Juan Bobo: A Folkloric Information System - how the controversial work of anthropologist J. Alden Mason, who collected Puerto Rican folklore, underscores the problem of authenticating folklore artifacts

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Sarai Lastra

Unlike other Caribbean tricksters such as Anansi, Juan Bobo does not transform himself from human to animal or vice-versa. His transformations are more in the mental realm--e.g., changing from an ill-reared numskull to a "wantonly cruel" trickster within the same story. With a notable first name and a foolish last name, together with undesirable physical talents, the folktales situate Juan Bobo (or Animala or Simple or Cuchilla) within a marginalized group and reflect the problem of Otherness. The audience is keyed (Bauman, 1977) by a teller opening the story with something like "Once upon a time there was a woman who had a son, but her son was a fool." The italics indicate prompts that prepare the audience for what is to come.

MIGRATORY TALES

The Juan Bobo tales migrated from Spain in an oral tradition originally influenced by the Spanish picaresque novels and Wise Fool tales (Espinosa, 1921; Manrique Cabrera, 1982). Appropriately, Childers (1977) has developed a motif-index titled "Tales from Picaresque Novels" which describes the genre's influences:

   [The picaresque novel] was a new genre of realistic fiction in which the
   rogue was the central character. It was usually a comic autobiography on an
   anti-hero who was a peripatetic character, moving about from job to job and
   from city to city. As the picaro (rogue) went from master to master, he
   satirized their personal faults and their trades and professions. The rogue
   and his tricks and the manners he satirized were two principal
   identification marks of the genre. Although the rogue and his tricks
   constitute the main interest in the novels, the satirical comments on
   various trades and professions give a wealth of information on the social,
   political, and religious background of.... Spain. (Childers, 1977, p. vi)

These literary influences reflected, in the picaro's personality and tricks, the satirical commentaries implicitly contrived throughout the plot, and the master/slave power relationships can be analyzed using Aarne-Thompson's standard classification system of tale types and motifs. By definition, the "Type-Index deals with entire tales; the Motif-Index ... deals with smaller elements of those tales. Thompson defines the motif as `the smallest element that persists in tradition'; in actual practice this element can be a character, a formula, a concept, an activity, or any one of the multitude of details found in folktales" (Clarkson & Cross, 1980, p. 8).

Although there have been some efforts to study some of these Spanish American folktales using a cross-classification scheme for tale types, it was not possible to locate a comprehensive motif-index that included the Juan Bobo tales. The first undertaking to classify Spanish folktales according to the Aarne-Thompson tale types was conducted by Boggs (1930, p. 6). He analyzed a few tales from the Mason-Espinosa collection. Afterward, Hansen (1957), building on Boggs's work, indexed the tale types for several folktales from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and South America, with a few more of Mason's Wise Fools tales described and even some motifs delineated. More recently, MacDonald (1982) has indexed several of the printed Juan Bobo tales available for children's literature in English (for readers interested in Spanish folk literature, there is a motif-index created by Goldberg [1998] for "Medieval Folk Narratives" while Keller [1949] constructed one for "Spanish Exempla").