The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez: A Cinematic Corrido

Every version and descendant of the ballad—the original song, the variants of it that appeared over time, the book about it published more than half a century later, and, finally, the film based on the book—was in one way or another a work of community activism. Each one followed a similar pattern of an outsider minority group finding a mediated method of filling in the gaps or elbowing its way into the mainstream establishment’s discourse. The corrido commented on Texas’s law-enforcement and legal systems. The book created an academic space for the study of Mexican American popular culture. The film retold the legend of a Mexican American folk hero for a new audience.

With His Pistol in His Hand is a 1958 book by Américo Paredes, a journalist, musician (he sings the ballad heard on the film’s soundtrack), folklorist, and scholar who taught in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin from 1958 till 1984. Though it originated as Paredes’s doctoral dissertation, the book is neither obscure nor esoteric but a clear, accessible, and well-documented study of the Cortez matter and the resulting corrido. Despite that—and in some ways because of that—its publication by the University of Texas Press in 1958 was radical and groundbreaking. To begin with, it elevated a borderland corrido to the level of a classical folkloric ballad. In the staid academic culture of the time, the study of ballads was mostly restricted to premodern folk songs from European and particularly English history, ones about Robin Hood and Rob Roy, for example. By placing contemporary South Texas corridos in the same category, Paredes made Mexican American popular culture worthy of scholarly inquiry. Furthermore, by analyzing a border corrido within its larger social, historical, cultural, and political contexts, Paredes had authored a pioneering example of what is now called cultural studies.

Locally, Paredes’s book was controversial. Because it challenged the received history of the Texas Rangers as a heroic band of frontier do-gooders, some readers found it heretical. What Paredes uncovered was a pattern of violence perpetrated by the Rangers against innocent Mexican Americans, including incidents of indiscriminate harassment and wrongful imprisonment, as well as shootings and lynchings. 

The idea of dramatizing the Gregorio Cortez incident as it is delineated in With His Pistol in His Hand for the screen originated with producer Moctesuma Esparza. As a teenager, Esparza had been active in the Mexican American civil rights movement in his native Los Angeles. As a student at UCLA, Esparza gravitated to the school’s cinema program and found that the same organizational skills he had honed as a community organizer could be applied to producing films. After receiving his MFA, Esparza dedicated himself to filmmaking that would counter the stereotypical depiction of Latinos in the movies. 

In the late seventies, Esparza approached the National Council of La Raza, a civil rights group based in Washington, D.C., with the idea of adapting books such as With His Pistol in His Hand into Mexican American–themed feature-length films for a mass audience. With the National Council of La Raza’s backing, he raised $1.3 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broad­casting, enough to produce a film version of With His Pistol in His Hand. Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, Esparza was one of the earliest participants in the “indie boom” of the eighties, joining the ranks of other young filmmakers such as the Coen brothers, Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee, who were struggling to make their first low-budget independent features around the same time. 

After securing the rights to Paredes’s book, Esparza enlisted novelist Victor Villaseñor to write the script, and offered the role of Gregorio to the up-and-coming actor Edward James Olmos. Olmos eagerly accepted, and suggested as a director Robert M. Young, with whom he had worked on ¡Alambrista!, a fictional account of an undocumented Mexican farmworker’s experiences in the Southwest, a few years earlier. 

An experienced documentarian, Young had turned to narrative filmmaking with the feature Short Eyes, based on Miguel Piñero’s award-winning play, which was released just weeks before ¡Alambrista! in the fall of 1977. With these two films, Young quickly established his singular directorial approach: using nonfiction filmmaking methods to tell socially conscious stories. Indeed, his reliance on documentary techniques—
handheld camera, use of available light, real locations instead of studio sets—gives ¡Alambrista! in particular the look and feel of newsreel footage. No doubt impressed by the director’s sensitive treatment of Latinos in both of his narrative features, and by the fact that Young had both written the script for ¡Alambrista! and shot the film, in addition to directing, Esparza gave him the job. It proved to be an inspired choice: Young’s documentary style in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez gives the then-eighty-year-old story a sense of you-are-there immediacy.