Américo ParedesGeorge Washington Gómez (1935-40)

Ramón Saldívar

English 126 Twentieth Century American Fictions

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“Always Historicize!” Frederic Jameson, The Political

Unconscious History of the U.S./Mexico Border

Region Nuevo Santander 1749 Mexico becomes Independent

Republic 1821 Texas Independent Republic 1836 U.S.-Mexico War 1846-48 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 1848

04/19/23 Paredes, George Washington Gómez

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Texas and the Southwest 1836

Paredes, George Washington Gómez

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Resistance and Repression The Construction of the

Borderlands 1848-1898 Catarino Garza 1890s The Mexican Revolution 1910 The Seditionists 1915

Américo Paredes b. 1915

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War of Maneuver and War of Position

-- Antonio Gramsci

War of Maneuver: Direct Action Culture as Symbolic Action

Strategy of indirect cultural resistance

Music and other Oral Forms Corridos/Ballads

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Corridos/ Ballads Anonymous folk song narrative

Originating in the tradition of the Spanish romance corrido

Octosyllabic quatrains in 3/4 meter Typically relates significant events After 1848 one theme, one form:

Border Conflict Individual and Organized Resistance

A Lone Hero “With His Pistol in His Hand” “Jacinto Treviño”

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“Residual Cultural Order”

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

The Seditionists of 1915 The Plan of San Diego Reprisals

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Identity, Naming, and the Symbolic Cultural Order, or What’s in a name?

Compare Faulkner’s process of the ideological construction of Identity with Paredes’

“And what shall we name him?” GWG, 15

“A great man who will help his people” GWG, 16

Louis Althusser: interpellation Mikhail Bakhtin: speech genres

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Américo Paredes (1915-1999)

With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958)

“Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture”

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Next Steps Continue Reading GWG Pt III: Good Old School Days