PART ONE
POLITICS, POETICS, AND THE RESIDUAL PRECURSORS, 1848–1958

Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

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.
Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand

No hay mejor cosa que un buen corrido. [There is nothing better than a good corrido.]
My father (all the time)

I
Borders, Bullets, and Ballads:
The Social Making of a Master Poem

In 1915, as European imperialist powers fought their bloody Great War, and two years before the Bolshevik uprising in Russia, both war and revolution raged in Mexico and briefly on the northern side of the Mexico-United States border. During the initial phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1911), various allied revolutionary groups had deposed the autocratic, United States-supported dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. However, this initial unity fragmented when the more conservative groups in the coalition took power but failed to demonstrate a clear commitment to the speedy realization of the Revolution's ideals, principally serious land redistribution. The more liberal and populist forces of leaders such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, in alliance, opposed this betrayal and the civil war continued. In April 1915, in "the most famous military engagement of the Revolution—the battle of Celaya," the army of general Alvaro Obregón, in the service of the conservative President Venustiano Carranza, defeated the populist forces of Francisco Villa in a ferocious encounter that presaged the ultimate demise of Villa and Zapata (Meyer and Sherman 1979:539).^[1] The Wilson administration's recognition of the Carranza government that same year also signaled the eventual triumph of conservative capitalist rule in Mexico and the continuing impoverishment of the Mexican masses, albeit in the guise of an official rhetoric of "institutional" revolution (Cockcroft 1983:99–116).

The pivotal Battle of Celaya was witnessed in part by a wealthy American adventurer, man of letters, and world traveler, Edward Larocque Tinker, who accompanied Villa's troops as a civilian observer. On the evening following the battle, as he "wandered along the boxcars on which the troops were quartered on the roofs," he heard "singing and the strumming of stringed instruments." Seeking the source of this music, he

came into the light of a campfire around which a crowd of Villa's ragged soldiers were gathered with their soldaderas —those amazing Amazons

who cooked for their men, and, with pots and pans, and often a baby on their backs, kept up with the regiments on gruelling marches; or, when need arose, snatched a rifle from a corpse and fought as fiercely as any male. This strange motley crowd, most of them showing strong strains of Aztec, was listening in the moonlight like fascinated children to the singing of three men. (1961:7)

As he listened "to the assonance of their voices," Tinker reports,

I too was fascinated and thought they sang some old folk tale. As verse after verse, however, took the same melodic pattern I suddenly realized that this was no ancient epic, but a fresh minted account of the battle of the day before. . . . It was a corrido —hot from the oven of their vivid memory of the struggle between Villa and Obregón—the first one I had ever heard. (1961:7)

The context of social conflict; singing in verse with the "same melodic pattern"; a narrated account of a specific powerful incident; male performers and a predominantly male audience (we shall attend to the presence of women later)—all of these enter into Tinker's general but likely accurate account of his first corrido performance. In 1943, when he returned to Mexico "to lecture on North American idealistic literature" at the National University, he "got a chance to study the subject" and also realized that, while "no ancient epic" singers, the corrido performers he had seen,

like the payadores of Argentina and Uruguay, were, in almost every essential, the lineal descendants of the troubadours who performed at the Court of Eleanore of Aquitaine in the middle of the 12th century, and that their songs were the Creole counterpart of the early Spanish romances, those Iberian chansons de geste in which countless medieval bards sang the famous exploits of Hispanic knights to the accompaniment of the lira mendicoram—romances which must have come to America with the Conquistadores. (1961:7–8)

In this chapter I shall examine Tinker's definition of the corrido in much greater detail and set out its relationship to the social history of its most active period. It must be clear from the outset that I am not discussing all corridos but only the epic heroic corrido of greater Mexico. We will see how this song narrative with its long heritage, compelling artistry, and its implication in social conflict became a master precursor poem for at least two generations of male Mexican-descent poets in the United States. For although the corrido had a very limited

influence on writers in Mexico (Paredes 1958a:102), it exerted a far more creative influence on Mexican-American writers. It was in the Mexican North and in the U.S. Southwest (hereafter, the Border) with their intimate ties of geography, population, and culture that the Mexican corrido flowered. In that same spring of 1915, as Obregón's machine guns and artillery were cutting down Villa's barbed-wire-entangled infantry like so many British at the Somme, the Texas rural police known as the Texas Rangers, supported by U.S. cavalry, were ruthlessly suppressing an armed rebellion of Mexican-Americans protesting Anglo-American authority in south Texas (Paredes 1958b:25–27; Harris and Sadler 1978; Montejano 1987:117–28). Around campfires in south Texas and in northern Mexico, where the rebels took refuge, they strummed guitars and sang of their violent encounters with the hated gringos (Paredes 1976:32–34). They sang in the same verse forms and recurring melodic patterns used by Villa's norteño (northern) soldiers, who at that moment were fighting against U.S.-supported domination a few hundred miles south of the border at Celaya.

Before explaining how a medieval poetic form introduced into southern Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors became a distinctive and artistically powerful master cultural poetics of the northern Border, I want to expand and specify Tinker's description of the corrido.

The Greater Mexican Corrido: an Expanded Definition

Even allowing for the literary license often taken by Anglo-American writers on Mexico (Robinson 1977), it is not difficult to appreciate why the Mexican corridos "fascinated" both Villa's "ragged soldiers" and the urbane, cosmopolitan Professor Tinker. But one must correct Tinker's impression that the corrido is a direct, relatively unchanged descendant of the Spanish romance introduced into Mexico with the Conquest. For the moment, let us note the key differences, which I will historicize later in this chapter. Following Mendoza (1954), Geijerstam (1976:50–51) lists these important differences between the older Spanish romance and the later corrido:

1. The romance has lines of seven or eight syllables; corridos tend to have eight, but may have up to twenty syllables per line. (This is particularly the case with historical corridos from the state of Guerrero.)

2. The romance consists mainly of a nonstrophic series of lines, assonantic, with simple rhymes (monorrimos ) on lines with an even number; the corrido is strophic, with four or six lines in each verse, and has different types of rhyme.

3. The romance is epic, novelistic, and morisco , that is, it deals with fiestas, tournaments, love affairs, and so forth. The corrido expands these themes, becoming a kind of local news service.

4. In musical terms, the romance is "serious," modal, and melodically restrained, while the corrido is "overflowing," lyrical, and of wider melodic range, though it retains the metric and rhythmic characteristics of its Spanish ancestor.

5. The romance usually consists of a dialogue between two principals; in contrast, the corrido is a narrative usually in the first or third person, with the troubadour acting as the (hypothetical) witness of the event described.

Contemporary scholars have refined these observations. Almost all scholars agree that the corrido is a male narrative folk song of greater Mexico composed in octosyllabic quatrains and sung to a tune in ternary rhythm and in 3/4 or 6/8 time. The quatrains are structured in an abcb rhyme scheme with no fixed number of stanzas for any given song or performance. The opening stanza usually sets the scene, time, and central issue of the narrated events and may, on occasion, carry a request from singer to audience for permission to begin the song. Often the closing stanza offers an overall comment on the narrated events and may also announce that the ballad has ended and express a farewell from the singer to the audience (McDowell 1985; Mendoza 1939, 1954; Paredes 1958b, 1963, 1976; Simmons 1957). Finally, corridos, in the words of their best younger scholar, "focus on events of particular consequence to the corrido community," on "events of immediate significance" that produce a "heightened awareness of mutual values and orientations" (McDowell 1985:46). The variations are sometimes considerable, but all scholars posit this basic corrido type.

Tinker heard an early and immediate corrido about the monumental battle at Celaya. Although he provides no text, most likely the ballad he heard resembled the version collected by Vicente T. Mendoza (1954). The first and last stanzas are (the translations are my own):

De Los Combates de Celaya

En mil novecientos quince
Jueves Santo en la mañana
salió Villa de Torreón
a combatir a Celaya
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ya no le temo al cañón
ni tampoco a la metralla
aquí da fin el corrido
del combate de Celaya
(Mendoza 1954:53–56)

Of the Battles of Celaya

In nineteen hundred and fifteen
On a Holy Thursday morning
Villa left from Torreon
To do battle at Celaya
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I no longer fear the cannon
Nor the machine gun do I fear
and here ends the corrido
Of the battle at Celaya.

We may begin by noting the poem's predominantly octosyllabic lines—"En mil novecien tos quin ce"—with syllabic stresses on two, five, and seven. From the outset the folk poet has a traditional obligation inherited from the Spanish romance to shape his lines within this rhythmic constraint, especially if we assume that the poem may also be read. There is some validity to this latter assumption, as we shall see.

However, the socially and artistically optimum mode for the corrido is as a sung poem, and in this mode a musical rhythm overrides the poetic meter. As Paredes (1958b:208) and McDowell (1981:65–70) both note, as song, the corrido imposes an additional artistic obligation upon the corridista (the composer-singer): to sing to a rhythm that in all likelihood is not consonant with the meter. To use their own shared example, let us consider the two opening lines from "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez):

En el condado del Carmen
Miren lo que ha sucedido

In the country of El Carmen
Look what has happened

If read as poetry, these lines would be stressed on the first, fourth, and seventh syllables: En el conda do del Car men. But when sung, the lines would have a very strong stress on the second, rather than the first, syllable of each line. When repeated in each line of the ballad, this musical syncopation, which alters the poetic meter, produces a discernible aesthetic effect. The "counterpointing of rhythms," Paredes

explains, and the ending of the second line of each quatrain on "the major chord formed on the subdominant," and "high register singing," all add "a great deal of vigor, almost defiant vigor, to the delivery of the corrido when it is sung by a good singer" (1958b:209). Already at the level of rhythm, the artistic manipulation of what McDowell calls "two autonomous systems, the poetic and the musical" constitutes the fundamental basis of a strong poem (1981:70).

A contrapuntal relationship is also articulated by the contrast between the corrido's stable rhyme scheme and its stanzaic novelty. In each stanza the second and fourth lines "must be controlled for rhyme or assonance" (McDowell 1981:56). McDowell elaborates on this artistic challenge: "From the composer's point of view, the critical moment in this structural unit are those key words at the end of lines 2 and 4. . . . Spanish, with its tendency to alternate vowels and consonants and even to delete certain unstressed consonants, contains many words which fortuitously end with the same pair of final vowels" (1981:57). As McDowell emphasizes, "it is the task of the corridista to exploit these congruences in tailoring his stanzas, while maintaining the semantic integrity of the corrido " (1981:57).

However, even as the corridista is maintaining the rhythmic patterns and rhyme scheme, he is also constructing a chain of stanzas in which, according to corrido tradition, there is rarely a repetition of stanzas and there is no refrain. That is, "the content of each successive stanza is new" (McDowell 198 I:56), creating the rapidly changing imagistic scenery of the corrido (Paredes 1958b:185). Thus, in the first stanza of the Celaya corrido we imagine Villa, the protagonist, setting out from Torreón to do battle; in the second stanza, we find ourselves riding a troop train, and we are also introduced to General Obregón, Villa's antagonist.

Corre, corre, maquinita
no me dejes ni un vagón
nos vamos para Celaya
a combatir a Obregón.
(Mendoza 1954:53)

Run, run, little train
Leave no cars behind
We are going to Celaya
To do battle with Obregón.

The imagistic and scenic novelty of each stanza is artistically counter-pointed to the recurrent rhyme and rhythm. (Perhaps it was something

like this for Francisco Villa's peasant soldiers riding in their troop trains. They must have watched the changing scenes of the landscape from northern Coahuila to south-central Guanajuato even as they heard the repetitive rhythm of the train carrying them down the tracks to their destiny at Celaya.)

Earlier, I spoke of the corrido as a narrative folk song, yet it is not a wholly narrativized discourse in the strictest sense. Rather, as McDowell points out, the general "narrative" of the corrido is really a structure of alternations. The corrido often alternates between actually narrated (chronologically linear) segments, in which an iconic account of events is presented, and other segments that constitute "the emotional kernel of the corrido, " verses that "dramatize that most dramatic of human involvements, the face-to-face interaction." The corrido may "expand the greater portion of its energy in presenting dialogue," and when it does so, iconicity is transcended and an "experiential substratum" appears in the ballad with a "relation of identity . . . presumed to obtain between the words spoken in the experiential substratum and the words sung by the corridista " (McDowell 1981:47).

"El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" illustrates the point. At one instant in his flight, Cortez is surrounded by lawmen who have thrown up a corral around him. Under intense gunfire, he jumps the corral, kills a second sheriff and escapes with parting shots from his gun and his lips.

Allá por El Encinal
según lo que aquí se dice
les formaron un Corral
y les mató otro cherife.

Over by Encinal
According to what we hear
They made him a Corral
And he killed another sheriff.

In the next stanza, Cortez speaks in quietly boasting metaphors:

Decía Gregorio Cortez
echando muchos balazos
—Me he escapado de aguaceros,
contimas][contimás] de nublinazos.
(Paredes 1958b:156)

Then said Gregorio Cortez
Shooting out a lot of bullets
"I have weathered thunderstorms;
This little mist doesn't bother me."

For McDowell, such a scene is the key to the corrido's artistic power, for it permits a "narrative discourse . . . punctuated by flashes of identification between the narrative and the experiential substratum" (1981: 48); while the corrido "does not favor poetic conceit in its presentation of narrative detail . . . the portions of reported speech . . . provide the corridista with ample scope to wax poetic" (1981:61).

Marked and traditional poetic language emerges in the form of ritualized and metaphorical boasts and insults by the central protagonist of the ballad. That Gregorio Cortez uses metaphoric language to compare the lawmen's furious shooting to a "little mist" also reinforces the image of the hero as an accomplished individual who can ride, shoot, and speak, often in "complex and subtle poetic conceits native to the oral tradition of his community." In the final analysis, of course, we are really speaking of the folk poet's ability to be an "accomplished man of words" (McDowell 1981:64).

While being attentive to all these artistic obligations, the folk poet must also respond to certain demands created by his relationship to his community, and these demands also shape his poem. Of particular interest here is what McDowell calls the "reflexive" character of the corrido manifested in its traditional opening and closing stanzas, which place the principal narrative in a metanarrative frame. The opening scene-setting stanza and the formally announced closing and farewell at the end enable the song to refer to itself, to "draw attention to the occasion of performance rather than to the occasion of narrative action" (McDowell 1981:48). Here one might quarrel a bit with McDowell, though. It is not clear, for example, why the opening stanza of the Celaya corrido—describing Villa setting out from Torreón—is not part of the "occasion of narrative action" but rather a reference to the "occasion of performance." Nonetheless, this opening stanza is distinct from those that follow, in that the latter put the audience immediately and imagistically into the movement and din of battle, which is, after all, the central concern of the corrido. In its imagistically unfocused, somewhat more abstract language, the first stanza does have something of a metanarrative quality. The reflexive quality of the final stanza is, in contrast, transparent: for the first and only time the singer at Celaya refers to himself in the first person, implicates himself in the battle, and clearly informs his audience that his song is ended.

Such reflexivity situates the song in an intimate relationship to the audience and, by extension, to society. Whatever the considerable

achievement of the individual folk poet, the song also flows from the social and back to it again. This useful fiction, that society is also the author of the song, is also upheld by another artistic convention. While we clearly have the appearance, albeit brief, of the first person in the final stanza of the Celaya corrido, most corridos embrace "the literary fiction of an understood observer, who encases his observations in the impersonal third-person . . . the typical case involves an impersonal authorial voice, present but not implicated in the events it depicts" (McDowell 1981:46). The effacement of the author into the impersonal third person precludes the audience from indulging in any easy personal identification with any figure in the poem. Rather, one tends to identify with the public social events depicted and the cultural actions that produce them. Further, the effacement of the corridista reinforces the social, collective nature of the corrido. While most corridos are the work of a single author, any personal point of view manifested in the ballad seems to represent a shared perspective. "Above all," Simmons posits, the composer "must identify himself with the pueblo and take care that the opinions he expresses are acceptable to the pueblo " (1957:36).

As to the performance itself, the optimum manner for experiencing the corrido as social art is in a face-to-face performance, such as that reported by Tinker. Following Paredes (1976), McDowell notes three traditional principal occasions for the singing of corridos: the solitary setting (when riding the range alone on horseback, for example); the familial context, with both sexes and different ages present; and the allmale group setting. The first is, by definition, not a social performance, while the second makes for a limited repertoire and a subdued rendition (violent corridos might be excluded or censored, for example). The allmale setting, however, places no such limits on the fullest display of the corridista's competence. Both Paredes and McDowell situate such performances in a cantina, or barroom, but they also take place today during men-only barbecues in south Texas. It is in these all-male settings that the full range of corrido aesthetics is on display, both the talents of the singer-composer as well as the skills of the audience, their ability to judge and comment on the form and content of the ballads (McDowell 1981:71).

Today, corridos are also transmitted through the printed page, films, records, and oral recitation without music. But the all-male face-to-face performance still dominates the perception and definition of the

corrido, and it too is an ideological act in its own right. Indeed, we must pursue the theme of masculinity a bit further as we now examine the propositional content—the heroic world—of the corrido.

The Heroic World of the Corrido

The corrido, we noted earlier, focuses on events that are of particular significance to the corridista's community and that capture and articulate this community's values and orientations. Among such classes of events—natural disasters, the election of officials, the untimely death of a child—one theme seems to have struck a special resonance: confrontation, violent confrontation, between individual men who often represent larger social causes but just as often are concerned with their personal honor. In neither case should the issue be petty or small, and in some corridos both concerns are intertwined:

The fearless man of action, the capacity to die honorably—these are themes characteristic of a heroic world view and the world view of the corrido is decidedly heroic. Part of the propositional intent of the corrido is to stipulate that a man should die honorably, should confront death fearlessly.

The honorable course of action is highlighted by presentation of its opposite, the man who disgraces himself by flinching at impending death. (McDowell 1981:53)

At the height of the battle of Celaya, his soldiers falling around him, rather than retreat, Villa redoubles his courage, according to his corridista:

Dice Don Francisco Villa:
—De nuevo roy a atacar,
me han matado mucha gente,
su sangre voy a vengar.
(Mendoza 1954:55)

Don Francisco Villa says:
—I will attack again
They have killed many of my people
Their blood I will avenge.

In contrast, as the composer of the ballad of Gregorio Cortez tells us, the Anglos chasing Cortez knew only fear:

Venían los americanos
más blancos que una paloma
de miedo que le tenían
a Cortez y su pistola

The Americans were coming
They were whiter than a dove
From the fear that they had
Of Cortez and his pistol

Cortez then speaks:

Decía Gregorio Cortez
Con su pistola en la mano:
—No corran, rinches cobardes
con un solo Mexicano.
(Paredes 1958b:156)

Then said Gregorio Cortez,
With his pistol in his hand:
—Don't run, you cowardly rangers,
From just one Mexican.

It is this image of the fearless man defending his right with his pistol in hand that defines the male heroic world of the corrido. To the extent that his personal sense of honor and right are congruent with larger social values and conflicts that concern the entire community, his heroic posture assumes an even more intense social signification. If this latter point is correct, we can begin to understand why the corrido flourished along the Border from the mid-nineteenth century and then declined after 1930.

The Sociohistorical Origins of the Heroic Corrido

Most scholars of the genre agree that corrido-like songs have been composed in Mexico since the Conquest. There is also total agreement on the corrido's general formal and thematic indebtedness to the Spanish romance, although significant differences argue decisively for the corrido's distinctiveness as a genre, as already noted. Therefore, most scholars take their cue from Mexico's leading authority on the history of the corrido and agree that "in its crystallized form, such as we know it today" the Mexican corrido is "relatively modern" (Mendoza

1954:xiii), that is, a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially of the intense social change occasioned by the Mexican Revolution. Simmons offers a respected dissenting note and argues that much earlier corrido-like songs are found throughout Latin America, although he also concludes that the corrido "finally evolved or solidified into its modern or definitive form during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century" (1963:1). Mendoza locates the geographical origins of the corrido in southern Michoacán, in deep southwestern Mexico. From there, he believes, it traveled into the northern part of the country, where, he notes, it is also very strong (Mendoza 1939:152–53).

In 1958, however, in conjunction with the publication of his With His Pistol in His Hand , Américo Paredes, an American scholar of Mexican descent, suggested a significantly different theory for the historical and geographical origins of the Mexican heroic ballad. In "The Mexican Corrido : Its Rise and Fall" (1958a), Paredes puts forth a persuasive and undogmatic case for locating the corrido's temporal origins in the mid-nineteenth century and its geographical origins in southern Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, an area Paredes calls the Lower Border.

Paredes cautiously and prudently begins to make his argument by noting the inability of scholars to locate a distinctive ballad tradition within Mexico prior to the period of the Revolution. While there are earlier scattered balladlike songs throughout Mexico, none of these are clearly heroic ballads, nor do they constitute a ballad tradition, that is, a group of ballads enduring over time and expressing a focused collective consciousness (1963:233). But, Paredes argues, such a balladry was in existence in the Lower Border at least since, but probably not before, the mid-nineteenth century, long antedating Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship and the first stirrings of revolution in national Mexico. Recently, Luis Leal has affirmed Paredes's thesis in his own work on the border corrido "Leandro Rivera" (1987).

It is at this juncture that we can begin to historicize the differences noted earlier between the Spanish romance and the Mexican corrido. In a phrase, the period's intense social change seems to have produced a condensing, grounded effect on the aesthetics of the romance. The generally looser form of the nonstrophic, metrically diverse romance now becomes strophic, with a regular meter and a more complicated rhyme. The "'serious,' modal and melodically restrained" music of the

romance now becomes the "'overflowing,' lyrical" energy of the corrido, as though its wider melodic range were musically equipping it to respond to a socially energetic moment. We may also historicize the shift in authorial voice between these two forms. The Spanish romance has a wholly detached, almost silent narrator whose main focus is delineating dialogue between two principals, while the corrido is "a narrative usually in the first or third person, with the troubadour acting as the hypothetical witness of the event described" (Geijerstam 1976:51). This shift to the witnessed event would seem consistent with the need to concretely ground and legitimize the corrido as an ideological instrument in the context of sharp social conflict. And this same sharp sense of conflict would occasion the need for a more direct narrative delineation of events rather than the indirect emergence of the story through dialogue.

Finally, we note a thematic shift from the epic, novelistic Spanish romance, which deals with "fiestas, tournaments, love affairs, and so forth," to what Geijerstam, after Mendoza, believes is an expansion of these themes in the corrido. Geijerstam is only partially correct here, for although corridos on a wide variety of subjects do begin to appear, in the manner of the Spanish romance, nonetheless, the heroic corrido with its thematic of socially significant male confrontation becomes the best known and most popular. We may say that even as the genre expands, it also contracts, with the best-known corridos fixed, as Paredes says, on "one theme . . . conflict; [on] one concept of the hero, the man fighting for his right with his pistol in his hand" (1958b:149).^[2]

For most of greater Mexico, the Revolution provided the intense social conditions required for the crystallization of the heroic corrido. But Mexico had undergone at least three major social crises: the war of independence from Spain (1810–1821), the invasions of the U.S. army in the 1840s, and the French occupation in the 1860s. Why did these crises not produce a definitive heroic balladry? And what conditions prevailed along the Lower Border during this same period that did? Paredes does not explicitly answer the first of these questions, but suggests an answer in his discussion of the second.

For Paredes, at least two general social conditions are prerequisite to the emergence of a heroic balladry. First, there must be present a community with a general tradition of balladry, scattered and uncrystallized as the tradition may be. Second, this community must find itself in a fairly sharp adversarial relationship with other groupings in the

social order, a relationship based on an unequal distribution of power, status, and resources. Both of these obtained during Mexico's successive conflicts with Spain, the United States, and France, and they were also present in the northeastern corner of Mexico, which historically included much of what is now south Texas. (Before independence, this land was part of the Spanish province of Nuevo Santander, afterwards, part of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.) Yet the former set of relationships produced only scattered corrido-like songs in the interior of Mexico, while the latter adversarial relationship produced a heroic balladry on the Lower Border. Here we must enter into the more specific conditions that Paredes finds necessary for the crystallization of the Spanish romance tradition, which was part of the Border's oral entertainment, into a truly heroic balladry: relative isolation from "the main currents of world events," a reliance on orality as a primary means of communication, the presence of a patriarchal culture, and the cultural practice of a kind of vernacular democracy in which the local community managed its own political affairs with little interference from the central government. These conditions, Paredes implies, were not present in the interior of Mexico but did define the Lower Border.

The Lower Border and the Birth of the Heroic Corrido

Settled in the mid-eighteenth century by the Spanish as part of their northern expansion out of Central Mexico, the Lower Border was home to a relatively isolated folk society. Arid geography and nomadic Indians separated these folk from the developing centrist culture of central New Spain and, after independence, Central Mexico:

The Lower Rio Grande people lived under conditions in which folk cultures develop. They lived in isolation from the main currents of world events. They preferred to live in small, tightly knit communities that were interested in their own problems. Their type of social organization was the family holding or the communal village, ruled by patriarchal authority under a kind of pre-eighteenth century democracy. (Paredes 1958b:242)

The villages' decision making was done by male elders with, one assumes, the more or less tacit consent of others. Compared to, let us say, Central Mexico, this generally self-subsistent, vernacularly democratic society lacked a sharp sense of social stratification—one might

South Texas - Mexico

say that the Border people tended toward a gemeinschaft society and culture.^[3] Lastly, Paredes notes, "their forms of entertainment were oral."

These then are some of the specific internal social features that, when joined to an adversarial relationship with an external force, generate a heroic balladry, especially when this adversarial consciousness is widely shared within the community and not overridden by sharp internal factionalism, that is, when the adversarial consciousness itself becomes cultural and historically enduring. The persistent adversary was, of course, the United States. More specifically, in 1826 Mexico decided to permit the regulated settlement of Americans, largely from the South, immediately north of the Lower Border, in what is now central and eastern Texas. For some ten years, these new settlers lived alongside the Lower Border people of Mexican descent, with the Nueces River more or less separating them. But larger political events soon brought those north of the Nueces into direct conflict with those on the Lower Border:

What subsequently made the balladry of the Lower Border different was the Texas Revolution and the annexation by Texas of the Nueces-Rio Grande part of the old province of Nuevo Santander, one-half of the home area of the Lower Rio Grande people. Thus a border was created, and the bitterness resulting from events between 1836 and 1848 provided the basis for a century of conflict. (Paredes 1958b:243)

The passage requires some elaboration, particularly as it concerns the development of an American hegemony over the Lower Border people on the north bank of the Rio Grande after the United States-Mexico War of 1846–47.

At the conclusion of the war, the Lower Border people on the north bank were legally Americans, their homeland now a part of Texas. They found themselves annexed into a new culture whose racism, religious prejudice, and linguistic xenophobia were directed toward them (de Leon 1983). They had first encountered these attitudes in the reprehensible actions of General Zachary Taylor's army troops, many of whom were southerners. In affirmation of a specious U.S.-Texas claim to southern Texas, Taylor's army was ordered to march from its staging area near Corpus Christi into the disputed territory, thereby initiating hostilities. It met and defeated the Mexican army in a series of battles—the first, north of the Rio Grande—on its way to victory in Mexico City. What is sometimes overlooked is this army's initial encounter with Lower Border guerrillas—the first Mexicans to fight (Paredes

1958b:133)—as well as its indiscriminately violent conduct toward the largely civilian population both along the border and in the interior of Mexico (Montejano 1987:1–99).

Reinforced by the events at the Alamo and at Goliad, Anglo-American antipathy toward Mexicans continued to find sharp expression among the new settlers who began to enter the Lower Border area from central Texas, the site of the initial Anglo core settlement, and the South. The political marginalization, strict social segregation, and racial violence against local "Mexicans" that began at that time have not yet entirely disappeared (de Leon 1983; Foley 1977; Montejano 1987). It is this sustained asymmetrical social encounter—this "conflict of cultures," Paredes calls it—that, in his estimation, provided the prime generative ground for the mid-nineteenth-century emergence and development of the heroic corrido along the Lower Border.

The oldest complete corrido known to scholars also dates from the 1860s and deals with border conflict. "El Corrido de Kiansis" has as its subject the cattle drives from the new Anglo-owned large ranches of south Texas to Kansas. Although organized and financed by Anglo-American ranching entrepreneurs, Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) furnished a substantial part of the labor and know-how for this industry and these drives. There is no man-to-man violent conflict in this ballad, but we do find the heroic Mexican vaquero pitting his superior riding and roping skills against those of Anglo cowboys:

Quinientos novillos eran,
todo grandes y livianos,
y entre treinta americanos
no los podían embalar.

Llegan cinco mexicanos,
todos bien enchivarrados,
en menos de un cuarto de hora
los tenían encerrados.
(Paredes 1976:55)

Five hundred steers there were,
All big and quick,
And thirty American cowboys
Couldn't keep them bunched together.

Then five Mexicans arrive,
All of them wearing good chaps;
And in less than a quarter-hour
They had those steers penned up.

According to Paredes, there is some fragmentary evidence of another heroic corrido from the early 1860s telling of an armed encounter between Juan Nepomuceno Corrina, a hero of the Lower Border, and the Anglo-American authorities after they mistreated a Mexican. Cortina kills a sheriff, organizes local Mexicans to fight the Anglos, and then, facing superior forces, escapes across the Rio Grande.

From the 1860s until the turn of the century, heroic corridos about such encounters began to appear in large numbers along the Lower Border. The concept of the local hero fighting for his right, his honor, and status against external foes, usually Anglo authorities, became the central theme of this balladry, reaching its social artistic zenith in the most popular of corridos, that of Gregorio Cortez. (We will return to this most famous ballad in some detail in chapter 3.) While focused on the local hero and his right, the heroic corrido consistently places Cortez in relationship to broader social conflict, as in the Kansas ballad, with emphasis on the collective experience of "mexicanos" versus "americanos." We often find this dialectic between self and society, as in one of the late corridos of the period concerning the organized armed uprisings against Anglo-American authority in south Texas in 1915. "Bands of Border men," Paredes tells us, "under the leadership of Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa raided as far north as the King Ranch, burning ranches, derailing trains, killing American civilians, and attacking U.S. army detachments." Paredes notes the results of this uprising.

Texas Rangers and sheriff's deputies took out their frustration at not being able to catch the sediciosos (the seditionists) by slaughtering as many innocent Mexican farm workers as they could lay their hands on. Hundreds were summarily "executed" without trial, and many hundreds more fled to Mexico to escape the rinche terror. The results were that more land in south Texas was cleared of Mexicans so it could be "developed" by Anglo newcomers in the 1920s. (1976:33)

It is in this context that the composer of "Los Sediciosos" (The Seditionists) tells us:

Decía Aniceto Pizaña
en su caballo cantando
—¿Dónde están por ahí los rinches?
que los vengo visitando.
—Esos finches de la Kiñena,
dicen que son muy valientes,

hacen llorar las mujeres
hacen correr alas gentes.
(Paredes 1976:73)

Aniceto Pizaña said,
Singing as he rode along,
"Where can I find the rangers?
I'm here to pay them a visit."

Those rangers from the King Ranch
Say that they are very brave;
they make the women cry,
and they make the people run.

Paredes's account is entirely authoritative and persuasive, but several other factors also contributed to the emergence of the heroic corrido of the Lower Border. First, a prolonged period of social domination does not of itself produce this balladry; this relationship must be mediated. Before such a balladry can exist, there has to be a significant emergence of actual social resistance to domination, a social source of the ballad's heroic thematics. We have already noted examples of such resistance in the armed actions of individuals like Gregorio Cortez and groups like the sediciosos of 1915. Other important forms of resistive discourse included militant newspapers in the major towns in south Texas, such as Laredo, Brownsville, and San Antonio; left-of-center labor union activity, which organized numerous strikes, particularly in the agricultural section (Zamora 1986); and organized reformist political activity that sought redress for social grievances through institutional means (Limón 1974). All of these operated within a general ethnic nationalist temper (de Leon 1983) and formed the wider context of the Lower Border corrido.

Second, Paredes clearly suggests that heroic actions are most appealing and most productive of a balladry when they occur in a losing cause. In a brilliant comparison to Scottish resistance to English domination, he argues that while

the Scot was able to mount a strong attack and score some local victories, he always lost in the end to a superior army from the south. The same situation faced the Mexican border raiders. It was the Scot, usually on the losing side, who produced the most stirring of the British border ballads. On the Rio Grande, it was only the losers in the conflict, the Border Mexicans, who produced ballads. (1958b:244)

As part of a powerful and expanding American capitalist political economy, Anglo-American victory on the Lower Border was, indeed, almost inevitable. From this perspective, Paredes's "conflict of cultures" thesis can be viewed at a much more fundamental level, as can the ideological significance of the corrido. What was fundamentally at issue in the Lower Border was a rapid transformation of a whole cultural mode of production. As Montejano (1987) has demonstrated, racial and cultural oppression were but the overt manifestations and ratifications of the forced transformation of a whole way of life from the generally self-subsistent, vernacularly democratic, political cultural economy keyed on the Spanish language and face-to-face oral communication, to an increasingly mass capitalistic, cash crop agriculture and an English-language print and media cultural economy, all of the latter dominated mostly by Anglo-Americans, who controlled the political state apparatus. With the rapid loss of their small landholdings through legally and morally questionable means, the people of Mexican descent in south Texas either died, became dislocated cheap labor in the new economy, or left for Mexico (Montejano 1987). After 1910 this cheap labor force was replenished by thousands of impoverished refugee Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande into Texas, mostly from the northern Mexican states, leaving behind the chaos and unfulfilled promise of Mexico's thwarted Revolution and bringing with them even more corridos, these from a later experience of social conflict.

The Border Heroic Corrido, the Mexican Revolution, and Greater Mexico

Based on the foregoing argument, Paredes also offers an implied thesYis to explain the relative absence of a heroic corrido tradition in Mexico's interior during most of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he implies an explanation for the heroic corrido's relatively sudden emergence in Central Mexico during the period of the Revolution.

Earlier, following Paredes, I suggested that certain enabling socio-cultural conditions for the corrido did not obtain in the Mexican interior prior to the Revolution, among these a collective adversarial consciousness, a prolonged social conflict, a sense of a violated communal social order, an orally based culture, heroic actions by local heroes, a sense of a "lost cause" in the face of a fundamental cultural

transformation, and, finally, of course, the general if latent sense of a ballad tradition awaiting the appropriate social conditions to foster its emergence. While these conditions did not prevail throughout most of the nineteenth century, they did coalesce during the period of Revolution, set in motion by the same fundamental international political economy that had affected the Lower Border. The same essentially North American capitalist forces had been at work in Mexico since Porfirio Díaz came to power in 1876. The late nineteenth century was a period of intense political centralization and economic development in Mexico, but the development was of questionable benefit to Mexico as a whole. It was a time "in which foreigners, with U.S. entrepreneurs at the forefront, took over much of the economy": "The state did not merely submit to foreign pressures on the debt: it threw open the doors to foreign investment in an attempt to marshall sufficient capital and technical expertise to generate significant economic growth for the benefit of domestic and foreign monopolies" (Cockcroft 1983:87).

With the huge exception of Mexico's poverty-stricken laboring masses, "almost all bourgeois and large-landholder interests prospered from vast increases in production and trade" supported by the Díaz dictatorship, which "institutionalized a repressive apparatus and an ideological system emphasizing political stability, science, technology, and material progress" (Cockcroft 1983:87)—but only for a few and to the massive social detriment of many, particularly the large poor rural sectors. The latter's social condition, always precarious, worsened under the Díaz regime (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458). Through legal coercion and state power, these large sectors lost what remained of their traditional landholdings. In southern Mexico, "by the early twentieth century most of the villages in rural Mexico had lost their ejidos [commons] and some 134 million acres of the best land had passed into the hands of a few hundred fantastically wealthy families" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458).

In the north, traditionally a region of small, individually owned ranch holdings (not unlike those of pre-1848 south Texas), "tendencies to concentration of landed property . . . had been fierce"; in Chihuahua, "by 1910 seventeen persons owned two-fifths of the state," while "95.5 percent of all heads of families held no individual property in land" (Wolf 1969:33). After some postindependence reform, the oppressive hacienda (plantation) system of the Spanish colonial period was reinstituted, in the north and south, and "over one half of all rural Mexicans

lived and worked on the haciendas by 1910" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458). Severe social deprivation also befell the other half, the "free," itinerant, easily exploitable labor force that moved from hacienda to hacienda. And, as might be expected, their urban counterparts fared no better (Cockcroft 1983:88–94).

Such deprivation in complex modern societies goes hand in hand with high rates of illiteracy among the dominated—at least until such time as technological advancement requires an "adequately" literate labor force. Estimates of illiteracy during the Porfiriato range as high as 84 percent (Cockcroft 1983:88). Therefore, one can reasonably assume that among the most deprived social sectors, orality continued to be a primary mode of communication and artistic expression. An important difference between this period of class orality and others earlier in Mexican history was its predominantly Spanish character; that is, by the late nineteenth century Mexico was predominantly a mestizo, Spanish-speaking nation (Heath 1972:53).

During the late nineteenth century, then, Paredes's three initial critical conditions—the political disruption of a rural, communal social order; a period of prolonged and intense social domination; and a predominantly Spanish-language, class-based, mestizo oral culture—came together as never quite before. Politically, they led to the Revolution of 1910; aesthetically, to the emergence of the heroic corrido in the Mexican interior.

Three other important factors also contributed to the emergence of both revolution and balladry. First, in response to the massive scale of oppression under Díaz, the popular participation in rebellion was massive as well, distinguishing this period of revolution from others in Mexican history, when the most deprived sectors of the populace participated on an inconsistent and piecemeal basis. The Revolution of 1910 was truly a popular, peasant rebellion (Wolf 1969:3–50). Second, the vanguard of the Revolution, unlike earlier Mexican leaders drawn from the more elite elements, was composed of men close to the people and to folk traditions like the corrido. Finally, we must note the decisively northern character of the Revolution. With few exceptions, such as Emiliano Zapata of the southern state of Morelos, the strongest leadership and the strongest participation came from the northern Mexican states (Cline 1969, Knight 1986:11–62).

This last point is critical because it lends even greater strength to Paredes's thesis concerning the border origins of the heroic corrido. As

he notes, "It would be little short of wonderful if the corrido had suddenly come into being at two different places and two different times. Either the Lower Border corrido owes its existence to the Greater Mexican form, or the Greater Mexican corrido is indebted to the more localized Texas-Mexican ballad" (1958b:105). The latter option seems more likely. As Villa's norteño soldiers sang their ballad around the evening campfire near Celaya in April 1915, it is likely that they were singing in a form they had learned in their home region of Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande from Texas. It was a form that their regional neighbors in the Lower Border states and likely their kinfolk, the TexasMexicans, had been employing in their struggle against Anglo domination since the 1850s. A parallel set of social conditions in central Mexico later in the century provided further nurturance for this poetic form, which, like much of the revolutionary energy, came down into Mexico from the north. Formed through an earlier experience with social domination along the Lower Border, the heroic corrido became an expressive form for all of greater Mexico during the Revolution.

The United States continued to support the Porfiriato, and early on the Mexican Revolution "in terms of the key interests of peasants and workers . . . was defeated " (Cockcroft 1983:112). This defeat added the final ingredient to the forging of the corrido on the southern side of the border—the sense of a lost, though just, cause. After the war many of Mexico's poor went north, crossing the border and making their way principally to the Southwest but also to the Midwest and to Pennsylvania. Most of these immigrants were from the northern Mexican states, where the fighting had been particularly harsh. They established permanent residence in the United States and joined earlier generations of Mexicans who had settled here. As they moved beyond Texas, they introduced the heroic corrido into California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as the Midwest.

In this amalgamation of greater Mexican peoples, we also find an amalgamation of many distinct, though closely related, cultural forms, among them the heroic corrido. For the corrido continued to be sung wherever Mexican people traveled and settled. The corrido corpus now included ballads of Lower Border conflict and those newer ones from the Revolution. A corridista singing in the central market area of San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s would sing of both Celaya and Cortez, as would his counterpart in a plaza in Guadalajara, Jalisco, for people and songs also moved south when workers returned home. North and

south of the border, audiences continued to be fascinated by the theme of strong men fighting for their rights and for their people, a theme cast in a complex poetics. It is this imagistically powerful unification of the personal, the artistic, and the social that appealed to the predominantly male corrido community and made the corrido a master poem of social struggle.

Social Struggle and the Political Unconscious: the Making of a Master Poem

It is not difficult to see how the greater Mexican corrido becomes an expressive instrument of social struggle. Much of its imagery unequivocally speaks in these terms. However, we can strengthen this reading if we probe beyond the corrido's manifest significations and toward what Fredtic Jameson calls the "political unconscious" of Western narrative forms, an unconscious politics that Jameson finds registered at three distinct levels in such narratives. (For a more detailed exposition of Jameson's ideas, see Appendix A.) We are partially anticipated in this approach by Richard Flores (1987), who offers just such an analysis of "Los Sediciosos," a corrido mentioned earlier in this chapter.^[4]

Taking Jameson's first level of analysis, that of chronological political history, Flores suggests that corridos may be seen as the repositories of the essential "facts" of social struggle; for example, the passed-on knowledge of 1915, of a real living man named Gregorio Cortez, of oppressive Mexican dictators and Texas Rangers. The importance of this primary level of political efficacy and social struggle must not be diminished, for such a condensed repository of basic knowledge is essential for any resistive consciousness. Yet, as McDowell has noted, the corrido is not primarily intended to be such a repository, and, indeed, assumes a wider field of knowledge already present in the corrido community and gained from other sources (1981:47).

Given this limited, autonomous contribution to the community's knowledge of chronological political history, it is at Jameson's second and, most fundamentally, at his third level of signification and interpretation that the full articulation of the corrido's political unconscious must be sought. For the corrido of border conflict, and here we continue to follow Flores's lead, the second level of analysis would see the chronological figures of the first level not as literal representations but as what

Flores, after Jameson, calls ideologemes , minimal units of symbolic discourse in a discourse of class relations. In this second-level reading, the opposing figures of border Mexican hero and the Anglo authorities must be seen in the full social context of the antagonistic class relations: "the Texas-Mexicans, reduced to peones in a class system, construct an ideological discourse to resist the forces . . . that have dehumanized them" (Flores 1987:17). Thus the corrido, with its surface, first-level projections of ethnic difference "also reflects a deeper conflict based on class difference and the emerging agricultural industry. In this context, the ideologemes of Ranger-bandit and rinche-hero reflect the ensuing class conflict around the shared code of the land: the control and ownership of the means of production on the border" (Flores 1987:15).

Like the corrido of border conflict, the corrido of the Mexican Revolution can also be seen as a repository of basic historical data for a public with minimal access to the official written word. Again, the historical particulars transmitted by the corrido are important but not as socially significant as the reproduction of class relations and consciousness. For example, an overwhelming number of folk corridos speak admiringly of those figures most closely associated by historians with the interest of the Mexican masses, principally Villa and Zapata. Other figures in the Revolution do not fare as well. Not too surprisingly, there are almost no corridos about Porfirio Díaz (Simmons 1957:70), and those few concerning such figures as Carranza, Madero, and Obregón are at best ambivalent in their attitudes and at worst reproving of men who ultimately betrayed the Revolution (Simmons 1957). The corridos of the Mexican Revolution thus also speak of oppressive class relations and resistance through the concrete ideologemes of the true revolutionary hero and the apostates who supported a return to the class-dominant status quo. As in the corridos of border conflict, in these later corridos the shared code of struggle is the rightful ownership of the land.

In speaking interpretively of the corrido as a signifier of class relations, one is forced to acknowledge the perhaps too easy applicability of a notion like the political unconscious to this material. Unlike the modernist texts from which Jameson derived his theory—texts in which political content is largely repressed—the corridos display the political unconscious in a way only too manifest. In the corridos about Celaya and Cortez, for example, the sociopolitical dimensions and class rela-

tions are immediately accessible. Other corridos, however, depict confrontations between men as a matter of personal honor rather than as representations of social causes. To understand how such a corrido expresses class relations, we must recall the corrido's historical context. The ballads' depiction of personal duels in the name of honor is occurring at a time (1890–1930) when bourgeois society no longer subscribes to such a code and now directs and practices violence on the mass scale of Celaya, south Texas, and the Somme. Only the subaltern classes of greater Mexico, the corrido seems to say, have maintained the courage and personal sense of honor to settle their disputes faceto-face and not through the mass, anonymous, industrialized violence of machine guns, tanks, and poison gas. Only in this context can we understand one corridista's paradoxical appreciation of face-to-face violence:

¡Qué bonitos son los hombres
que se matan pecho a pecho
Cada uno con su pistola
defendiendo su derecho!
(Paredes 1976:78)

How admirable are men
Who fight to the death face to face,
Each of them with his pistol,
Defending his right.

It is not the violence in itself that matters, the corrido seems to say, but its form. For if men must fight, the form of violence can provide some large degree of redemption.^[5]

Having thus evoked the notion of form—here, the social form of violence—we approach Jameson's third level of interpretation, in which we look to the form of symbolic acts to grasp their role in the articulation of social conflict and change at the highest level or broadest sphere. For Jameson, this is the inherent conflict that constitutes any social formation, the latter understood as the social arrangements of any given historical period where distinct modes of production overlap and come into conflict. Here symbolic acts may speak to this conflict by articulating, principally in their form, the sedimented ideological traces of older modes of production in conflict with the present or the anticipatory messages of a future mode of production. Thus, quite apart from its function as a record of political history and as a carrier of the

ideologemes of class relations, the corrido of greater Mexico, in its formal florescence from about 1890 to 1930, formally articulates the antagonistic modes of production. It is a formal expression of a selfsubsistent, vernacular, democratic political economy. Here I add to Flores's fine beginning.

We have already noted the political economic domination of greater Mexico by a world capitalist economy led by the United States. It is equally important to highlight the cultural component of this domination. For example, even as the Anglo-American capitalists reorganized the economic life of the border Mexicans and imposed a new political order, they also began the systematic effort (almost completed) to culturally assimilate this population even while maintaining it as socially subordinate. This new cultural reeducation entailed a two-front strategy and a host of weapons. First, it was necessary to delegitimize native culture, indeed at times to render it odious to Mexicans themselves. These efforts included the institutional purveyance of denigrating stereotypes; the disciplined expulsion of Spanish from public life, particularly the schools; and, most effective of all, the socially produced construction of "Mexican" as synonymous with "poor" and the socially ostracized; indeed, strict social segregation became the order of the day in many parts of the Southwest until well into the 1950s (de Leon 1983; Montejano 1987). Second, while maintaining Mexicans in a low status, the Anglo-American authorities saw to it that Mexican youngsters were taught English and basic American civic culture, at least through their earlier years of schooling. Some minimal amount of such learning was absolutely necessary if this labor force was to be well disciplined and integrated into the lower end of the new political economy, particularly as the latter shifted away from agriculture to an urban industrial identity (Barrera 1979). The school system served as a locus for both broad strategies: Mexican youngsters learned the English language and American civic culture in schools that were consistently segregated at least until the 1950s in some parts of the Southwest (San Miguel 1987).

This broad two-part strategy was in full swing by 1911, in the middle of the corrido period, as is evident in discussions within the MexicanAmerican community at the time. Members of this community resented the purveyance of denigrating stereotypes and upheld their right to maintain Spanish, yet they grudgingly recognized that they must learn English if they were to have any mobility in the new social order (Limón 1973, 1974). As we shall see in the next chapter, to the degree that

such linguistically keyed mobility occurred, it led to the emergence of an ambivalent, small, middle class whose solidarity with the mass working classes was at best tenuous. It is against these discourses of domination that, in Foucault's terms, we must see other increasingly subjugated discourses of resistance such as the struggle of the Spanishlanguage press and, in our present case, the florescence of the corrido (Foucault 1980). We have already argued this case at two levels, primarily levels of content, but here we are interested in positing the notion of form and its sedimented ideology of conflict and resistance.

For at a historical moment when Mexican culture, as well as its political economy, was being reorganized and "Anglicized" in the interest of domination, it is just possible that the sheer music, the strict predictable measured poetics, the Spanish language of the corrido, indeed, the strong sensory quality of the male performance context constituted a point of resistance at the level of form. Such form as ideology, I suggest, likely reminded its audiences of another time and place, another form of social life. At a time when distinct cultural modes of production—agrarian precapitalist and emergent capitalism—overlapped and came into conflict, the content of the corrido spoke directly and critically to the present at two levels of social critique, but its form provided an implicit model of a perceived better past, an anchoring point in a new storm rising.

The formal ideological relationship of the corrido to the revolutionary crises in Mexico's interior was not that altogether different. For during the Porfiriato most of Mexico was experiencing some level of Anglicization compounded by bourgeois French influence. As Cockcroft tells us, and it is worth quoting him at length, in 1890, a member of the ruling Mexican elite

expressed his satisfaction to the Chamber of Deputies, "on seeing foreigners as owners of high finance, of credit institutions, of the electrical power plants, of the telegraphs, of the railroads, and of all those things which signify culture and the progress of Mexico." Education, which was for the elite (by 1911 illiteracy still plagues 84 per cent of the population), included teaching of English because, in the words of educator Ezequiel Chávez, "it was believed necessary . . . given the growing union between the Anglo-American people and our people." Justo Sierra, minister of public education, encouraged the "saxonization" of Mexico—including more immigration—to develop the nation's culture and economy. A national normal school was created in 1887, and from then until 1919 almost all Mexican textbooks became the private business of Appleton

Publishing Company of New York, and were written by U.S. authors. (1983:88)

The pervasive influence of bourgeois French culture on the Mexican elite of this period is only too well known. With regard to the fate of the corrido, however, it is worth noting the internalization of European modernism, articulated through Paris, by Mexican poets such as Amado Nervo. While ostensibly a revolt against nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, modernism contained its own contradictions: "modernists . . . turned their backs on political, economic, and social problems as they sought refuge in the world of the imagination"; elitist in its continuous innovations and refinements of language, modernist poetry "was designed for the upper class" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:475–76).^[6]

In this context, the form of the corrido—its rhymes, meter, music, and stanzaic patterns spoke dialogically as an oppositional voice of the "illiterate" Mexican masses. The corrido articulated a different cultural mode of production against the Díaz-led imposition of a European and American bourgeois ideology of form. When the corridistas at Celaya sang in 1915, they articulated both a critical political vision of the world at the level of content and a counteraesthetic, an equally political ideology of form. When the corridistas of south Texas sang of Gregorio Cortez in 1901, they too sang this political poetics, but for these Mexicans, their folk Spanish-language corridos also spoke critically and formally to a world in which domination was articulated in English.

Contradiction and the Corrido: The Repression of Woman's Voice

At a critical historical moment, then, the epic heroic corrido offered an oppositional voice to external domination, a voice registered at various levels of discourse. Yet as a representation of patriarchy, which it most assuredly is, the corrido necessarily carries within it a large element of internal domination and repression, a repression of the gender Other.

Maria Herrera-Sobek has argued recently for a fivefold archetypal representation of women in the Mexican corrido (1990). However, she defines the corrido tradition rather broadly to include what I would more comfortably call quasi-corridos, including what Américo Paredes has called "movie corridos," ersatz ballads produced in Mexico City

by the mass media to accompany a series of B movies. Both corridos and films nostalgically create a historically dubious "charro" ranching world dominated by hard-drinking, womanizing, boastful men. Paredes associates this exaggerated movie-made machismo with Mexico's desire to sense its own strength after a historical experience of international inferiority (Paredes 1967). I amplify on Paredes only by noting that this rural "manly" nostalgia also masks the failure of the ruling party, the PRI, to redistribute land to the peasants.

But in speaking of the definitive epic heroic corrido—definitive as a source of powerful poetic influence—Herrera-Sobek observes that "in its epic character the corrido is similar to the canción de gesta . Both forms extol the exploits of protagonists, who are usually male. Women generally play secondary roles in the narratives" (1990:xiii), and she identifies "the treacherous woman" and the "good mother," in secular and Virginal roles, as the dominant "secondary" images in this particular corpus (1990:67–72; 4–8). Be that as it may, women simply do not appear that often at all in this corpus, even in these secondary imagistic roles. Whatever the merit of Herrera-Sobek's observations with regard to the entire corrido corpus, women make few appearances in the epic heroic folk corrido. It cannot be the general case, as she wants to imply, that "corridos depicting the heroic exploits of Mexican fighting men need such a negative figure . . . to precipitate the hero's descent" (1990:72; emphasis mine) if this female traitor is absent from many of the greater Mexican corridos. For example, there are no such female figures in the more representative folk corridos about Celaya, the seditionists, or Gregorio Cortez.

A treacherous female figure does appear in the folk epic corrido "Valentín Mancera," which Herrera-Sobek analyzes. However, because her Jungian typological approach focuses on identifying the distinct archetypes, she does not explore the dialectical relationship between this image of treachery and that of another kind of woman—the good mother, which she reserves for an earlier chapter (1990:68–71). Shortly before the hero Valentín Mancera is betrayed by a treacherous woman and killed, he has this encounter with his mother.

Su madre, triste, decía:
—¡Válgame Dios, Valentín!
¿Hasta cuándo te reduces?
¿Cuál será tu último fin?

Valentín le contestó:
—No llore, madre adorada

vale más morir peleando
que correr de la Acordada
—Echeme su bendición
que ya me voy pa' Galvanes
(Mendoza 1954:177)

His mother, sadly, did say
—Dear God, Valentín!
When will you calm down?
Where will you finally end?

Valentín answered her:
—Don't cry, adored mother,
It is better to die fighting
than to run from the authorities
—Give me your blessing
For I am going to Galvanes

Against the forces of social domination that are aided by a treacherous woman, Mancera finds support in the maternal. And although this maternal theme, this affirming presence of woman, is itself not characteristic of corridos, it is a theme that seems to appear more often than the treacherous woman.^[7]

Of far greater importance than these limited negative and positive female images is the corrido's larger gender politics and poetics of exclusion and repression. Woman is almost wholly excluded or repressed in the male world of the corrido, in the ballad's predominant imagery and subject and equally so in its principally male-defined performative context. (And a case could be made that the corrido's form—its rigid, repetitive quatrains, its linear, hard-driving narrative style, its sharply bounded universe with its formal openings and closings—is maleengendered.)

Yet, like all repressions, this one cannot be forever contained. In "Valentín Mancera" the hero acknowledges and defers to the maternal as a source of strength. Compared to the image of an activist treacherous woman, this maternal emergence represents a potentially far more radical challenge to the patriarchal ethos of the corrido. Though articulated in what some might see as a "submissive" maternal imagery, the figure of the mother stands as an active counteralternative to the hegemonic world of the father—real and poetic—in the influential construction of his sons. Moreover, in Tinker's description of hearing his first corrido at Celaya, we encounter the concept of the active maternal and familial, of the woman who struggles wholly on behalf of her community, oc-

casionally killing in its defense. As the three corridistas sang of Celaya, the audience included not only Villa's ragged soldiers but also "their soldaderas —those amazing Amazons who cooked for their men and, with pots and pans, and often a baby on their backs, kept up with the regiments on gruelling marches; or when need arose, snatched a rifle from a corpse and fought as fiercely as any male" (Tinker 1961:7).

This image of women's participation is amplified by Meyer and Sherman's portrait of the women who accompanied the soldiers:

The soldaderas were more than camp followers. They provided feminine companionship, to be sure, but because neither the federal army nor the rebel armies provided commissary service, they foraged for food, cooked, washed, and, in the absence of more competent medical service, nursed the wounded and buried the dead. Both sides were dependent upon them, and in 1912 a federal battalion actually threatened mutiny when the secretary of war ordered that the women could not be taken along on a certain maneuver. The order was rescinded. Not infrequently, the soldaderas actually served in the ranks, sometimes with a baby slung in a rebozo or a young child clinging at their skirts. Women holding officer ranks were not uncommon in the rebel armies.

The soldadera endured the hardships of the campaign without special consideration. While the men were generally mounted, the women most often walked, carrying bedding, pots and pans, food, firearms, ammunition, and children. Often the men would gallop on ahead, engage the enemy in battle, and then rest. By the time the women caught up, they were ready to move again, and the soldadera would simply trudge on. Losing her special "Juan" in battle, she would wait an appropriately decent period and then take on another, to prepare his favorite meal and share his bed. (1979:556–57)

These women were not primarily soldarias (soldiers), but they were responsible for military logistics—the heart of any campaign, according to military analysts. The active, nurturing social reproduction and defense of community through "women's work" was crucially important at this moment in history. This is the image of the maternal that informs the poetry we will examine, an active maternal that serves as a creative resource for the most radical revisionary strategy toward the world of the father and his poetry and toward society. The gender basis for this radical revisionary subversion already lies within this patriarchal culture. It too is part—a necessary part—of any son's anxiety of influence and, progressively revised, can also play a larger oppositional role in a transformed corrido as it looks out to a continuing external domination.

The Rise and Fall of the Greater Mexican Epic Corrido: from Residual to Emergent

Yet even with this latent gender contradiction, the corrido had a larger oppositional mission in society, although it did not last, at least not at the full performative strength it acquired between 1848 and 1930According to Américo Paredes, by the 1930s "when Mexico's Tin Pan Alley took over the corrido, its decay was inevitable." Paredes explains: "At first radio and the movies employed folk singers and composers, and Mexican popular music had a brief golden age. But soon the demand for more and more new songs wore the folk material thin" (1958a:102). It is as if, Paredes seems to be suggesting, the demand for corridos produced a new body of songs that were "thin" in their articulation of the traditional aesthetics and social vision.

This is a judgment confirmed by Dickey (1978) with respect to corridos, and comparatively collaborated by Patterson (1975) with respect to the political transformation of American folk song into "country western" at about this same period of time and through these same processes. Patterson traces this transformative process to the cornmodification of a Southern oppositional folk song culture in response to two demands posed by a new advanced capitalism: The first was a demand for a noncontroversial music appropriate for a general audience and suitably edited for radio play. The second entailed the transformation not so much of the music itself, but rather of its social base.

Like greater Mexican campesino society, both the black and white agrarian base of Southern folk song was disrupted by an advanced capitalism that "between the late 30s and the early 50s" succeeded in "driving them out of the rural South and into southern, northern, and western cities and into industrial and service occupations" (Patterson 1975:283–84). These urban migrants managed to retain some of their musical culture in these new settings for a time, through radio and recordings, but the lack of a sustaining organic community base soon meant a "thinning" of the erstwhile oppositional musical culture.

Similarly, in an analysis focused on Mexicans in Texas but, as Paredes suggests, applicable to greater Mexico, Dickey reports:

This "golden" age of recording and radio, where the technology was new and the folk material was rich, was not to last, howeyer. The social fabric

of the Tejano (Texas-Mexican) communities was changing, the people were becoming more urbanized and influenced by American ways; as a result there was a demand for new . . . corridos more than for the old songs. With increased professionalization, commercialization and the blending of traditions and innovations in Tejano music by the late 1930s and the 1940s, new trends were emerging in the music. (1978:17)

Neither Paredes nor Dickey specifies the social forces, but they undoubtedly resemble those social forces that Patterson identifies as the sources for the diminishment of folk song as an oppositional form.

This constellation of new forces—advanced capitalism—meant that very few, if any, new corridos of epic heroic quality continued to be played after the 1930s. The earlier heroic corridos, like those of Celaya and Cortez, continued to be sung, and were sometimes recorded and even played on the radio, but not as frequently as other kinds (Dickey 1978:19; Peña 1982:39). These other kinds of corridos concerned more everyday themes and issues of interest to the community, including natural disasters, betrayed love affairs, contraband, murders, and immigration. Despite their subject matter being rooted in the everyday experience of the greater Mexican people, these corridos tended to be increasingly the products of professional composers who, though closely related to the community, nonetheless had an ear out for the commercially conditioned demands of radio stations and recording companies. These demands tended to produce corridos more attuned to the sensationalistic (drug-dealing murders, etc.), and poetically constrained both by recording and radio play time and what appears to be, over time, a less than rigorous poetic aesthetic. It is within this commercial world that we also find Paredes's "movie corridos" of extreme machismo.

As such, the corridos composed in the period between 1930 and 1960 rarely, if ever, spoke directly to social conflict. To the extent that social conflict was addressed, it was to depict and protest the victimization of Mexicans, at least in the U.S., through discrimination (Peña 1982.). Rarely did there appear within this period the carefully crafted heroic world of a man confronting another defending his right, and often that of his community, with his pistol, real or metaphorical, in his hand. Yet the heroic corrido did not altogether disappear. While now decidedly historical, the heroic corridos of conflict from the Border and the Mexican Revolution continued to be heard or read in a variety of forums. One might hear them in cantinas, or in open-air plazas. Some

recordings were available, and people played them at home (as my father played them for me) or occasionally heard them played on the radio. For a more intellectual public, Vicente Mendoza's important collection appeared in 1954. Shortly thereafter, Américo Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand was published.

To clarify the corrido's relationship to its past, present, and future, we may conceptualize this historical relationship by using the fluid, subtle, and historically sensitive Marxist cultural theory of Raymond Williams. Williams's great contribution is to allow us to see how subordinate groups are dialectically related to domination in cultural terms and how this relationship can be transformed over time.

The epic corrido of greater Mexico never became fully archaic, in Williams's terms; that is, it was never wholly restricted to one definite historical period. Rather, the corrido took on the status and quality of a residual culture that "by definition has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present" (Williams 1977:122). If, in its "pure" state, such a residual form once played an active role in contesting the hegemony of domination, as did the epic corrido, seemingly, it is at even greater risk of being transformed, as happened to the epic corrido after 1930. This is so because "at certain points the dominant culture cannot allow too much residual experience and practice outside itself, at least without risk" (p. 122). Domination attempts to work its cultural hegemony by continually producing a "selective tradition"—by admitting only those discourses that verify and legitimize its own power, and "it is in the incorporation of the actively residual—by reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion—that that work of the selective tradition is especially evident" (p. 122).

Nonetheless, the active residual may maintain its counterhegemonic stance at least in part because "certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation" (p. 123).

What Williams does not, and does not have to, specify in his general treatise is precisely how the residual remains effective in the present. As regards our case at hand, it is clear that the dominant culture—the binational bourgeois culture of the Border—does limit the corrido, even

as some aspects of the corrido (the less-than-epic recorded corridos mentioned earlier, for example) continue to express "certain experiences, meanings, and values . . . lived and practiced on the basis of the residue." Residual traditions are one resource for subordinate groups in their ideological struggle against domination; but in contesting cultural and, ultimately, social hegemony, subordinate groups can also turn to "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship" that "are continually being created." As Williams recognizes, defining this emergent culture is very problematic. For one, "it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of dominant culture . . . and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it. . . . the social location of the residual is always easier to understand" (p. 123). Williams is likely fight on this point, but the distinctions might be more helpful were he not to insist on such a sharp sense of the emergent as wholly "new," since the seemingly "new" more often consists of new transformations of older, that is to say, residual, forms.^[8] Perhaps only the residual forms keep the emergent forms at some distance from the dominant culture, while only the "pure" new practice allows the emergent to be an "effective element of the present" and to work as a counterhegemonic practice. If this is at least sometimes the case—and I do not wish to generalize here—then we may ask how the new and the residual work together to respond effectively to domination and its hegemonic assault.

It is from this perspective that I want to approach the poetic texts I have chosen. As a fully active contestative practice in its own right, the epic corrido waned from the 1930s to the 1960s, but as an active residual practice in new transformed poetic emergences, the epic corrido continued to carry its powerful poetic and counterhegemonic influence into a new period.^[9] These transformations played a role in a new social struggle against domination, even as the poetic emergent and residual carried on their own "internal" struggle of poetic influence. This internal struggle in the service of the social requires that the later poets possess a full knowledge of the precursor. The key figure in the transmission of such knowledge is Américo Paredes, the corrido's foremost scholar and foremost poetic son.

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

It's a wise child that knows its own father.
The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald

2
Américo Paredes, Tradition, and the First Ephebe:
A Poetic Meditation on the Epic Corrido

"In 1915, oh but the days were hot! So says the corrido , 'Los Sediciosos' commemorating the Texas-Mexican uprising of 1915." And so comments Américo Paredes, who was born along the Lower Border that same year, even as "bands of Border men under the leadership of Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa raided as far north as the King Ranch, burning ranches, derailing trains, killing American civilians, and attacking U.S. army detachments" (1976:32–33).

Though widely acknowledged as the master of corrido scholarship and as the elder statesman of Chicano intellectual activists, Paredes is almost wholly unknown as a poet. Yet, as I shall argue in these next two chapters, his corrido scholarship, his politics, and his poetic efforts are, ultimately, not separate endeavors. Before he published any corrido scholarship, and at an early age, his poem "Guitarreros" (Guitarists) revealed his strong poetic interest in the corrido and was shaped by its influence. Later in his life, as I discuss in the next chapter, his scholarship itself is poetically endowed by the epic heroic corrido, thereby becoming an example of what Lukács, after Schlegel, calls "intellectual poems" ([1910] 1974:18) and what C. Wright Mills calls "sociological poems" (Miller 1986).

In this chapter, I want to concentrate almost exclusively on "Guitarreros," which I believe is Paredes's best poetic effort to date. This evaluation is supported, at least implicitly, by the poet himself, who in 1964 selected this one poem for publication in the Southwest Review . The poem's success to me seems to derive in large part from an intense engagement with its most psychoculturally available precursor, the epic heroic corrido.

"Guitarreros": A Formalist Perspective

"Guitarreros" represents an effort to incorporate the influence of the corrido in the interests of producing a quite different and strong poem, an effort that ends in a kind of fruitful poetic and political defeat. Here is the poem as it was written in 1935 and almost in the form in which it was published in the Southwest Review in 1964. (I have reinserted the epigraph that was accidentally omitted from the 1964 printing. The epigraph means, "They brought down the black bull never before brought down.")

Bajaron un toro prieto
que nunca lo habían bajado.

          Guitarrero

Black against twisted black
The old mesquite
Rears up against the stars
Branch bridle hanging,
While the bull comes down from the mountain
Driven along by your fingers,
Twenty nimble stallions prancing up and down the  redil  of the guitars.

One leaning on the trunk, one facing—
Now the song:
Not cleanly flanked, not pacing,
But in a stubborn yielding that unshapes
And shapes itself again,
Hard-mouthed, zigzagged, thrusting,
Thrown not sung
One to the other.

The old man listens in his cloud
Of white tobacco smoke.
"It was so," he says,
"In the old days it was so."

In consummate and powerfully detailed imagery, our poet is imagining a musical performance scene, although this is not wholly clear until lines 6–8, when guitar playing first becomes evident. "Now the song," and now, also, the import of the epigraph and lines 1–5 becomes clearer. Two musicians are under an old mesquite tree whose dark trunks have grown intertwined (as they often do in south Texas) "black against twisted black," and the two likely sit "one leaning on the trunk, one

facing." But the mesquite branches are also horses on the run rearing up, "black against twisted black." The imagery of horses is then smoothly shifted to the guitarists as their combined twenty fingers become like "twenty nimble stallions prancing up and down the redil "—the strings and necks of their guitars. This "ranching" metaphor is then nicely interlocked with another, for it is these music-making stallions that drive down a bull from the mountain—the image introduced in the epigraph.

To understand fully the image of the bull, one must trace the epigraph to its source, "El Hijo Desobediente" (The Disobedient Son), Paredes's favorite corrido,^[1] and one that Simmons has called among the best (1957:41). Here is the version Paredes gives as the one he learned as a young man from the corridistas of the Lower Border; another version is provided by Mendoza (1954:266–68). The translation is my own.

          El Hijo Desobediente

Un domingo estando herrando
se encontraron dos mancebos,
echando mano a los fieros
como queriendo pelear;
cuando se estaban peleando
pues llegó su padre de uno:
—Hijo de mi corazón,
ya no pelees con ninguno.—

—Quítese de aquí mi padre
que estoy màs bravo que un león
no vaya a sacar la espada
y la parta el corazón.—
—Hijo de mi corazón,
por lo que acabas de hablar
antes de que raye el sol
la vida te han de quitar.—

—Lo que le pido a mi padre
que no me entierre en sagrado,
que me entierre en tierra bruta
donde me trille el ganado,
con una mano de fuera
y un papel sobre-dorado,
con un letrero que diga,
"Felipe fue desdichado."

—La vaquilla colorada,
hace un año que nació.

ahi se la dejo a mi padre
pot la crianza que me dió;
los tres caballos que tengo,
ahi se los dejo a los pobres
para que digan en vida,
"Felipe, Dios te perdone."—

Bajaron el toro prieto,
que nunca lo habían bajado,
pero ora si ya bajó
revuelto con el ganado;
ya con ésta me despido
por la estrella del oriente,
y aquí se acaba el corrido
de El Hijo Desobediente.

          The Disobedient Son

On a Sunday during branding
Two young cowboys did meet,
Each going for his steel
Each looking to fight;
As they were fighting
The father of one arrived:
—My beloved son
Do not fight with anyone.—

—Get away from here, my father
I feel more fierce than a lion,
For I may draw my knife
To split your heart in two.—
—My beloved son,
Because of what you have said
Before the next sunrise
Your life will be taken away.—

—I only ask of my father
Do not bury me in sacred ground,
Bury me in brute earth
Where the stock may trample me
With one hand out of the grave
And a gilded paper,
With an epitaph that reads
"Felipe was an ill-fated man."

The red yearling
Born a year ago,
I leave to my father
My upbringing to him I owe;
My three stallions

I leave to the poor
So that they may say
"May God forgive you, Felipe."
They brought the black bull down,
Never before brought down,
But now the bull has come down
With the rest of the stock;
Now with this I say farewell
Guided by the eastern star
This ends the ballad
Of the disobedient son.

The epigraph of "Guitarreros" and the bull coming down from the mountain in line 5 give us sufficient textual authority to propose that Paredes's poem is about the imagined singing of this particular corrido. The ballad now comes to be represented in the poem by the black bull, and it is "El Hijo Desobediente" that the guitarists are "bringing down" from their consciousness and driving along with their nimble fingers. But like a strong bull and unlike a stallion, the song, or, to be more precise, its performance, is

Not cleanly flanked, not pacing,
But in a stubborn yielding that unshapes
And shapes itself again,
Hard-mouthed, zigzagged, thrusting,
Thrown . . .

The poem concludes with an old man listening to this powerful corrido in a cloud of white smoke, an old man who simply comments "'It was so . . . In the old days it was so.'" What was so? First, one might say that what the old man means—perhaps the "meaning" of the poem—is that the moral world of "El Hijo Desobediente" sung by the two guitarists was so , a world in which men acted in defense of their honor and also felt a deep sense of obligation and fealty toward their elders. Second, it is also likely that as the old man listens, he is thinking that this powerful style of singing was so . Thus "it was so" refers to the passing of an older world, to an entire moral and aesthetic universe that was so but no longer is.

Poetic Victory and Defeat

We have already poetically historicized "Guitarreros" in discussing its epigraph and Paredes's allusion to his favorite corrido. Clearly, corrido

singing is the "subject" of his poem; but this obvious point may be understood in a deeper, richer sense.

If poetry is about the crafting of poetry, as Harold Bloom, following the lead of Wallace Stevens, hypothesizes, then let me propose that "Guitarreros" is not so much about corrido singing as about how strong poems should be made. In Bloom's terms, strong poems are not simply made about poems, they are made against antecedent strong poems. The poem that has come before has great potency and influence for the later poet. Yet, in this theory, no strong poetic latecomer is wholly accepting of his strong fatherly precursor, and the ephebe engages the father in a creative struggle through any combination of six defensive strategies cast as poetic tropes. The result, of course, is the ephebe's own poetic achievement even if, by Bloom's terms, this necessarily falls short of complete victory. These six rhetorical strategies or "revisionary ratios" tend to appear in matched pairs. Bloom chooses to call them clinamen and tessera, kenosis and daemonization , and askesis and apophrades and finds them operating in whole or in part in the strong poetry of Anglo-American culture. In part, they structure the poet's reception of tradition and poetically manifest what Bloom calls the poet's anxiety of influence.^[2]

I propose that "Guitarreros" is a relatively strong poem and is structured in large part by a dialectical movement of these rhetorical strategies, responding to the influence of its strong precursor, the corrido of greater Mexico, exemplified by "El Hijo Desobediente." Let us chart some of these strategies using Bloom's categories, even while purposefully misreading those categories to derive less individualistic and more collective terms of discourse.

We have already seen that from the very beginning, the strong corrido precursor is present in the young poet's consciousness. Here we may avail ourselves of more biography than Bloom is likely to use and revise him by using his theory more historically. In the 1930s Paredes did not have a printed text of the ballad before him as we do; rather, he had been continual witness to corrido performances in his native border country of south Texas. His poem is fashioned in response not to what he read, but to what he heard and felt in the presence of folk poets. The world of the corrido is immediately evoked by the poem's epigraph and title, both rendered in Spanish.

Having invoked his poetic precursor, Paredes opens his poem with an introductory section of eight lines that execute a clinamen , which

I shall call Swerve (as Bloom also does). In The Anxiety of Influence , Bloom tells us that a clinamen appears as a corrective move in the ephebe's own poem "which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves" (1973:14). In a later statement, Bloom amplifies this point: A poem's opening swerve

is marked by dialectical images of absence and presence, images that rhetorically are conveyed by the trope of simple irony . . . and that as psychic defense assume the shape of what Freud called reaction-formation. . . . Just as rhetorical irony . . . says one thing and means another, even the opposite thing, so a reaction-formation opposes itself to a repressed desire by manifesting the opposite of the desire. (1975a:97)

Implied error and asserted correction. Absence and presence. Irony and the literal. Desire and repression. These are the dialectical meanings conveyed by the imagistic and formal composition of the first eight lines. The manifest content, however, may be only a secondary key to this understanding; we must also be attentive to the role of form in the poetic relationship (a concern that receives relatively little of Bloom's attention).

Even as the corrido's presence is established in the epigraph, the corrido's form is immediately abandoned: The corrido's Spanish gives way to the English of the ephebe's poem; the oral corrido's regular meter and rhyme yield to a written poem with varying meter and little rhyme. Most importantly, the conventional diction of folk song is replaced by a constellation of modernist imagery—"black against twisted black"; a mesquite like a stallion; fingers also like stallions, which drive along a bull like a song. These formal choices are the essence of this ephebe's Swerve, and they implicitly and initially "say" that his poem is a wholly different, and perhaps better, way to craft. We have therefore also a formally articulated ironic moment, for in its very form this new poem has also culturally swerved toward a very different kind of audience.

Yet this new poetic form is necessarily caught in a moment of further irony conditioned paradoxically by the appearance of tradition. For even as we have a kind of poetic "correction" to implied traditional error, this seemingly formal declaration of poetic independence quickly begins to be thematically dominated by the corrido. What appears to be a formally autonomous poem in lines 1–5 begins to reacknowledge tradition as two folksingers begin slowly to emerge:

While the bull comes down from the mountain
Driven along by your fingers,
Twenty nimble stallions prancing up and down the  redil  of the guitars.

Our young poet is directly addressing his fellow precursory poets—"your fingers"—as it becomes increasingly clear that they are playing their guitars and singing the ballad alluded to in the epigraph.

In explicitly recognizing his precursors and their poetic crafting, the ephebe is beginning to engage in the revisionary movement that Bloom calls the tessera , and which I shall call Accommodation. In this movement, the initial formal Swerve begins to falter, or at least it readjusts to the emerging presence of tradition in the imagistic content of the poem. Accommodation is an expression of a momentary truce between poet and precursor. The young poet talks to and talks only about his fellow poets as they begin to craft their poem, and his complimentary imagery, fingers like "twenty nimble stallions," reveals his admiration for them. In one sense, the precursor is exerting his control over the younger poet, yet guitarreros are at the same time within the control of our poet, for their singing can be "heard" only through his poetic skill. Only, the later poet seems to say, through his more "modern" verse can one make sense of this precursory power, and its presence in his poem is both dominating and dominated. In the movement of tessera , Bloom tells us,

the later poet provides what his imagination tells him would complete the otherwise "truncated" precursor poem or poet. . . . In this sense of a completing link, the tessera represents any later poet's attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor's Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe. (1973:66–67)

No longer swerving, or at least not as much, the young poet is in imagistic awe of his precursors' power. Nevertheless, while making this concession, he also extends a generosity to them, for their power would remain historically truncated were he not willing to acknowledge tradition and re-present it to us in his art. The poet has returned to his precursor, but on his own terms or at least in a momentary Accommodation.

However, having made this initial temporary adjustment—this compromise—between self and tradition, the ephebe completes the poem by wholly acknowledging the force of the poetic fathers and seemingly

negating his own poetic presence. This later negotiation with the precursor is the movement of kenosis , or what I shall call Withdrawal. In this poetic stance, the ephebe appears wholly to humble himself before the authority of tradition, although he continues to exact a price from the precursor. Although "apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood," the later poet "seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed . . . that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems" (Bloom 1973:14–15).

This Withdrawal, this humbling and poetic emptying out, begins with the line "Now the song," as our ephebe engages in a direct evaluatory encounter with the strong precursory poem. What does he think of it and, by implication, how does it compare to his own "song" before us? His awed description betrays too much, for clearly our young poet is overwhelmed and his poem is emptied of all sense of poetic self. Now his poem is suffused by this seemingly absolutely powerful poem from the past, which like a good strong bull or cow pony (the metaphor is slightly but perhaps profitably confused here), is

Not cleanly flanked, not pacing,
But in a stubborn yielding that unshapes
And shapes itself again,
Hard-mouthed, zigzagged, thrusting,
Thrown not sung
One to the other.

The lines clearly suggest the full awe and admiration of the ephebe for his precursor song, but their other necessary effect is to vitiate the ephebe's own poetic effort. Yet, of course, the young poet still has some degree of poetic control as the truce of Accommodation lingers, but it is now a quite shaky truce as the precursor appears in full power and poetic majesty and quite literally takes over the ephebe and his poem.

Here, the content of the particular corrido the guitarreros are singing—a ballad about sons, fathers, disobedience, and dire consequences—exerts its force. A miscreant son violates the moral hierarchy and rules of his society and meets his fate in a world where "the representative of God on earth was the father" and his "curse was thought to be the most terrible thing on earth" (Paredes 1958b:11). Symbolically, moral order is restored at two levels in the corrido. First, even as the young vaquero manfully and calmly accepts his fate, he acknowl-

edges his social being and affirms the natural order of things by distributing his goods, especially his stock, and by asking to be buried in a secular natural setting. Second, the corrido ends with the other vaqueros establishing control over the renegade bull. Like the miscreant vaquero, the black bull is strong but potentially dangerous, perhaps even evil, and he must be brought down, brought under social and moral control. This moral universe was so but is no longer possible and, with the ephebe, we stand morally empty before it, knowing that we have to construct our moral existence without it. For all its moral power, the normative impact of the past has been blunted by time and change, and only the moral desire of the young poet cast into poetry can give us limited imaginative access to it.

Both the moral and artistic dimensions of the corrido world are finely captured through the single powerful metaphor of the guitarreros controlling and driving the song, like the vaqueros control and drive the black bull. The guitarreros and the vaqueros, of course, must also exercise an intermediary control over their "livestock," one group literally, and the others through the art of their fingers to produce a tightly and finely crafted artistic whole. This is a world in which unbridled, undisciplined moral and artistic disorder must be controlled by artful, moral human beings, lest they suffer the degradation of their kind.

We cannot but sense our poet's admiration for the artistic and moral world of the corrido. Even as the form of his poem violates the folk tradition, it is his generosity to folk tradition in his art which brings that world to us, and he ultimately affirms its values with the better part of himself. Yet while lending final assent to this dominant influence, he nevertheless implicitly and explicitly demonstrates its historicity and thus, in Bloom's terms, "the precursor is emptied out also" in relation to the ephebe even as he is being overwhelmed by the precursor. The ephebe fully accomplishes the twin tasks by the ingenious introduction of the old man in the last four lines of the poem:

The old man listens in his cloud
Of white tobacco smoke.
"It was so," he says,
"In the old days it was so."

Most literally, the old man is an elder, that is, an old man with authority; as Paredes described greater Mexican culture of early south Texas, "decisions were made, arguments were settled, and sanctions were decided

upon by the old men of the group, with the leader usually being the patriarch" (1958b: 12). In effect, the elder in this poem settles this poetic struggle between the poet and tradition, but does so through a Withdrawal. That is, although in one obvious sense he represents tradition, he is also the young poet's speaker and in his twin role as traditional image and poetic voice, he limits both tradition and the ephebe, "emptying" them out in relation to each other.

This dual movement of limitation is primarily carried by the old man's "It was so." But, again, what is it that "was so"? At one level, the old man is commenting upon the guitarists' powerful singing performance, which is now essentially a historical artistic performance. Today we are left with a different style of "singing," which is not singing at all, namely the ephebe's poem. If it is stylistically and performatively less impressive than the "hard-mouthed, zigzagged, thrusting" song, then we are the poorer for it; yet, at the same time, folk tradition has also reached its performative limits. It can no longer speak to us directly; the precursor's voice is muted in time, and only the ephebe's poem is so , for all its poetic weakness relative to the powerful song of the past. Both past and present have their artistic limitations: the past is powerful, but the present is alive.

A final way to grasp this paradoxical relationship of influence is to note the parallel journeys of the two ephebes, Felipe, the young hero of the corrido, and our young poet. Both depart from traditional norms (Swerve), readjust and acknowledge their swerving (Accommodation), and finally affirm tradition to the point of self-negation (Withdrawal), but do so in a way that takes a toll on their fathers. Both ephebes must die—Felipe literally, our poet figuratively—under the influence of the powerful order that is their inheritance. That order lives on in our consciousness only because of the ephebe's effort to challenge it, but here he finally acknowledges the superiority of the father, even as the father must acknowledge his own kind of debt to the son.

In principle, the poem need not end here. With more time, experience, learning and self-confidence, the ephebe may mount a new challenge, following the dialectical, antithetical completion of Accommodation in a next movement, which Bloom calls daemonization , and I shall call Rebellion. Here the ephebe would begin "a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor's Sublime" as the "later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper,

but to a range of being just beyond that precursor" (1973:15). The ephebe seeks his own autonomous voice and, "Turning against the precursor's Sublime, the newly strong poet undergoes daemonization, a Counter-Sublime whose function suggests the precursor's relative weakness " (1973:100).

But our ephebe's poem ends short of Rebellion. There is no strong counterassertion, no attempt to articulate a new, distinctive poem that implicitly denies the adequacy of the precursor. In this poem, at least, our ephebe cannot find—perhaps chooses not to find—his own distinctive voice. Indeed, Paredes's unresolved relationship to the precursor is resolved only in 1958, with the publication of With His Pistol in His Hand , as we shall see in chapter 3.

"Guitarreros": Influence, the Social, and the Discourses of Domination

Paredes's "Guitarreros" is suffused with the power of the precursory tradition of the corrido. That strength, however, turns out to be also a limitation, leaving the poem to end in the past tense with no word of the present or future. In this sense, Paredes's poem-as-poem is produced in a struggle with a strong precursory poem-as-poem, a losing though creative struggle for the latecomer.

But the corrido is a genre of strong folk poem deeply implicated in social history—in politics, conflict, and social change—and later poems that would rival it must also address these concerns in their present historical moment. The latecoming rival cannot simply write another corrido, but rather must fully and maturely internalize and use the poetic and political energy of the corrido in order to write a new poem wholly relevant to his time, even as he creatively draws on the past. This, our ephebe is unable to do: unable to come to full poetic terms with the precursor, he cannot move beyond his admiring contemplation of the past to gradually and creatively transform it into a poetic and politically critical meditation on the present. In these terms, the truncated achievement of "Guitarreros" relative to the precursory tradition also limits its capacity to address the poet's contemporary world of political discourse.

However fine a poem "Guitarreros" is, unlike a corrido, it offers no particulars of its historical moment and no ideologemes or statements about disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, social deprivation,

or racism in south Texas in the 1930s. Indeed, the poem is notable for its total negation and repression of any statement about the cultural discourses of domination, including "Americanization," that were accepted by an emerging, though still small, petty bourgeois Mexican-American class. Institutionally this outlook is best represented by the League of United Latin American Citizens, a men's social service club founded in urban San Antonio and Corpus Christi in the late 1920s. Expressing at times a disdain for proletarian life and the traditional Mexican rural past, league members saw Americanization as the best guarantee for upward mobility. This meant not only the learning of English but, more significantly, less emphasis on the retention of Spanish and great emphasis on the rapid acquisition of an American civic political culture. The league and similar groups did struggle against racial discrimination, although they seemed far more reluctant to articulate a politics of class consciousness. Other groups tried to combine the latter together with a stronger sense of ethnic nationalism—one thinks of the fiery Emma Tenayuca, who organized several violent strikes among the Mexican-American cigar, government, and pecan-shelling workers in San Antonio in the 1930s—but in the world of public discourse, it was the petty bourgeois who were gradually hegemonic, validated, as always, by those who dominated, even as a culture of resistance maintained largely among the working classes continued as a substratum (Montejano 1987:156–254; García 1991).

Regarding this south Texas of conflict, struggle, and dominating discourses, Paredes's poem is silent. The total domination of the corrido, the latecomer's inability to move beyond the revisionary ratio of Withdrawal in the face of the precursor, render the poem strangely impotent, politically as well as poetically at this level. Yet we sense here neither ignorance of nor escape from the social context, but rather repression, a repression captured, once again, in the evocative closing line, "It was so." It is as if the poem understands but refuses to say why the moral and aesthetic world it so admires isn't so anymore. How did it come to an end? This is a question for later revisionary ratios, steps "Guitarreros" does not take, steps that might poetically address the question of politics, which Paredes did broach in "Flute Song," a less repressed, though poetically less satisfying, poem of that same year:

Why was I ever born
Heir to a people's sorrow,
Wishing this day were done
And yet fearful for the morrow.

Useful for its glimpse of the poet's social sorrow, his fears and wishes, this bit of verse, conventional in its meter and rhyme, abstract in its rhetoric, is uninspiring as poetry. It does not show the focused imagery, the complex poetic argument, the compelling rhythm of "Guitarreros" because, I submit, it is not experiencing the challenge of a precursor, and the result is poetic insipidity, a "weak" poem.

Here we enter into Jameson's third-level analytic, the ideology of form. And it is in the formal competence of "Guitarreros"—the formal poetic reasons that Paredes and his editors selected it for publication—that we find this ephebe's best response to his poetic precursor and, at the same time, his repressed ideological critique of present social conditions. Recall that for Jameson, it is at this level that we find the traces of overlap and conflict in History (with a capital H), now conceived as the struggle between distinct cultural modes of production.

In "Guitarreros" Paredes's formal achievement—his skillful articulation of a modernist poetics—executes the Rebellion that the poem's imagistic content does not. It is in the poem's form that we find a complete disjuncture with corrido aesthetics and, therefore, the ephebe's greatest poetic autonomy. This Rebellion necessarily carries the younger poet into the coterie of formal modernism at a historical moment when modernism is performing its own critical ideological service contra capitalism in a wider social sphere. At the same time, however, at the level of local politics, the modernist form isolates this poem too severely from its immediate context. In its aesthetics, and relative to the struggle immediately at hand, the poem's form too quickly anticipates the future and is closed off from the immediately contextual present. The poem therefore cannot address the present in an aesthetic form that would resonate with it even while educating it toward the future. The ephebe has not yet learned to bring his precursory political-poetic tradition into his own form so as to make it relevant to the present. In Raymond Williams's language, we might say that the residual is not residual enough. It suffocates any new emergence except in purely formal terms.

In a context of struggle, a more complex, subtle, yet explicit and public poetic engagement with the precursory tradition and the political present was required. Some twenty years later, a much more poetically and politically experienced Paredes was ready to again try to craft such a poem. But this time his poem would be in prose.

For even if we know the person represented, whose portrait we may call "like" or "unlike"—is it not an abstraction to say of an arbitrarily chosen moment or expression that this is that person's likeness? And even if we know thousands of such moments or expressions, what do we know of the immeasurably large part of his life when we do not see him, what do we know of the inner light which burns within this "known" person, what of the way this inner light is reflected in others? And that, you see, is more or less how I imagine the truth of the essay to be. Here too there is a struggle for truth, for the incarnation of a life which someone has seen in a man, an epoch or form; but it depends only on the intensity of the work and its vision whether the written text conveys to us this suggestion of that particular life.

The great difference, then, is this: poetry gives us the illusion of the life of the person it represents; nowhere is there a conceivable someone or something against which the created work can be measured. The hero of the essay was once alive, and so his life must be given form; but this life, too, is as much inside the work as everything else in poetry.
Georg Lukács, "On the Nature and Form of the Essay"

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

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.