subject of Bloom's work on the poetics of influence.

As a multiple-voiced performance, With His Pistol in His Hand is just such a polyphonic ethnography, a dialectical juxtaposition of identities, traditions, and cultures. In addition to the obvious contrast between Anglo and Mexican, Paredes shows us the varying identities within the Mexican-descent community itself. A few examples. In chapter 2, "The Legend," a fictional traditional figure recalls the singing of "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" and says,

"That was good singing, and a good song; give the man a drink. Not like these pachucos nowadays, mumbling damn-foolishness into a microphone; it is not done that way. Men should sing with their heads thrown back, with their mouths wide open and their eyes shut. Fill your lungs, so they can hear you at the pasture's end." (p. 34)

And, we discover that our mythic hero also has several identities, including some not so heroic, which speak to gender and domination and which Paredes critiques with a kind of humorous inversion. For when Cortez is finally captured and brought to jail, several women show up to claim him as theirs, even while his poor wife also waits in jail.

Humor, irony, and inversion, however, best serve Paredes in attacking hegemonic Anglo racist discourses about Mexicans in Texas, and here too he borrows from the corrido tradition, which often makes fun of Anglos. Paredes quotes Webb:" 'Without disparagement, it may be said

that there is a cruel streak in the Mexican nature, or so the history of Texas would lead one to believe. This cruelty may be a heritage from the Spanish of the Inquisition; it may, and doubtless should, be attributed partly to the Indian blood.' "Nonetheless, despite this cruel streak, Webb describes "'the Mexican warrior'" as inferior: "'The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with rather than against the music.'" To all this, Paredes wryly comments: "Professor Webb does not mean to be disparaging. One wonders what his opinion might have been when he was in a less scholarly mood and not looking at the Mexican from the objective point of view of the historian" (p. 17). Later, in his discussion of the shoot-out between Cortez and Sheriff Morris, Paredes ironically appropriates and juxtaposes Webb's observations in a new context. After Morris is shot, his deputy runs, according to Paredes, preferring to "travel with rather than against the music" made by "the whine of leaden slugs" (p. 63).

Multiple voices, inversions, humor and irony, and the dialectical juxtaposition of identities, traditions, and cultures: these are, for Fischer, the techniques that can be of service to the writing of a new kind of ethnography. And in some incipient anticipatory way, Paredes's book involves just such practices, including also the blurting of genres between ethnic autobiography and historical ethnography, between folk poetic forms and "the poetics and politics of ethnography" (Clifford and Marcus 1986). The text's blurring of forms as such constitutes a critique by way of an alternative model to the linear, hierarchical discourses in the service of advanced capitalism.

Yet, these anticipatory formal messages of a new kind of cultural production do not constitute the formal totality of Paredes's book. It is not a postmodernist tract, not vulnerable to the suspect collusion between postmodernism and the later stages of advanced capitalism (Jameson 1984). This tendency toward a politically problematic "future" mode of cultural production is checked precisely by the corrido's influence on With His Pistol in His Hand . Suspended as it were between a style of the future and an older precursory expressive mode—a definition of modernism I will elaborate in my concluding chapter—Paredes's ideology of form is perfectly positioned—unlike "Guitarreros"—to speak its political unconscious to a new generation, itself modernist in character.

Through its very form With His Pistol in His Hand became an important rhetorical vehicle for reaching a particular audience in the

late fifties and sixties. It is an ideological statement in which the writing of a culture partakes of the culture itself rather than objectifying, reifying, or distancing it. In Williams's terms, we may say that it is able to be superbly effective in the present as a counterhegemonic discourse. It is precisely so because it so wholly incorporates the now residual form of the corrido into the crafting of a therefore more potent emergent cultural practice that already anticipates the future. But this process of incorporation requires the poet's own internal axis of confrontation with his strong precursors, even as he confronts the political present. The potent Dead return to shape Paredes's late poem, but also to speak once again politically against a continuing domination of the Mexicandescent community in the United States. Yet, while this complex representation of a powerful residual tradition worked against domination, in large part it did so by speaking its mediated message to a specific and new audience—a new generation of Mexican-American intellectual literary activists.