Puerto Rico (United States) / All works
Tale
Porto-Rican Folk-Lore
Synopsis
Riddles, songs, romances and tales collected throughout the island and put down in writing, for the most part, by schoolchildren from almost every municipality, in Spanish. Picaresque tales dominate: Juan Bobo, the simpleton who takes every instruction literally, to the point of handing his little brother over to the animals he had been told to feed, appears alongside Pedro de Urdemalas and Juan sin miedo. The riddles alone number eight hundred.
Context
The series appeared in instalments in the Journal of American Folk-Lore: in 1916 the riddles, in some one thousand two hundred and eighty-eight variants, then three hundred and seventy-three décimas, Christmas songs and nursery rhymes, then from 1921 the tales, the most abundant part. The traditional romances appeared separately, in the Revue hispanique. The survey was associated with Franz Boas, and the help of the island's schools made it possible to gather such a mass of texts. These are given in Spanish and introduced in English by Espinosa, who held this body of material to be the richest collection of Spanish tales gathered in Hispanic America, and noted that some stories are perhaps partly of African origin.
Who it is for
Texts in Spanish, presented in English. The Juan Bobo stories read like farces; the riddles are best taken one at a time.
Prizes and reception
Rafael Ocasio devoted an entire book to this collection and to what it says about race and nation in Puerto Rico.
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