ABSTRACT
Folklore has been a major aesthetic force in Latino/a literary practice since the early twentieth century. Spiritual figures such as the “curandero/a” or “santero/a” have shared literary space with more spectral figures such as “La Llorona” or the devil. Popular traditions of music and dance have enriched Latino/a novels, short stories and poetry, as have representations of deeply meaningful religious practices, rituals, and rites of passage. Historical figures from the conquest forward that have been celebrated and demonized in the oral traditions of Latino communities have made their way into foundational texts in the Latino/a canon (“La Malinche” and Gregorio Cortez are perhaps the two most well-known examples). Countless memoirs have offered insight into the everyday culture of Latinos/as – their representations of traditional and contemporary foodways, children’s games, chistes (jokes), proverbs, and dichos, these accounts offer a picture of intergenerational exchange, community cohesion, and, most importantly, survival, in the shadow of empire, colonization, and continued economic, social, and political marginalization. With such a proliferation of folklore in Latino/a literature it seems a simple
enough task to trace the many ways in which folk expression has been utilized by Latino/a authors, but nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, any attempt to untangle the deep interconnectedness of Latino/a folkloric and literary expression must contend with several complicating factors. First of all, one must avoid the temptation to see literature as the natural historical outgrowth of folklore. Folklore and literature are certainly historically related, but the nature of this relationship is not self-evident; and while we might accept the proposition that folklore, especially oral narrative traditions, represent a (pre-textual) form of “literature,” it would be a critical mistake to reduce the relationship between the two to an historical continuum that figures the written text as a more “advanced” form of literary expression. Second, any discussion of the “uses” of folklore in Latino/a literature runs the risk of reifying folklore as the raw material for literature. While many Latino/a authors have self-consciously refigured folktales and legends into literary formats, the relationship between oral and literary forms of expression is shaped by a dynamic,
mutually informing field of cultural expression. One must also be wary of assuming that all folklore is necessarily counter-hegemonic. While many Latino/a authors have deployed folklore in a recuperative mode, finding within it an expression of subjugated knowledge that articulates the experiences of an historically marginalized community, critics must attend to the deeply contradictory nature of “folk” knowledge, especially the ways in which it produces a form of “common sense” that all too often reinforces relations of domination and subordination within minoritized communities. Finally, though manifest connections exist, the field of Latino/a folklore is vast and heterogeneous, encompassing not only a widely varied set of practices, but also a broad array of historical influences, experiences, and traditions ranging from Spain to Africa to the Indigenous Americas. What unites expressive practices across the Americas is a history of linguistic, social, and cultural mixture resulting from the historical colonization and hyper-exploitation of subjugated people, a mixed blessing to be sure. Despite the many points of historical convergence, examining a field as broad as “Latino/a folklore” (or Latino/a literature for that matter) requires not only an ability to see connection where it exists, but also careful attention to the particularities of indigenous, Creole, Afrolatino, and Mestizo realities. In this chapter, I will attempt to illuminate this vast field, while at the same time addressing the complex ways in which Latino/a writers have put folklore to literary use.
