Rafael Ocasio’s Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico comes at a time of introspection on both current and historical practices within the field of folklore studies. In the last few years, the American Folklore Society has been working on a project titled Notable Folklorists of Color, highlighting folklorists from historically marginalized groups that have done crucial work for the academy but have been sidelined for decades. While working on compiling a comprehensive bibliography for this project, I first encountered the extensive collection of Puerto Rican oral folklore published in the Journal of American Folklore under the title “Porto-Rican Folk-lore,” with each edition specialized in one or various genres—twenty individual articles were published between the years 1916 and 1929. The project was spearheaded by Franz Boas, but the material was collected by the anthropologist John Alden Mason, and edited by New Mexican folklorist and philologist Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, Sr.
Ocasio’s book is dedicated to the history of the fieldwork and editing process of precisely this collection, providing a comprehensive and critical look at how the research was conducted, the relationship between the researchers and editor, and the historical context in which the text was produced. The collection itself, compiled between 1914 and 1917, included riddles, folktales, legends, Christmas carols, and décimas (poetic songs with ten-line stanzas, often improvised at the moment), among other folk genres. However, the book is less dedicated to showcasing the collection itself, though it does reference, in Chapter 4, some of the folktales in the account of jíbaro daily life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and more about how each decision the research team made and how interactions with each other (or lack thereof) shaped the final published result.
Each chapter concentrates on a clearly defined aspect of the research process, contextualizing it within the cultural and political landscape of Puerto Rico in 1915. Chapter 1, “Porto Rico as a Colonial Scientific Laboratory: Documenting Puerto Rican Oral Folklore,” provides treatment of the historical context in which the project was developed. Puerto Rico had been annexed into the United States empire in 1898 and had become a research center for US scholars in the early parts of the twentieth century. Boas proposed the research trip aimed at collecting oral lore and archeological finds, to be performed by Mason within this context. Chapter 2, “A Post-Spanish-American War National Identity: Editing Puerto Rican Folktales in a Sociopolitical Vacuum,” delves into the complexities of the political landscape when Mason arrived in Puerto Rico, just a few years before Puerto Ricans were given US citizenship. Language was a huge point of contention; the United States imposed English in schools, while local political activists were forging a cultural identity through movements such as the criollismo literary movement, based on the same kinds of material that Mason was collecting. Mason, Boas, and Espinosa never contextualized their work within these current events in Puerto Rico. Chapter 3, “Jíbaros’ Authorship through Literary Self-Characterization,” examines how the main research communities were selected, who was selected, and who was ignored. Mason was seeking illiterate men who relied solely on the passing of oral knowledge, searching for a sense of authenticity. Conversely, he also relied on literate school children to write down stories they remembered, and thereby attained a massive amount of data to be sorted through. All of the documents were sent to Espinosa who, without the help of an expert in Puerto Rican linguistics or culture, had to make sweeping editorial decisions.
Chapter 4, “Telling a Story about Class and Ethnicity through Fairy Tales, Cuentos Puertorriqueños, and Leyendas,” takes a look at Mason’s compilation methodology. This chapter examines some of the cuentos de Encanto (stories of enchantment) and leyendas (legends) through the critical eye of class struggles and localized historical figures. Chapter 5, “An (Un)colored Puerto Rican Culture: Unpublished Negro Fieldwork in Old Loíza,” focuses on the unpublished research on Afro-Puerto Rican oral lore in the municipality of Loíza. Mason visited forty-nine years after the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, yet neglected to document cultural celebrations, dances, and material culture. This chapter also addresses the complex racial and racist constructions within Puerto Rico. Chapter 6, “Tropicalizing the Puerto Rican Racial Past: The Quest of an Indian Area,” focuses on collecting Puerto Rican indigenous cultural knowledge exclusively through archaeological endeavors. This last chapter references the best-known component of the research trip among Puerto Ricans, because the Caguana Ball Park, known as Capá when Mason “discovered” it, became a state-run museum decades later.
Although the collection was extensive and a wealth of material was published in the decade of the trip, there was no immediate follow-up by any of the members of the research trip or additional theoretical unpacking of the stories. The relationship between the three main scholars was rocky at best, the political global landscape was shaped by World War I, and Boas himself was going through severe health issues.
Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore fills in gaps both in the historiography of Puerto Rican cultural history and in the history of folkloristics in the United States. Necessary and timely issues of race, colonialism, and class as they affected the collecting and editing processes are addressed in detail. Issues of gender inequality and the effects of not including adult women in the collection, are mentioned but not unpacked at the same level.
Ocasio’s project is not aimed at bashing or undermining the work done by Boas, Mason, and Espinosa, but rather offers a critical, dare I say, necessary, introspective take on the context surrounding the production of the text, in order to allow for further readings of the text and of the original informants. To that purpose, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore is published in tandem with Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico, released in May 2021, which provides a selection of the materials featured in the collection.
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[Review length: 996 words • Review posted on May 27, 2021]