Juan Bobo and the Riddling Princess: A Puerto Rican Folktale

Abstract

Translator's Introduction Bobo and the Riddling Princess is one of the tales that J. Alden Mason (1885-1967) brought back from his monumental field trip to Puerto Rico in 1914-15. Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown (American Philosophical Society 2). He discovered anthropology when as sophomore in 1904 he took the first anthropology course ever offered at the University of Pennsylvania (Satterthwaite 871). He went on to be trained in linguistics and fieldwork under Edward Sapir in 1909 and to complete PhD at Berkeley under Kroeber in 1911. He spent much of the next two y ears working in Mexico as part of the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology, under the direction of Franz Boas. So when the New York Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the insular Government of Puerto Rico, secured Boas to do survey of that island, it was natural for him to select Mason to oversee the collection of Puerto Rico's folklore (see Mason, Riddles 423; Butler; Satterthwaite). Mason spent more than year on the island and brought back an amazingly diverse and rich collection. The ballads were major find. The riddles constituted the second-largest Spanish American collection yet made. The songs included carols, children's songs, and other genres as well as some 375 examples of the decimas, the poetic and partly improvised response to daily life and love of the Puerto Rican village singers. But the folktales, numbering in the hundreds, were the most impressive find of all. As Aurelio M. Espinosa says in introducing the collection as whole, a large number are new creations, with traditional elements confused and mingled. special cycle, the Juan Bobo, or John the Simple, tales, the traditional nddle-tales have been especially (Mason, Riddles 423). Introducing the tales in particular, Espinosa says, In our Porto-Rican collection we find many new and important developments. The 'Juan Bobo' tales, which are the most numerous of this group [i.e., picaresque tales, the most popular group], absorb many versions of European folk-tales (Mason, Folk-Tales [1921] 143). The rich development of the Juan Bobo tales is then one of the characteristic features of this Puerto Rican folktale repertoire. The Juan Bobo tales continued to develop in Puerto Rican oral tradition in the decades following Mason's collection visit, as Sarai Lastra has demonstrated. Mason apparently utilized two principal collecting methods to gather this wide array of folk materials. For his own field collecting he concentrated on the mountain town of Utuado, with its peasant jibaro population, and the coastal town of Loiza, with its black population. these towns adults wrote out material for him, and he recorded mostly adult men on wax cylinders (Lastra 534-38). The bulk of the collection, however, came from schoolchildren all across the island. Working with E. M. Bainter and the Puerto Rican Department of Education, Mason coordinated massive effort in which teachers in the various municipal districts had their students write out the material. Mason himself oversaw this project, traveling to towns and villages and up mountainsides to talk with teachers and students in schools all over the island and to listen to their riddles, songs, and tales (Mason, Riddles 423; Mason, Folk-Tales [1922] 103). Aurelio M. Espinosa, editor for many years of Hispanic issues of the Journal of American Folklore, supervised publication of the collection. Espinosa edited the material and published it in ten issues of the Journal between 1916 and 1929. fact, the fall issue of 1926 was devoted entirely to the collection. Mason was good Boasian, more interested in the text than in the context. The tales, riddles, and songs are published with no information about the performers or the performances, not even clarification as to whether the particular pieces were collected orally or in writing. …