Border Folk Balladeers: Critical Studies on Américo Paredes is a book of significant value to scholars, teachers, students, and to the general reader interested in the history and culture of Mexicans and Mexican Americans born on both sides of the Mexico-US border. It contains a full-length introduction and eleven essays written exclusively for this volume by scholars in the fields of folklore, literary criticism, and critical race theory, and who are renowned authorities on the work of Américo Paredes. Grouped into three sections, this book includes studies on theories of the Texas Modern; the Latin American critical tradition; border writing in world literatures; ethnography in minority communities; an analysis of Texas-Mexican border jokelore; and, among other critical studies, a comprehensive probe into the international drug traffic in the Mexico-US border, with an emphasis on narcoballads and narconovels, the contemporary offshoots of the Texas-Mexican border corrido.