Americo Paredes; Southwest Scholar

Americo Paredes, a scholar on the American Southwest whose seminal writings challenged conventional histories of life along the Texas-Mexico border and helped shape a positive cultural identity among Mexican Americans, died Wednesday in Austin, Texas. He was 83.

The longtime anthropology and English professor at the University of Texas at Austin was considered a pioneer in the field of Mexican American studies.

His best-known work was the 1958 book “With His Pistol in His Hand,” a groundbreaking study of the tale of a south Texas cowhand who became a folk hero when he stood up to the legendary Texas Rangers. It became the basis for the 1983 movie “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” with Edward James Olmos.

In his study, Paredes challenged the stereotypes of Mexican Americans as victims or uneducated laborers that prevailed in historical and sociological works of the 1950s. His subject, Gregorio Cortez, spoke poor English, which led to his false arrest in 1901. In self-defense he shot the sheriff who came for him and eluded a posse and the Texas Rangers on a chase from Gonzalez to the Mexican border. He turned himself in when he learned his family had been arrested.

His story had been passed down largely through a corrido, a narrative musical form that was fading when Paredes first heard the ballad in the 1920s.

Chicano activists discovered Paredes’ book in the early 1960s, which helped awaken a new generation of Latino scholars and led to a surge of study of the lives of Mexican Americans.

“It was a classic piece of scholarship and had enormous impact,” said Gilberto Cardenas, former director of the Center for Mexican American Studies, which Paredes founded at the University of Texas in 1970. “He dispelled notions about [Mexican] banditry . . . and inspired several generations of scholars.”

Paredes was born in the south Texas town of Brownsville in 1915. He came from a family of ranchers who worked on both sides of the border.

He started to listen to corridos in his youth, sung by old-timers gathered around a fire, just as the songs were beginning to lose popularity. Later he became a guitarist and singer who performed on radio. He also worked as a reporter for the Brownsville Herald.

After serving in the military during World War II, he enrolled at the University of Texas on the GI bill, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1951 and doctorate in 1956. Recalling the songs that entranced him in his youth, he decided to study the corrido as a form of social expression.

“I was an angry young man,”’ he once said of his idea of writing about the Cortez ballad. “I was angry of the way our people were treated, the lack of opportunities we had.”

He collected scores of corridos and later became the subject of one himself. Taking off on the title of his pioneering work on Cortez, singer-songwriter Tish Hinojosa wrote “Con Su Pluma en la Mano,” or “With His Pen in His Hand. It tells how Paredes, with his pen in his hand, heads north from the border to the University of Texas and proceeds to rewrite the history of Mexican Americans in the Texas border towns.

The corrido as a musical form underwent a revival in the 1960s, partly owing to Paredes’ book on Cortez.

Paredes also published “Folklore and Culture of the Mexican Border,” a collection of his writings, in 1994.

In it he chronicled the rise and fall of the corrido, examined the origin and significance of ribald jokes and ethnic slurs, and assessed machismo in the United States and Mexico.

He also wrote fiction and explored intergenerational conflicts, such as in the darkly comic stories in “The Hammon and the Beans,” published in 1994.

In 1989, Paredes was among the first five scholars to receive the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for his contributions to Mexican American studies. In 1990, Mexico honored him with the Order of the Aztec Eagle for his work in preserving Mexican culture.

The American Folklore Society recognized him in 1997 as the most important scholar in the field of Mexican American folklore.

He is survived by his wife, Amelia, a daughter and three sons.