Critical Mestizaje and National Identity: Discourse of Difference in Americo Paredes

Year 2004, Issue: 20, 3 - 16, 01.10.2004

María Herrera-sobek

Abstract

The Mexican American scholar Américo Paredes has been a pioneer in formulating theories related to the concept of mestizaje race mixture , the nation state, nationality, and nationalism through a discourse of difference. The author of the ground-breaking work “With a Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero 1958 , numerous scholarly articles, as well as a collection of poems Between Two Worlds written in the 1930s-1950s but published in 1991 and the novel George Washington Gómez written in the 1930s but published in 1990 left in these works a rich vein of theoretical formulations not heretofore fully explored. Embedded in both his creative works and his scholarly production are issues of critical mestizaje as well as theories that will surface much later in the 1980s and 1990s decades articulated by such theorists as Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson among others.

References

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