Journal Article

Revolutionary Shadows: Borderlands Identity in the Fiction of Américo Paredes

Kaup, Monika

2017

Overview

According to David Montejano, the rebellion was a violent reaction against the agricultural modernization that, beginning around 1900, dispossessed Texas-Mexicans of their lands, imposing a new farm order and turning former vaqueros and rancheros into an army of landless migrant farmworkers.18 Seditionist attacks specifically targeted the modern installations in the border landscape that formed the material basis of commercial farming, including “train derailments, bridge burnings, and sabotage of irrigation pumping plants” (Anglos and Mexicans, 117). [...]Paredes’s spatial palimpsests mirror the psychological palimpsests in his borderlands fiction: just as physical, external space is depicted as a repository of residual and dominant formations, so is the inner psyche of his borderlands protagonists a world where archaic and suppressed layers coexist and conflict with recent and dominant tendencies. [...]at a meta-textual level—although Paredes himself has dismissed the idea—George Washington Gómez might be read as a kind of dystopian “shadow” autobiography of the author, which speculates about the future before it arrives, imagining a worst-case scenario of the person he might become.34 Paredes was born in the same year as his modern antihero (1915); the novel was written in the late 1930s, before Paredes had ever left the Valley. Forward-looking and rational, Cuitla dreams of a “tractor, had seen himself enthroned upon it, driving up and down the fields” (91). Because the post-revolutionary ejido is a “modern version of the traditional Indian communal land holding” beholden to modern principles of commercial agriculture rather than traditional subsistence farming, Cuitla finds himself slipping into the role of patrón to the ejidatarios (Williamson, Penguin History, 397).

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: 20th century / Agnosticism / Agriculture / Ambiguity / Archetypes (Psychology) / Autobiographical literature / Bildungsroman / Borders / Comparative literature / Farming / Fiction / Folklore / Hegemony / Heroism & heroes / Hispanic Americans / Identity / Ideology / Irrigation / Latin American literature / Literary characters / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literary translation / Literature / Logic / Migrants / Modern literature / Modernism / Modernization / Narrative techniques / Novels / Palimpsests / Paredes, Americo (1915-1999) / Plot (Narrative) / Race / Racism / Short stories / Transnationalism / Writers