AUSTIN, Texas—A new Website has gone online honoring the life works of the late Professor Emeritus Amÿrico Paredes of The University of Texas at Austin. The site includes a video presentation of the May 23, 1999, memorial ceremony recognizing Paredes as a writer, folklorist and scholar who helped shape a positive cultural identity among Mexican Americans and who influenced a new generation of Texas scholars.
The Paredes Website can be reached via the UT Austin Office of Public Affairs home page, http://www.utexas.edu/opa, by clicking on the item listed as “Dr. Amÿrico Paredes Memorial” in the upper left corner of the page.
The Paredes Website will be maintained by the UT Office of Public Affairs for a period of time and later will be transferred to, and maintained by, the Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin.
Paredes, a noted author and one of the founders of the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Center for Intercultural Studies of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at UT Austin, died May 5, 1999, in Austin. He was 83.
Paredes challenged the writings of legendary and contemporary historians and their versions of life along the Texas-Mexico border. His scholarly work about the struggles of working class people along the Rio Grande borderlands set in motion a revolutionary approach to writing about the way things and people had been in early Texas.
