One cannot fully appreciate Rafael Ocasio’s Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico without reading his previous book, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore (2020). The earlier book explains in detail how the Puerto Rican folk stories came to be collected by John Alden Mason in 1914-1915. The later book, which presents the folktales that Mason collected, also contains a summary of the previous book. The two books are really one book, broken up into two parts. Both books are extremely interesting and well researched, with the stories themselves as the treasures in the second volume.
Basically, these volumes are the story of an academic triangle. One player is Franz Boas, world-famous anthropologist, who chose to focus briefly on Puerto Rico because the world was at war, and he needed a safe place for his graduate students to intern. The second player is the graduate student, John Alden Mason, who worked hard to please his famous professor and boss, collecting all kinds of folk stories and folk songs from Jíbaro peasants. The third player is Aurelio Espinosa, distinguished scholar of Spanish literature and folklore, who was tasked by Boas to edit Mason’s collection of stories. Mason painstakingly had written down in phonetic form the indigenous dialect in his fieldwork, language that naturally varied from standard Spanish, but the purist Espinosa, from 1916 to 1929, edited them into “as correct Castilian as possible” (6). He seems to have had a supercilious attitude toward the young Mason and complained about the authenticity and origin of the stories that Mason collected.
Mason in 1914 had gone ahead to Puerto Rico to prepare the way for his professor to drop in and conduct his own research. Boas mostly was devoted to “the anthropometric documentation of boys and men, data that sourced his only article written about his month-long trip to the island, ‘The Anthropometry of Porto Rico’” (3). The rest of the time Boas and his student communicated through letters.
Mason was charged by Boas “with documenting rural oral folklore through conversations with peasants of varying ages and from a variety of geographical locations” (4). And so he did, though not by standards that would be widely approved in modern folktale fieldwork.
One of his collection methods was to recruit schoolteachers to assign students to write down folk tales that they knew. In this way he collected hundreds of samples, although no information about individual informants was documented. Mason also recorded well-known individual storytellers and folksingers, accumulating a wealth of material. A century later, much of Mason’s original field notes have not survived, nor have the original tale versions of his field collections which were heavily edited by Espinosa. It would have been so interesting to compare his original collected stories with the final edited versions.
Despite the flaws in field collection, the final polished pearls of the stories are exquisite. Ocasio has done the world a service by presenting selected stories which otherwise would have been lost in the dusty annals of the Journal of American Folklore of a century ago.
The stories are organized in chapters as follows:
1. Jíbaro Readaptations of Fairy Tales
2. Rescuing Encantados
3. Fantastic and Impossible Quests
4. Juan Bobo: A Deceiving Trickster
5. Beware of Strangers
6. El Pirata Cofresi: A National Hero and Other Notable Bandits
7. Brief Stories and Anecdotes.
Each story is presented first in Spanish, followed by an English translation. For folklorists, just reading the stories is pure pleasure, not only for the artistry of each language, but also for the unusual variations in the tale types. For example, in “María, la Ceninoza” (“María, Cinderella”), the cruel stepmother kills María’s (Cinderella’s) beloved goat and then orders Maria to the river to wash the goat’s tripe, with a strict warning not to lose a single piece of the tripe. When a piece of tripe floats down the river, María flings herself after it and is carried by the river to an enchanted palace. The witches there reward her for cleaning their palace with the gifts of rubies and diamonds falling from her mouth when she speaks, and other treasures. Later María’s evil sister tries to repeat the trick, but she is rewarded only with gifts of horse manure falling from her mouth when she speaks. The story then continues with the invitation to the ball and the happy-ever-after ending. As Ocasio notes while commenting on another tale, “The digressions are . . . striking examples of cultural adaptations to fit the taste of a rural audience” (21). Indeed, it is the digressions which give these Puerto Rican versions their charm.
My favorite of the groups of tales are those about Juan Bobo in chapter 4 because they are so funny. Some sample titles: “Juan Bobo Sends the Pigs to Mass,” “Juan Kills the Cow,” “Juan Bobo Dies When the Donkey Farts Three Times.”
In short, Rafael Ocasio has given Puerto Rico and the world a great gift by presenting stories which are an important part of Puerto Rico’s cultural heritage. Anyone will enjoy reading these stories. But folklorists receive an extra bonus by learning of the academic triangle between Boas, Mason, and Espinosa. Mason’s work is often criticized for faulty fieldwork procedures, but the fact that he worked so hard and collected so many folklore gems in his stay from 1914-1915 is a credit to him that cannot be overlooked. Thanks to Ocasio’s excellent research, Mason’s work has once again come to light.
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[Review length: 912 words • Review posted on April 1, 2023]