The word Hispano here is not a synonym for Hispanic or Latino. It refers to a particular set of communities in what is now New Mexico, one of the fifty states of the United States. Families there can trace their heritage and roots to Spanish colonists from the earliest days of Spain’s hegemony, long before Plymouth Rock. Linguistic scholars have traced their vernacular to ancient forms of Castilian and other forms of Spanish. Meanings and words are never separate for long; throughout the book Alvin Korte casts a very helpful light on layers of context in the expressions he documents, tying what may seem like trivialities to the Hispano worldview. It’s a book primarily about worldview, although Korte, a sociologist, uses the word ethno-phenomenology.
Chapter 2 includes a number of proverbs, riddles, and rhyming riddles, some of which the insider-ethnographer remembers from his own childhood. Keenly aware of the needs of scholars feeling their way into the Hispano culture, he traces its oral traditional expressions in considerable detail (28), but with little or no specific reference to related exemplars, such as ballads (corridos), in conceptually nearby regions, such as Mexico’s Costa Chica (see McDowell, for example). Similarly he contextualizes the New Mexican Hispano proverbs he presents, but without referring to genre studies of proverbs (Mieder, among others) or riddles (see McDowell, among others).
Korte’s chapter 2 provides a complete text of a lengthy political corrido, a cry of protest against a specific company, the Agua Pura (Pure Water) Company (40-50). The ballad’s artistry alone is worth the price of the book. Folklorists, however, will look in vain for regional, theoretical, or genre-related compare-and-contrast materials. Korte’s research merits the effort to locate such research and bring it to bear.
The Catholic Church and even older thought patterns combine to create the phenomenon of mortification, a combination of shame, wounding hardship or troubles, and severe loss of standing in the community, with a side dish of victimization left over perhaps from times when the “evil eye” or “ill-wishing” had very real and very terrible consequences. It is the subject of chapter 3, which identifies the current-day Hispano culture as being shame-based. A present-day Hispano wife, for example, thinks it’s okay for her husband to call her a prostitute and a worthless drunk; she only protests when he vilifies her in their daughter’s presence; the child should avoid learning to expect and tolerate similar verbal abuse after she is grown (59).
Korte’s chapter 6, entitled “Being in Prison: En la Pinta,” might well have borne as a subtitle Horace’s famous quote regarding the Greek side of Greco-Roman culture: “Captive Greece conquered her savage conqueror and brought the arts into uncouth Rome” (Epistles, Book II). Rome conquered Greece with the sword, but Greece took over Rome with its arts and culture.
The culture of the conquered, that is, the incarcerated Hispano offenders, infiltrated and eventually subverted many of the prison-inmate power structures, so much so that some of the non-Hispano prisoners wanted to participate in the more civilized practices of the Hispanos. The worldview of the conquered culture won out over another competing worldview--the convict code--of some non-Hispano inmates as well. It expressed itself in hospitality and gracious living, sharing possessions, pleasantries, and reciprocal kindnesses.
Hispano inmates shared food, rather than gobbling, concealing, or hoarding it. When other inmates saw the atmosphere this created, they envied it. Hispano inmates welcomed others to their circles, using prison food and personal stores of coffee and other rarer foodstuffs. Those sharing calm, hospitable meals also carried on conversations that did not consist solely of curses, threats, intimidation, or bravado. Interviews leading to Korte’s findings took place around 1983 in various penal facilities in New Mexico. The researcher and three mental health practitioners visited several facilities once a month for about a year in 1983, sharing the convicts’ living space, locked in with them (123).
The hospitality subculture did not succeed in taking over life as usual completely; some inmates, even some Hispano inmates, never joined in. Korte gives the web of back-home civility credit for an atmosphere in which a number of men began to regard their cells or their “pod” as a place to keep clean, invested with pride (153), because they might be sharing a meal there. Reciprocity led to comradeship, even brotherhood, for some, bringing increased peace and quiet for all, and far fewer acts of random-seeming violence. Prisoners of whatever ethnic affiliation were able to subsist more peacefully, once the noise, threats, and daily minor abuses abated (129, 132). This increased their chances of surviving their prison term, as well as making their time served less hellish.
Smaller-scale models like Korte’s can reveal cultural practices otherwise difficult to trace. In this instance the hospitality subculture created a life-enhancing, even potentially life-saving environment in a very dangerous place. It seems inaccurate, however, to mention small-scale anything in connection with Korte’s book. I recommend it unreservedly to anyone interested in narrative, myth or worldview, Western hemisphere folklore, or human culture in general.
Works cited:
McDowell, John Holmes. 1979. Children’s Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McDowell, John Holmes. 2000. Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mieder, Wolfgang, ed. 1984. Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship. University of Vermont.
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[Review length: 881 words • Review posted on October 2, 2012]