Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 293daringly speculative, gathering together ideas and personalities in a web of
speculation. Not only that, here and elsewhere in his writings, Adams takes the
measure of his times and the diminutive role to which, in his view, man as well as
woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been relegated.
His language has the wit, grace, and decorum of an earlier age of letters, the one
to which his great-grandfather belonged. His forms and feelings, however, place
him decidedly at the forefront of his own times, as he contemplates a world in
process with a mixture of awe and panic. What Adams offers the reader, in short,
is an elegant measuring of the vortex: a portrait of constant dispersion and
dissolution that is at once dizzying and clearly focused – as precise and yet as
disturbing as a late impressionist painting.Voices of resistance
When Henry Adams wrote of multiplicity, there is no doubt that what he primarily
had in mind was the disappearance of any tenable idea of order, a system of belief
that would enable personal stability and cultural coherence. But inseparable from
that was the sense Adams and others like him had that the Anglo-American model
of civilization, embodied in such leaders of the early republic as his own great-
grandfather, no longer enjoyed a monopoly on civic power. It was being challenged,
more than ever, by other models. The voices of other Americans, describing other
visions of America, were demanding to be heard. These included those other
Americans who had been there before the whites, or those whose lands had been
appropriated by the United States. They also included those who had come over, or
had been brought over as slaves, before the Civil War, and those who had entered the
country afterward seeking opportunity or just survival. What these voices spoke of
was their need for recognition as human beings and citizens; what they raged against
was injustice. Sometimes, they celebrated resistance, individual or communal. At
other times, they anticipated an America that embraced difference, that drew
strength from its plural character – that saw multiplicity, in short, as a source of
hope rather than fear.
In the Mexican-American communities of the Southwest, the most popular
and compelling form for expressing racial and cultural pride and resistance to
white domination during this period was the corrido. The corrido is derived from
the Spanish word meaning “to run” and it describes the rapid pace of those narrative
ballads whose roots can be traced to the romances of medieval Spain. Corridos first
appeared as a distinct ballad form in Mexico during the middle of the nineteenth
century. And they soon afterwards emerged in the American Southwest, assuming
immense popularity and currency in the forty or fifty years after the Civil War.
Corridos flourished, in particular, in circumstances of cultural conflict, as an expression
of a people living in a border territory. Their composers were generally anonymous,
and they were transmitted by word of mouth to commemorate notable events or local
heroes or to celebrate prototypical situations in the family and the community.
Unsurprisingly, many corridos focused on the conflict between Mexican-AmericansGGray_c03.indd 293ray_c 03 .indd 293 8 8/1/2011 7:54:24 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 24 AM