With His Pistol in His Hand
by Américo Paredes
The ballad as the only history the border would allow.
you want to understand how Mexican Americans preserved their identity in song when the written record was taken from them
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Paredes traced the legend of Gregorio Cortez — a South Texas man who killed a sheriff in self-defense in 1901 and became a folk hero — through the corridos that kept his story alive. An academic book that reads like a revelation: the border ballad as an act of resistance, music as dispatch when journalism wasn't permitted, the community's memory preserved in verse because there was no other way to keep it. The founding text of Chicano studies.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- Written by a Mexican author
