Moving Away from the “Master”: Américo Paredes and Mexican American Women Writers

Abstract

Américo Paredes is a central figure and “master” in Mexican American and Chicana/o literary history. This chapter focuses on Paredes’s coming-of-age novel, George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (1990), penned between 1936 and 1940 and during a time when women writers like Jaramillo were publishing their work and working within dominant regional narratives about the Southwest. The chapter situates the novel within and against the work of Mexican American women writers, and it links the fictional women characters in the novel to the real women writing at the time. This approach identifies a feminine “inter-space” between fact and fiction to stage a break from the aesthetics of place that Paredes represents. The aesthetics of Chicana/o critical regionalism overlap and are distinct from Paredes.