Latin American Folktales (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

Latin American folklore, or more precisely the recording of oral tradition in Latin America, has a five-hundred-year history marked by assiduous and highly skilled endeavor. Its span, however, is not continuous. There are two periods, the early Colonial era, lasting through the sixteenth century and into the first few decades of the seventeenth, and the twentieth century. In between lie nearly three hundred years of inactivity on the part of scribes and archivists, whose missed opportunities, to paraphrase the storyteller’s closing formula, were carried off by the wind.

Understandably the two periods are not comparable. The first belongs to the era of early colonialism and religious conversion; while the second follows in the trail of two relatively recent phenomena—the rise of social science and the stirrings of romantic nationalism. The different agendas, set by the missionary on one hand and the folklorist on the other, produced results that were dissimilar in subject matter and even in style. This book is concerned mainly with the latter period. Nevertheless, it is in the earlier era, with its lore of the Conquest and of the advent of Christianity, that characteristic themes are first sounded.

Indian
Background

One might have assumed that the initial voyages of Columbus had more pressing business than the collecting of stories. But in 1496, faced with the challenge of repeated insurrections among the Taino of Hispaniola, the Admiral himself ordered his chaplain, the Jeronymite friar Ramón Pané, to make a careful study of native custom. Pané lived with the Taino for nearly two years, made careful notes, and in his report included fragments of oral lore reduced to alphabetic script. Among the small but choice harvest of motifs were such typical Latin American Indian items as the ocean trapped in a gourd, the origin of women from trees, and the emergence of ancestors from inside the earth.

Less than two decades after Pané’s discoveries, the royal chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera was at work on a compendium of New World exploration that included a pioneering sample of the lore of the northwest corner of South America. From Peter Martyr comes the first notice of the typical Colombian Indian motif of the female supreme deity.

Collecting in depth, however, did not occur until after the conquest of the Aztec capital, Mexico, in 1521. Franciscan friars, who began arriving in Mexico City three years later, took charge of the intellectual culture of the new colony and made it their business to learn Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The friars prepared Nahuatl-Spanish grammars and dictionaries that are still useful today, along with voluminous compilations of Nahuatl texts. Foremost in this work was the missionary-ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), whose twelve-book encyclopedia of Nahua lore, called
General History of the Things of
New Spain,
included myths, legends, oratory, songs, sayings, and figures of speech. Repeatedly comparing himself to a medical doctor, Sahagún explained that he was recording these texts to supply preachers with the necessary information to “cure” the native people of their “blindness,” because “the physician cannot properly treat the patient without knowing in which of the [four] humors, and from which cause, the infirmity arises.” It is clear, nevertheless, that Sahagún was a man not only of the faith but of the Renaissance, whose researches served the interests of science, perhaps intentionally. In retrospect, Sahagún has been viewed as an experimenter in the techniques that would one day reemerge as anthropology.

Similar efforts, though not with the same thoroughness or subtlety, were initiated in the central Andes about 1550, gathering momentum in the 1570s during the term of the fourth viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo. In order to support a program of reform and to substantiate his claim that Inca rule had been abusive, Toledo ordered an investigation of Inca history and custom, much as Columbus had done in Hispaniola three generations earlier. One result was Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s colorful
Historia de los incas,
drawn from the traditional histories chanted by Quechua bards.

The native chronicles to a large extent are the stories of kings, presented in chronological order, preceded by legends of tribal origin and myths of world creation. This is true of the sixteenth-century lore from Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere, including Colombia and Guatemala. Even in the fragmentary accounts obtained in Hispaniola, the names of a few Taino chieftains are preserved. Of particular interest, especially in the Peruvian and Mexican cycles, are stories of the final kings, the ones who were obliged to deal with the Conquest. In the view of native storytellers these rulers are tragic figures, and we hear that the Conquest was fated to occur. Such stories, from Mexico and Peru, are included as nos. 1/I–V and 2/III–V in this anthology.

It could be imagined that when the collectors of oral lore reawakened in the twentieth century and began finding the standard repertory of European folktales with their poor-boy-wins-princess plots and ubiquitous kings, the versions recorded in Indian communities would incorporate kings in Indian dress. But what we learn, in many localities, is that the Indian king has gone underground. In native folk belief, as if harking back to the Conquest lore of the old chronicles, the “king” is a remote personage who has been captured, killed, or hidden inside the earth, eventually to be reborn or to emerge as a deliverer. In the Andes this important figure is called Inkarrí, combining
Inca
and the Spanish word
rey,
or king. In the region from New Mexico to Panama he is sometimes called “Montezuma,” evidently in allusion to the Montezuma of Aztec history. Among the Boruca of Costa Rica he is supposed to be living inside a mountain, guarding a treasure hoard. The widespread attitude is summed up by the anthropologist Robert Laughlin, writing of his experience with an accomplished tale-teller, Romin Teratol, of the Tzotzil Maya community of Zinacantán: “That Zinacantecs do not see kings in the same light as we do was driven home to me when showing pictures of contemporary European kings and queens to Romin. He asked if they were immortal. Not satisfied with my negative reply, he persisted, ‘But they come from caves, don’t they?’ ”

Meanwhile the familiar king of Old World folktales, in many of the versions composed by Indian storytellers, has been changed into the hacienda owner, or patrón, a character decidedly less persuadable than the prototype. Immediately the tales take on the coloration of modern short stories with sociological overtones. In short, reality breaks through. “The Pongo’s Dream” (no. 36), from Peru, and “The Bad Compadre” (no. 96), from Guatemala, are two of several examples in the collection at hand.

At what date Hispanic folktales—the Cinderellas and the Dragon Slayers—arrived on American shores would be hard to calculate. Although modern folklorists have assumed these stories came with the conquerors, direct evidence is scanty. We do know that a group of forty-seven Aesop’s fables was translated into Nahuatl in the sixteenth century, and such fables recur in modern Latin American collections. One of them, though it is not represented in the Nahuatl group, is given here as no. 53, “Good Is Repaid with Evil.” A better example, representing a different kind of folktale, is no. 15, “What the Owls Said,” a story from twentieth-century Mexico with a Peruvian variant recorded in 1608.

More important, it is clear that the earliest missionaries brought Bible stories, at least in the orthodox versions found in the various forms of the catechism known as
doctrina cristiana,
as well as in sermons and in other writings, all of which were translated into native languages. Often the stories are given in a connected series beginning with the creation of the world, followed by the appearance of Adam and Eve, the expulsion from paradise, God’s visit to Noah, the world flood, the birth of Christ, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. By no means a Bible miscellany, the sequence economically illustrates the Catholic doctrine of original sin and redemption. That is, God created humans to enjoy eternal life in exchange for obedience; Adam and Eve, through their disobedience, broke the contract and bequeathed their sin to all subsequent generations. The flood was an attempt to wash away the accumulated sin, though only to temporary effect; it was Christ, finally, through his life, death, and resurrection, who restored the promise that had been withdrawn at the Expulsion. The earliest known native version, dating from 1565, is given here as no. 3, “Bringing Out the Holy Word.” When the cycle reappears in the twentieth century it is found to contain numerous nonscriptural details, evidently borrowed from medieval traditions of considerable rarity in world folklore today. Indeed, the cycle has dropped out of the Hispanic repertory, surviving only in Indian retellings; it is one of the characteristic jewels of Latin American folklore, presented here in its twentieth-century form as nos. 55–73. Not surprisingly, it has been reinterpreted by native tellers. The doctrinal cues are now largely missing, and—again with sociological overtones—the emphasis is on escape from persecution.

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.