Mexico's Oral Narrative and Global Contexts

Abstract

The first question that comes to mind when considering the role of the corrido and oral traditions in the re-writing of literary histories is whether or not it has a place at all within a new global context. Certainly, the topic of oral traditions has surfaced with insistent frequency at literary conferences somewhat like an illiterate grandmother turning up at a cocktail party for sophisticated young writers. She may have helped build the house but she seems out of place, her presence a bit embarrassing, and the problem of where to sit her at the table an uncomfortable one. Although most are quick to recognize the foundations of national literatures in epic narratives such as El Cid or Le Chanson de Roland, the oral tradition that produced these works is often dismissed as a distant point of departure from which to hurry forth in order to examine more relevant written works. In spite of suggestive yet cumbersome terms such as “orature”, the concepts of “literature”, “history”, and “globalization” are not readily associated with oral narrative traditions. Oral compositions are too often associated with pre-history not history proper, with the assumed simplicity of low culture not the complexity of high culture or with an assumed confinement to local contexts like the fairground, coffee house, or cantina not the open, world stage. The view held by the Marques de Santillana (1398–1458) in the fifteenth century that oral compositions could only please “gente de ‘baxa y servil condicion’”, people of low and servile condition, continues to hold considerable sway even today (Mariscal 120). The view that oral narrative offers a point of departure, a prehistoric basis from which more noble, more sophisticated works could evolve is well illustrated by Domingo F. Sarmiento’s La vida de Juan Facundo: Civilizacion y Barbarie (1845). Here he reduces the rich oral tradition of the Argentine pampas to a medieval European anachronism: