By: Staff Writer
May 28, 2021
A Puerto Rican professor in Spanish wants to share his book of folklore with Caribbean, Latin American and North American audiences.
Dr Rafael Ocasio, a Puerto Rican born professor in Spanish at the Agnes Scott College in Georgia, who also calls himself a “Caribbeanist,” will be presenting his new book, “Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico,” at the June 4-6 Caribbean Literary Conference (CARICON).
He told Caribbean Magazine Plus, “The book is a book on Puerto Rican folklore. Particularly about Puerto Rican folk tales, and these were folk tales that were gathered in 1915 through the efforts of Franz Boas.”
Boas, also known as the “The Father of American Anthropology,” played a significant role in discovering and preserving Puerto Rican folklore. Boas was a German-born anthropologist who founded the relativistic, culture-centred school of American anthropology that dominated 20th century thought.
Dr Ocasio also said, “He was in Puerto Rico for over a month and as part of his archaeological and anthropological research they conducted or folklore and complied hundreds of Tales and songs.”
These tales are still very popular in Puerto Rico said Dr Ocasio. “Some of the tails are about historic figures. One of them is a pirate, Roberto Cofresí. He was a historical figures and there are many stories about witches, and there are many stories about peasants because a lot of stories were gathered by Puerto Rican peasants”
Adding that “Another interesting part of the process is that in order for Boas and his group of people to gather all of those stories, you needed writers and they decided writers were going to be school children. So many of the school children from the public school system wrote those stories as well.”
Dr Ocasio came across these stories as a student growing up in San Juan and that he learned to read and understand stories by just reading those old folklore tales.
Dr Ocasio also said: “I would say I’ve been working on this book for maybe four years. Some of the stories I heard through another Puerto Rican writer, the late Judith Ortiz Cofer, who made me aware of the stories and once I discovered where the stories had been published originally, and the stories were published in the Journal of American Anthropology and so as I learned more about the stories I became interested.”
You can find copies of Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico at Rutgers University Press, where one would find another one of Dr Ocasio’s books, “Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore.”
“Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico,” is published in both English and Spanish said Dr Ocasio and he wants the book to “reach school students in Puerto Rico.” He added: “I wanted this book to reach the wider Latino audience around Latin America as well because a lot of the folk stories resonate with them as well. They have similar characters in other Latin American countries, so Latino readers will also find he book interesting, also the Puerto Rican community in the United States as well.”