Content area
Full Text
In Mexican- American literary history1 the period from 1836 to the late 1930s has been characterized as the century of the epic or heroic corrido (ballad),2 the paradigmatic form of Mexican-American, socio-symbolic expression during a period of open conflict between a dominant AngloAmerican culture and a colonized population of Mexican descent.3 After the decline of the heroic corrido tradition, almost forty years elapsed before the Chicano literary renaissance and the flowering of a new tradition of socio-symbolic literary expressions. But what of the period in between? I suggest that one direction in which Mexican- American literary expression developed in those intervening years was toward a hybrid form of Mexican-American modernism, which inscribed and adapted aesthetic features of both the corrido tradition and Anglo-American modernism. This hybrid form is evident in Americo Paredes' novel George Washington Gómez* a work centrally concerned with representing a divided MexicanAmerican identity and responding to the economic, political, and social developments associated with modernity.
While other critics of Chicano literature have characterized Paredes' writing as "modernist," for the most part this term has served as a sociocultural marker, identifying Paredes' concern with the characteristic issues and developments associated with modernity5 while distinguishing him from canonical modernist writers.6 However, few of these critics fully explore the aesthetic dimensions of Paredes' modernist style, that is, his use and adaptation of the themes and representational techniques associated with literary modernism.7 Certainly, Paredes' novel bears little resemblance to the formalism, metropolitan orientation, and allusive and elusive verbal language games associated with the high modernism of Eliot and Pound. Instead, I would argue that this text bears affinities with a different strain of modernism, which I call "border" modernism. Border modernists, like William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway,8 were more concerned with historicism, rural locales, direct statement, and oral forms of expression. Yet these border modernists shared with their metropolitan counterparts a commitment to questioning received traditions and developing new forms to represent the modern world and to express modern identities. Paredes' concerns align him with this alternative strain of "border" modernism. I suggest that Paredes employs a form of Mexican-American modernism in his novel George Washington Gómez in order to inscribe and deconstruct the aesthetic tradition of the heroic corrido,...