The Corrido as Mediated Precursor

The general influence of the corrido on Chicano poetry in the 1960s has not escaped critical notice. For all of its residual character, the

corrido still had a live, direct presence in the consciousness of those involved in the movement, either from our immediate working-class background or as part of the emergent political culture. New and old corridos were sung at farmworker and other political rallies as well as at literary festivals like flor y canto . The influence of the corrido, however, was also absorbed in a mediated fashion through the widespread reading of Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand and the gradual emergence of its author's charismatic social persona. Together they also provided the continuing mediated poetics of the precursor, a poetics never separate from politics.

We can substantiate this particular relationship with extended testimony from one of the leading Mexican-American literary intellectuals of this generation, Tomás Rivera. At the time he is describing, Rivera was a graduate student at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Back in 1958, we thought writing should be a money-making proposition. To make money there had to be a gimmick, we thought, so we went to the people who were making it at the time, Mickey Spillane and people like that. We actually tried to imitate Spillane. We thought people would notice, that it would bring us fame and glory. We sent off the manuscripts y pues nada [and nothing]. Los chicanos que metíamos allí [The Chicanos we stuck in there] were cooks and prostitutes, very stereotyped characters, as were the Anglo ones. I don't demean cooks or prostitutes, just the fact that we would stereotype them without benefit of dignity.

Then, one day I was wandering through the library and I came across With a Pistol in His Hand by Américo Paredes, and I was fascinated. I didn't even know Paredes existed, though we were only thirty miles away, pero no había cornunicación alguna porque no había Movimiento ni nada de eso. Saqué el libro ese. Lo que me atrajo fue el apellido Paredes [but there was no communication at all, because there wasn't a Movement or anything like that. I checked out that book. What attracted me was the name Paredes ]. I was hungry to find something by a Chicano or Mexican-American. It fascinated me because, one, it proved it was possible for a Chicano to publish; two, it was about a Chicano, Gregorio Cortez, y sus azañas [and his deeds]. (Y los corridos, también [And the ballads, too], I grew up with the corridos de Texas .) That book indicated to me that it was possible to talk about a Chicano as a complete figure. I went back to the old newspapers and checked the accounts for how they handled Gregorio Cortez and found the grotesque exaggeration, as Américo says. Then I would go back to Américo's book and wonder which one was right. Was Américo lying too? Was he overdoing it también

[also]? More importantly, With a Pistol in His Hand indicated to me a whole imaginative possibility for us to explore. Now that, also, was in 1958, and it was then I began to think, write, and reflect a hell of a lot more on those people I had known in 1945 to '55.

That's the personal trajectory of the evolution of my role as documenter. I guess that sense of it came from feeling that Américo had documented one person para siempre [forever]. It was very important. I felt that I had to document the migrant worker para siempre [forever], para que no se olvidara ese espíritu tan fuerte de resistir y continuar under the worst of conditions [so that their very strong spirit of endurance and the will to go on under the worst of conditions should not be forgotten], because they were worse than slaves. El esclavo es una inversión [A slave is an investment], so you protect him to keep him working. A migrant worker? You owe him nothing. If he came to you, you gave him work and then just told him to leave. No investment. If he got sick, you got rid of him; you didn't have to take care of him. It was bad, labor camps and all that. (1980:150–51)

Rivera's statement is key in several respects.^[4] For one, it clearly reveals the effects of cultural hegemony on young Mexican-Americans, a hegemony that fostered an ambivalence toward their native culture and led them to internalize and reproduce negative stereotyping discourses; for Rivera, "cooks and prostitutes." But for a Mexican-American intelligentsia, particularly those with a strong desire to write, there seemed to be no alternative discourse, no useful models from which to speak, to resolve that lingering ambivalence, until "one day wandering through the library," as Rivera says, or perhaps at a bookstore, they came across With His Pistol in His Hand and then passed it around like a Holy Writ.

To find Paredes's book was to discover at least three things not at all evident to young Mexican-Americans in the early 1960s. First, young Chicanos discovered the probability that the received conventional history of the Mexican experience in the Southwest was distorted and falsified. Mexicans were not bandits; they were, or could be, like Cortez, men of honor, integrity, and courage. Equally important in this regard was the converse proposition, namely that Anglos had not always acted as paragons of virtue and civic obligation, nor was their authority legitimate. Second, young Chicanos recognized what Rivera calls "the imaginative possibility" of Paredes's book, the fascinating discovery that, contrary to dominant stereotypes, Mexican-Americans could write creatively in a modernist style. The name Paredes on the book's cover "proved it was possible for a Chicano to publish." Rivera's reading of

Paredes's book articulates, once again, Jameson's first and third levels of the political unconscious. But, in the 1960s Paredes's prose corrido also evoked an explicitly conscious sense of race and class relations, a sense evident in Rivera's reading also. For Rivera absorbs Paredes's corrido influence and uses it to focus our attention on the still continuing social plight of Mexican-Americans. He speaks of a world of politically produced social deprivation, of racial stigma, of disempowerment most visibly evident in farmworker society but by no means confined to it.

Yet even as the text of With His Pistol in His Hand provided the powerfully mediated influence of the precursory corrido to a new generation, the author of the text did so as well. When people in the Chicano movement gathered and the conversation turned to the subject of Américo Paredes, one could often detect the gradual emergence of an unsung proto-ballad of Américo Paredes. It is as if such conversations—a kind of Chicano movement oral tradition—constructed the known life and career of this man into a folklore narrative combining ballad and legend. Like all narratives, this narrative varied from group to group and performance to performance. Certain motifs were sometimes stated, sometimes implied, but the overall narrative structure that emerged recalled the traditional ballad's and legendry's thematic structure.

As with the traditional ballad, these conversations first established a setting and implied a social context for the appearance of the hero and the central narrative action. In our conversations, the story sometimes began with a confrontation between our hero and the Anglo authorities: An Anglo teacher tells the young Paredes that college is not for boys "like him"; has he considered attending vocational school? Or an assimilationist middle-class Mexican-American publisher in San Antonio refuses to publish Paredes's early stridently ethnic nationalist poems. Or, perhaps most dramatic of all, in the late 1950s the chief editor of the University of Texas Press refuses to publish With His Pistol in His Hand unless Paredes deletes all critical references to Walter Prescott Webb, J. Frank Dobie, and the Texas Rangers. Paredes refuses to do so, and the editor finally relents. When the book does appear, a former Texas Ranger tries to get Paredes's address from the Press so that he can "pistol whip the sonofabitch who wrote that book."

This conversational proto-narrative then fills in the hero's background in a way that is almost absolutely factual and yet has the aura of legendry. Our hero was born in the auspicious year of 1915, during the height of the Texas Rangers' killing of Mexican-Americans in south

Texas. He is said to be a good and simple man, but also already a bit extraordinary, highly gifted intellectually and a bit of the bohemian. He is exceptionally attractive to women and highly respected by men, a well-known popular singer on radio programs, a prize-winning poet and a journalist, a man who could and did defend his family's honor. The narrative continues. Paredes marries and divorces a well-known, equally bohemian local popular singer. Restless and curious about life beyond south Texas, he leaves the border and eventually winds up in central Texas, near Kaernes County, at the University of Texas at Austin—but not before spending a few years as a correspondent in Japan and China after World War II. "Did you know that Don Américo covered the Chinese Revolution?" says someone.

When he does arrive at the University of Texas to study English literature and creative writing—his central career goal—he faces another racially motivated confrontation: the U.S. government initially refuses a visa to his wife because she is half Japanese. For a moment Paredes thinks of living in Mexico, but the government relents. Now in his mid-thirties and a married man with children, Paredes had already completed two years of community college coursework. He completes his bachelor's degree with highest honors in one year, a master's in two, and then a doctorate in three more, while teaching several sections of freshman English to support his family. During this period, he also publishes a few scholarly articles, short stories, and poems and wins two writing prizes. He reworks his dissertation on the balladry and life of Gregorio Cortez into With His Pistol in His Hand , teaches for one year in El Paso, and is invited to rejoin the Department of English at Texas as a faculty member.

As a faculty member from 1958 to 1966, Paredes engages in an intellectual politics that continually attacks the dominant society's disparaging view of Mexican-Americans. His chief weapon is his careful creative scholarship on Mexican-American history. He also tries to promote social activism among the university's Mexican-American students, but the assimilationist perspective is still too prevalent among them at that time, and they do not respond to his efforts. Like Gregorio Cortez, Paredes finds himself engaging the opposition largely alone, although he does find a Romaldo-like "brother" in George I. Sanchez, a progressive professor.

While Cortez had aroused the consciousness of his community by riding and shooting his way toward them and soliciting their help,

Paredes's ideological and cultural community began to come to him in the mid-sixties. The hero and the nascent Chicano student movement in Texas and throughout the Southwest joined in struggle and mutual support on issues such as the farmworkers, the need for courses in Mexican-American studies, and increased political representation. (The hero's legend continues to develop to the present day: "I thought he was real tall!" says a Chicano at the University of California at Santa Barbara when he first meets Paredes.) Together, then, this author and his book provided one model for the development of the Chicano movement, and that model was itself wholly indebted to the precursory master poem—the corrido.

In this way, the corrido was historically repositioned by the Chicano movement to permit the genre to have a continuing influence on the development of contemporary Chicano literature. As Erlinda Gonzales-Berry observes, "many of today's poets were undoubtedly nourished on corridos and popular verse forms which abound in oral tradition" (1980:45). This judgment is supported by Sergio Elizondo, who notes the corrido's influence on Chicano poets, with "Alurista, Albelardo and Ricardo Sánchez, among the best known" (1980:73). More specifically, for my purposes, José Saldívar, in a fine "precis," as he calls it, offers a succinct analysis of the corrido and its influence, and argues for the significance of Jameson's theoretical work for a new Chicano literary criticism. On the corrido's centrality to Chicano poetry, Saldívar writes: "A study of Chicano literature must . . . begin with an attempt to define at least one of the cultural paradigms which emerge from the historical experience of the Chicano Border frontier life" and "I am suggesting that the corrido is the central sociopoetic Chicano paradigm" (1986:13).

Curiously, however, Saldívar then seems not to see how widespread the influence of the corrido is: "Given the strength of the corrido paradigm in the Chicano experience, it is bewildering that subsequent contemporary Chicano poets have not looked to it consciously or unconsciously for structuration and content" (1986:13). As we have already seen, the maleness of Chicano poetry from 1965 to 1972, its close identification with a charismatic male politics, its direct and mediated indebtedness to the corrido are defining characteristics of this poetic period. I would add still another: the saliency of the long poem, or what Ortega calls "narrative or saga poetry, relating a Chicano world vision" (1977:35).^[5] Formally, this saliency might be explained by the political necessity to undertake a sustained dialectical engagement with

the full scope of past and present history, a motivation perhaps, for all epic engagements. But is not such an overweening, aggressive poetic ambition also clearly related to the maleness of the period? Moreover, I propose, the Chicano long poem of the period is also generated by the continuing powerful influence of the only other long poem in the greater Mexican experience—the epic heroic corrido—and the necessity for young, aggressive Chicano males to come to grips with its daunting political and patriarchal poetics.