Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico / Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico
Rafael Ocasio
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In Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico / Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico (Rutgers University Press 2021) Rafael Ocasio returns to his Puerto Rican homeland to gather in a single volume much of the island's rich heritage of folklore. For Ocasio, Folk Stories amounts in many respects to a continuation of an earlier project with the same press, in which he describes and analyzes the fieldwork of John Alden Mason, conducted under the supervision of Franz Boas: prominent anthropologists in the North American academy who visited Puerto Rico during the 1920s. Although Folk Stories begins with a general introduction, which includes a useful overview of this fieldwork, at the core of the volume are the stories themselves: these stories were collected by the anthropologists over the course of several interviews with local informants (sometimes itinerant storytellers, sometimes schoolchildren); they were then published, in their original Spanish and mostly during the 1920s, in specialized anthropological journals. Ocasio is making these wonderful stories available to a larger, modern readership. He has updated the language of the original Spanish versions for flow and clarity; in addition, following each story he provides a translation into English, a translation rendered by him. The volume is organized thematically: there is, for example, a unit on trickster stories and another that features local adaptations of stories that reached the island from abroad. Interestingly, a few of the stories appear in multiple versions, suggesting—undoubtedly—that Mason heard slightly different versions of the same story depending on the informant. The stories, in their conception, are aimed at children and register the wisdom of Puerto Rico's rural, jíbaro society. Many of the stories would be familiar to those who grew up in Puerto Rico or within the cultural influence of the island: several feature anthropomorphized animals or Juan Bobo, the clever Jíbaro. Readers versed in similar traditions from other Latin American regions will be fascinated by the counterpoint between the familiar and the unexpected they encounter in Ocasio's collection. |
Boas and Mason were prescient in their interest in Puerto Rico's rural folktales: for them, these folktales provide a snapshot into the soul of a society that is the result of centuries of cultural admixture. Similarly, Ocasio is right in bringing the stories to a much larger contemporary readership, particularly on account of their bilingual format. Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico / Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico is of potential interest to a wide variety of readers: those interested in Puerto Rico itself or, perhaps, its broader cultural heritage and linkages; those interested in the nexus between storytelling and anthropology; and those interested in storytelling as an art and craft. In conclusion, Ocasio's own assessment about the stories and their importance may be most appropriate: "For the first time in literary history, the Jíbaros, the iconic inhabitants of the Puerto Rican campos, become the writers of their own stories."
Rafael Ocasio is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Spanish at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, near Atlanta. He teaches upper-level courses on Latin American literature and film as well as Spanish-language courses. He is the author of several books on Latin American and Caribbean literature and culture.
Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico is a publication by Rutgers University Press.
Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico is a publication by Rutgers University Press.
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