Latin American Folktales Read online

  Twentieth Century

  Modern folklore research came late to Latin America. In Europe, by the mid-1800s, it was already clear that folktales were national treasures that might energize such groups as Germans, Finns, or Italians. In the Americas the overlay of new cultures made the opportunity less easy to recognize. Evidently it was the Indian tale that had grown from the soil, and it was decided that Indian folklore, for geographical if no better reasons, could serve Euro-American cultural interests. In North America the first resounding answer to the Grimms’ two-volume Kinder- und Hausmärchen was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches (1839), a two-volume collection of Algonquian tales, which the poet Longfellow turned into the enormously popular Song of Hiawatha. In Latin territory the situation was even less clear, for here there was more mixing of Indian and European culture than in the English-speaking region to the north. The first tentative steps were taken in Brazil, where oral tales from Amazonian Indian sources—still regarded as Brazilian classics—were published in the 1870s by Charles Frederick Hartt and José Vieira Couto de Magalhães. When the idea of folklore as a useful pursuit finally arrived in Spanish-speaking America, at the very end of the nineteenth century, it came first to the outermost parts of the region, Chile and New Mexico.

  Rodolfo Lenz initiated the project in Chile with collections of Araucanian Indian tales published in the 1890s. Lenz, who has been called the Nestor of Chilean folklore studies, gathered around him a band of coworkers, including Sperata R. de Saunière, Julio Vicuña Cifuentes, and Ramón Laval, whose focus promptly shifted from Chilean Indian to Chilean Hispanic lore. Saunière, for her part, stated that she took her Hispanic narratives only from “persons of humble estate, house servants and country people who were not schooled and did not know how to read,” scrupulously preserving “the idiomatic expressions and turns of speech.” Among her informants was the eighty-year-old Juana González, of Chillán, a town in Indian country 250 miles south of Santiago, who provided the story “Antuco’s Luck.” If any Latino folktale could be made to stand for the whole it might well be this one. It has everything: the baroque opening and closing formulas, Hispanic narrative content, a hint of Moorish influence, profound Catholic symbolism, a hero with an Indian name, European kings, and a defiant touch of New World nationalism as the once-poor herdsman, now in Paris, takes the French princess as his wife, signing his marriage contract Antuco de Chile. The story is given here as no. 5. As for the “idiomatic expressions and turns of speech,” these point to a dawning rationale for the collecting of Hispanic folktales not only in Chile but in Spanish America generally. Lenz himself was a pioneer in Hispanic linguistics, and he and his Chilean followers were soon in touch with another, younger researcher, Aurelio Espinosa of New Mexico, who would carry the work into new fields.

  Of New Mexican Spanish ancestry dating from the sixteenth century, Espinosa was born in southern Colorado in 1880. He began his academic career at the University of New Mexico in 1902 and later joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he taught until his retirement in 1947. During his long career he brought the Hispanic folklore of the Southwest to an international audience and produced groundbreaking studies in the dialectology of New World Spanish. For Espinosa the folktale was a sampler of localized Spanish, rich in expressive and phonetic detail, waiting to be compared with specimens from other parts of Latin America and from Spain itself. Not satisfied with available Iberian texts, he traveled to Spain in the 1920s and recorded the tales for his massive Cuentos populares españoles, still the premier compilation of peninsular Spanish folk narratives. In addition, under his direction the first major folktale collections from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico were made.

  It was becoming apparent that the Americas had preserved a Hispanic folk culture of great purity, perhaps especially in New Mexico. Here, a thousand miles from Mexico City, in a landlocked province the Colonial gobernador Diego de Vargas had called “remote beyond compare,” were the oral literatures of Castille and Andalusia with their Arabic, Jewish, and South Asian roots still visible. Among the hundreds of New Mexican tales collected by Espinosa and his students were such durable standards as “The Three Counsels” and “The Twelve Truths of the World” in versions as complete as any that have been recorded in Latin America. Dressed up in the mock-serious numerology of far-distant lands, each of these tales preaches the straight and narrow, while promising reversals of fortune that break the rules. The poor man who sticks to the main road, keeps his mouth shut, and checks his impulses (“Three Counsels”) or who insists on following the dictates of compadrazgo, even if it means taking the Devil as his compadre (“Twelve Truths”), in each case ends up living in a palace. It may also be noted that the hero who returns home to find his wife in the arms of a priest (“Three Counsels”) or who escapes the Devil by having an angel invoke the eleven thousand virgins (“Twelve Truths”) stands as the beneficiary of an unquestioning faith constantly inviting skepticism. One is reminded that in an irreverent Cuban tale the eleven thousand virgins are let out of heaven by St. Peter for a night on the town in Havana. As for one’s wife in the arms of a priest, what else does one expect in folktales? Both conservative and revolutionary, authoritarian and subversive, pietistic and anti-clerical, this of course is the contradictory world of the folktale, whether Slavic, Spanish, Scandinavian, or Indic. But it belongs especially to versions recorded in Spanish America, where the contrasts are etched in sharp relief. “The Three Counsels” appears here as no. 45, “The Twelve Truths” as no. 23.

  By mid-century “The Three Counsels” had been put on record not only from New Mexico but also from Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Other tales by this time were found to be equally far-flung, and the basic principle of Latino folklore—its unity—could be agreed upon. Another principle, seemingly confirmed again and again, is that folkloric influences do not normally travel from Indian languages into Spanish, though they move freely in the opposite direction. Consequently an overall distinction can be made between collections from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, on one hand, and the mainland on the other. In the Antilles, where there are few if any Indian communities left to receive and rework Hispanic traditions, the familiar idols-behind-altars approach to Latino folklore has very little resonance.

  The Antillean collections excel in tales that moralize, in sardonic inversions of such tales, and, as would be expected, in folkloric romances that end with the happily married living somewhere in the ever after. In “Don Dinero and Doña Fortuna,” no. 6, from the Dominican Republic, the gentleman stands stubbornly on his money, while Fortuna proves her own version of nature’s truth: Luck wins out over Money. “The Charcoal Peddler’s Chicken,” no. 44, from Puerto Rico, supplies the inversion: a poor man chooses to share his humble meal with Death rather than Luck, since Death, not Luck, treats everyone equally. In the romantic “Clump of Basil,” no. 43, also from Puerto Rico, a clever young woman courts the king with impertinent riddles and outwits him, winning his mind, his heart, and of course his money. Stories like this are found on the mainland, too. But seldom in Indian communities.

  Indian versions of Hispanic tales avoid outward moralizing. As a finishing touch, should one be needed, the storyteller prefers the etiological motif. Typically, “The Miser’s Jar,” no. 38, from the Kekchi Maya of Belize, ends not with a maxim about greed but with an epigrammatic theory on the origin of a certain bird: “As he sat down and began to weep, he was changed into the where-where bird. And to this day the bird may be seen near pools and in wet places, crying, ‘Where, where? Where, where?’ ” Science, then, is the objective rather than philosophy, and we are led out of the folktale and into myth.

  The happily-married ending, as in “The Clump of Basil,” is the stock-in-trade of European folklore. It does find its way into Indian versions, as can be seen in at least two tales, “Riches Without Working” (no. 88) and “Rosalie” (no. 100). More usual in the folk fiction of native America, howeve
r, is the marriage that is left behind or the marriage opportunity that is rejected. In this regard the Puerto Rican stories, with their bride-and-groom finales, may be compared with the darkerhued tales from Colombia.

  All five Colombian stories in this anthology were recorded by Gerardo and Alicia Reichel-Dolmatoff in the 1950s in the little village of Atánquez, 400 miles north of Bogotá. Located in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Atánquez is Spanish-speaking, its folklore essentially Hispanic with the full complement of moral and romantic tales. But there is also an undercurrent of Indian themes, as well as occasional terms recalled from Kankuama, the Chibchan language that had formerly been spoken in Atánquez. Nearby, in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, lies the tribal territory of the Chibchan Kogi, who managed to preserve their language and their traditional religious lore through the twentieth century. In folktales from Atánquez it can be noticed that marriage is turned aside and that the happy union, if there is one, is between parent and child. In “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” for example, the young heroine acquires a lover but goes on by herself to seek work, eventually returning not to a lover or a husband but to her father and mother. With the money she has earned she and her parents set themselves up as storekeepers and have whatever they want “from that time on.” The daughter’s work, we learn, had been aided by the proverbial old woman of Hispanic folklore, nearly always identified by Latin American storytellers as the Virgin Mother, especially when accompanied by her “little boy.” But the work itself, in this case, is the retrieving of a magical hair from the “mother of all the animals.” And here, so to speak, is the idol behind the altar, the old female divinity of the Sierra Nevada now in league with the Virgin of Catholic doctrine.

  Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s significant new collections of Hispanic folktales continued to appear, adding Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador to the roster of nations that can now be regarded as folkloristically well covered. Included in this group, notably, was Guatemala, where an ambitious program at the University of San Carlos was being carried out under the direction of Roberto Díaz Castillo, Celso Lara Figueroa, and Ofelia Déleon Meléndez. With its sponsorship of fieldwork, its bulletins, journals, and monographs, and its educational out-reach, the Centro de Estudios Folklóricos has set as its goal nothing less than the integration of Guatemalan folklore and Guatemalan national culture. Among its most popular publications has been Lara Figueroa’s edition of the tales of the quintessential Latino trickster, Pedro de Urdemalas. This folkloric figure is known throughout Latin America from New Mexico to Chile, also in Spain and in Portugal (where he is called Pedro de Malas-Artes). Lara Figueroa can write that he is “forcefully alive in the hearts of the Guatemalan people, who have incorporated him in their collective personality. Thus in reading the tales people relive his adventures, automatically identifying with this standard bearer of our culture. For Guatemala he is the hero who challenges the ruling classes; he is the originator of true popular values.” A sequence of Pedro de Urdemalas tales appears here as no. 18, including a version of the widespread “King’s Pigs” from the Guatemalan collection.

  As the century progressed, folklorists became more and more aware of the need to collect not only stories but information about the narrators. In this way they could preserve what Lara Figueroa has called “the life of the story”; that is, its social context. Most of the twentieth-century collections, especially the earlier ones, do not include that extra benefit. In some cases, at least, we have the names of the storytellers, enabling us to imagine that José so-and-so is giving us a man’s point of view or that a narrator named Bárbara offers a woman’s version. Often even this much has been withheld, necessarily, to protect the narrator from repercussions in the home community. Nevertheless, collectors have been able to sketch portraits of certain storytellers, sometimes in Chaucerian detail.

  Lara Figueroa presents his informant Antonio Ramírez:

  He was born in Villa Nueva near Guatemala City. When he was two years old he moved with his parents to the plantation country of Escuintla, where he still lives. In Escuintla they know him as Uncle Chío, and the children call him Don Conejo [Mister Rabbit]. Don Antonio is analfabeto [does not read or write]. He is about seventy-five years old, now employed as a clerk in a brick-yard in the barrio of San Pedro. He says he learned his stories “here and there” and from a certain Colonel Julián Ponciano, who was once his patrón and “who used to tell stories to the workers while they scraped the seeds out of the pumpkins.” Don Chío tells stories mainly at wakes. He has a preference for tales of Pedro de Urdemalas, “because that’s what people like to hear at wakes. Maybe it’s because Pedro is such a devil and one-ups everybody. He isn’t bad, though. He just goes after priests, con artists, and rich people, not really bad, just a one-upper.” [no. 79]

  The Costa Rican collector Carmen Lyra presents her beloved tía Panchita, whose name may be rendered in English as Aunt Franny:

  She was a short, slight woman, who wore her gray hair in two braids [ . . . ]. She was always dressed for a funeral. And to protect her black skirt she wore a white apron around the house. [ . . . ] She and my Aunt Jesús, whose hands were crippled by arthritis, lived together in the vicinity of Morazán in a little house that was kept spotlessly clean. People called them The Girls, and even their own brothers, Pablo and Joaquín, when they sent me off to visit them, would say, “Now, you go see The Girls.” She supported herself by making a thousand varieties of cakes and candies that flowed out of the house like water. Everybody wanted them. They were displayed in a massive old armoire with a glass front that stood in the tiny hallway next to the front door. [ . . . ] She would sit in her low-slung chair and tell me stories while her fingers, wasting no time, rolled cigarettes. I sat at her feet on a little leather stool that Uncle Joaquín had made for me. I could smell the tobacco, that had been cured with fig leaves, cane liquor, and honey. [ . . . ] How interminable were the moments when she broke off the story to take a puff from her cigarette or to light it with a coal at the edge of the hearth!” [no. 21]

  From her Bolivian collection Delina Anibarro de Halushka presents the storyteller José Rivera Bravo:

  Sixty-nine years old, married, no children. From an old and large family in Sucre. A cultivated man, a student of the humanities. Owing to the dedication of his parents and his brothers and sisters and his own determination and indomitable spirit he has amassed a store of knowledge in spite of his blindness. For many years he lived on plantations owned by his parents along the Zudañes River in the department of Chuquisaca, where he learned a great number of legends from Indians and from the townspeople of Zudañes. So keen is his interest in oral narratives that he has published two little booklets of them, entitled Tradiciones chuquisaqueñas (Sucre 1958). He uses the term tradiciones to mean legends, or accounts regarded as true. He tells them with an air of theatricality, as though inviting his listeners to believe. By contrast he considers wonder tales to be “nursery stories” and thus not to be taken seriously. [no. 19]

  Knowing all this, whether we should or should not, we turn to the stories with a subtext already in mind. For a tale like the Venezuelan version of “The Horse of Seven Colors” (no. 12), we have only the teller’s name, Carmen Dolores Maestri. But even this is suggestive. The hero of the story is a male Cinderella, who stays in the kitchen, washing dishes, while his two contemptuous brothers go off to the tournament to compete for the hand of the princess. Their swaggering dialogue, with its rough camaraderie and bullying tone, amounts to a tacit commentary on machismo, and we look to see whether the storyteller might not be a woman.

  Cultural matters, however, have usually been the province of the anthropologist, while the folklorist has concentrated on plot and incident—technically, the tale type and the motif—with the idea of comparing these elements over time and distance to establish patterns of diffusion. Shortly after the beginning of the century, when the boundary between professions had begun to harden, the peculiar nature of each of these two
disciplines dictated that Indian materials would be collected by anthropologists, Hispanic materials by folklorists. This has been the rule. But in the 1990s two deeply researched works by the anthropologist James Taggart broke down what remained of the barrier, bringing forward a double collection of Hispanic and Hispano-Indian folktales. In Enchanted Maidens (1990) and The Bear and His Sons (1997) Taggart presented fresh versions of old tale types gathered on both sides of the Atlantic, along with abundant data on the men and women who are the tellers, actually the re-creators. Their personal histories, together with Taggart’s cross-Atlantic comparisons, make for an original contribution to “the life of the story,” suggesting a direction for future work.

  Performance and Translation

  Most tales in this as in nearly all collections were dictated or taped in one-on-one sessions with a folklorist or anthropologist, though sometimes with a few other listeners present. To do otherwise—to record performances in their natural settings—is inconvenient and would have been virtually impossible before the availability of magnetic recording devices. Although not taped, the Mazatec folk-Bible tales (nos. 55, 62, 71, 72, and 73) are among the few stories in this book that an anthropologist was able to witness in situ. The occasion was a wake in a tiny village in Veracruz State, Mexico, and among those present was Robert Laughlin, who writes:

  Inside, a table is set, adorned with arches of marigold and limonaria, two candles, religious pictures, and of course [the deceased’s] favorite foods. The women enter to help grind the corn and prepare the coffee. When the prayer-man arrives the women kneel on straw mats before the altar. In candle-light he chants the “Three Mysteries.” In response the women’s sad nasal voices rise. Outside the men sleep or talk quietly together. Melchor García stands up. He is the religious leader of the village, also a prayer-man, wise in the knowledge of Spanish and the Bible. He offers to tell a religious tale. The others, sitting atop mounds of firewood, snicker and rock with laughter as he tells the tale that he, too, had heard at a wake and had learned by heart.