The first half of Américo Paredes’s ”With His Pistol in His Hand” is about the construction and reconstruction of truth on the US/Mexican border. Part One opens with a historical panorama of the Lower Río Grande Border, previously “the old Spanish province of Nuevo Santander, colonized in 1749 by José de Escandon” (7), and continues with a narrative that combines history, geography, and anthropology from the colonial era to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe and on to the early twentieth century. But right from the outset, Paredes manifests his discomfort with what he calls “those documented old men’s tales called histories” (xi). It is not simply that written history lies or is biased–though that is true, too, and Paredes quotes “the most distinguished historian Texas has produced” as claiming matter-of-factly that “The Mexican warrior . . . was on the whole inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to the Texan” (17). It is more that Paredes claims that by introducing a multiplicity of sources, ranging from contemporaneous newspaper accounts of specific events to folk memory, oral history, and cultural manifestations such as the border ballad, we gain access both to multiple points of view and also to the broader truths that the very fact of variation and deviation reveals.
Paredes’s case study here is the tale of Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican American who, the bald facts tell us and all renditions of the story agree, in 1901 shot and killed a US Sheriff and was then pursued on horseback and foot hundreds of miles by various posses of Texas Rangers before being captured, tried, and convicted of murder. Finally, however, after many years in jail his sentence was overturned as he was judged to have shot in self-defence.
But Paredes begins not with the bald facts or with what he can ascertain about the truth of the tale (this comes later), but rather with an extended version of the “legend.” This legend, he notes, never comes complete: it is an “amorphous body of narrative” (108) that is told in parts that are often inconsistent or contradictory. There is “no standard version.” As such, the compilation Paredes gives us is necessarily his “own version,” which he has constructed by combining “those parts that seemed to [him] the furthest removed from fact” and that yet (he implies) are for that very reason “the most revealing of folk attitudes” (109). For it is the inconsistencies and changes that ultimately provide surest evidence of continuities and certainties. It is precisely the “extreme elasticity of reminiscence and oral report” that makes the tale of Gregorio Cortez a suitable vehicle for the articulation of long-standing and deeply-embedded attitudes, affects, and beliefs about conflict in the border region.
Take for instance the very basic question of Cortez’s physical appearance, on which there is little if any agreement among the many variations. And yet there is a certain consistency depending on who is telling the tale’s. In the first instance, “Those who knew him describe him as opposite to themselves. Short men describe him as tall; tall men say he was short. Fair men call him dark; dark men call him fair” (11). But second, and “more interesting still,” Paredes tells us, “those who did not know him describe him as like themselves. A short, very dark man told me that Cortez had been just a little dark man, chiquitito y prietito. [. . .] A fair, blue-eyed Anglo-American [. . .] remembers him as fair” (111). Likewise when it comes to Cortez’s occupation: “The laborer made of Cortez a laborer, the farmer a farmer, the vaquero a vaquero, the suspected smuggler a smuggling suspect–each applying his own situation, his own disagreeable contacts with the Anglo-American, as the reason for Cortez’s defending of his right” (113). As a result, therefore, the plasticity and malleability of the oral production and reproduction of the story, handed down in bits and pieces on diverse occasions, give us “a synthesis of the Border Mexican, who saw himself collectively in Cortez” (113). The figure of Cortez comes to combine the particular (a name, a place, an event, a date) with the general (the situation and position of an entire community) and even aspects of the universal as the Chicano border legend resonates with similar stories told for instance on the Celtic frontier where England meets Scotland.
In the complex amalgamation of “fact and fancy,” of both “exaggerations” and “purely folkloric elements” (114, 115), it would be wrong to try to eliminate the fantastic, to pare down the story to the bare bones of whatever historical “truth” might still be identified. Indeed, to do so would be also to eliminate and misunderstand history itself, in that the legend is not simply a (foggy, distorted) version of what “really” happened, but it also helped to determine the events that it represents. As Paredes concludes Part One of his book, in what at first sight is a strange inversion of temporality and causality: “It was as if the Border people had dreamed Gregorio Cortez before producing him, and had sung his life and deeds before he was born” (125). The issue is less whether the legend matches the facts, but that border culture was waiting for the arrival of facts that might, more or less or closely enough, match the legend already in gestation and looking for a form of expression.
Posthegemony 