In their considerations of Chicanola border poetry and narrative, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and José David Saldívar have suggested that the cultural condition of the border writer addresses central concerns of contemporary American culture and what one can regard — as I try to do here — as its aspiring cultural outlaws. In the context of their postmodern approaches to culture the notion of the American frontier outlaw has a rather archaic ring, for such an identity recalls 19th–century constructions of self and an underlying belief in individual agency. Even in the 1930s the figure of the folkloric Tejano rebel existed in a similar historical halfway house, one in which the idea of the Mexican outlaw is both utterly anachronistic and politically relevant. Nonetheless, the traditional heroic outlaw of Tejano balladry — corridos — still has the power to signify a legacy of opposition to Anglo power, and the themes of such balladry persist today in the form of legal conflict over unresolved land claims (Verhovek), as if yesterday's outlaw has materialized from legend and taken form as lawful claimant. Thus it is valuable to see how the concerns of contemporary theory can be related to antiquated legends and to note any intermediary texts located in a moment between the late 20th-century present and the mid-19th-century past. Arguably, Américo Paredes's 1930s novel George Washington Gomez prefigures the newly lawful claims of those heir to the mythos of legendary outlaws and at the same time prefigures postmodern border theory. The novel underscores the divided character of a culture inheriting a folkloric tradition in a newly modern American context and elaborates on themes pertinent to a postmodern one.