Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico

By Rafael Ocasio

Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico explores the historic research trip taken to Puerto Rico in 1915. As a component of the Scientific Survey of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Boas intended to perform field research in the areas of anthropology and ethnography while other scientists explored the island’s natural resources. A young anthropologist working under Boas, John Alden Mason, rescued hundreds of oral folklore samples, ranging from popular songs, poetry, conundrums, sayings, and, most particularly, folktales while documenting native Puerto Rican cultural practices. Through his extensive excursions, Mason came in touch with the rural lives of Puerto Rican peasants, the jíbaros, who served as both his cultural informants and writers of the folklore samples. These stories, many of which are still part of the island’s literary traditions and collected in a bilingual companion volume by Rafael Ocasio, reflect a strong Puerto Rican identity coalescing in the face of the U.S. political intervention on the island. A fascinating slice of Puerto Rican history and culture sure to delight any reader!
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978810228

Book preview

Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore

CRITICAL CARIBBEAN STUDIES

Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Carter Mathes, and Kathleen López

Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University, Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University, Aisha Khan, New York University, April J. Mayes, Pomona College, Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies, Martin Munro, Florida State University, F. Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University, Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University, Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico

Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Caribbean Colonialities.

Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora

Alaí Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015

Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize

Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel

Lia T. Bascomb, In Plenty and in Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity

Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean

Rafael Ocasio, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico

Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore

Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico

RAFAEL OCASIO

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ocasio, Rafael, author.

Title: Race and nation in Puerto Rican folklore : Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico / Rafael Ocasio.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Critical Caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019043696 | ISBN 9781978810211 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978810204 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978810235 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978810228 (epub) | ISBN 781978810242 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Boas, Franz, 1858–1942—Travel—Puerto Rico. | Mason, John Alden, 1885–1967—Travel—Puerto Rico. | Folklore—Study and teaching—Puerto Rico— History. | Ethnology—Puerto Rico—History. | Oral tradition—Puerto Rico. | National characteristics, Puerto Rican. | Puerto Ricans—Ethnic identity. | Puerto Rico—Race relations. | Puerto Rico—Social life and customs. | Puerto Rico— Relations—United States. | United States—Relations—Puerto Rico.

Classification: LCC GR47.P8 O23 2020 | DDC 398.2097295—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043696

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Rafael Ocasio

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

In memoriam

Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952–2016)

Whose literary mentorship inspired this book. This is my tribute to her passion to preserve Puerto Rican oral folklore through her creative fábulas criollas that she heard as a child in Hormigueros from her abuela’s cuentos.

Contents

Introduction: Retention and Reinvention of Puerto Rican Oral Folklore Tales

Post–Spanish-American War U.S. Scientific Explorations

1 Porto Rico as a Colonial Scientific Laboratory: Documenting Puerto Rican Oral Folklore

The Island of Porto Rico in the U.S. Public Eye

Identifying Porto Rican Folklore: The Compilation Process

2 A Post–Spanish-American War National Identity: Editing Puerto Rican Folktales in a Sociopolitical Vacuum

Arguing about La Raza and a Native Puerto Rican Culture

Editing in a Sociopolitical Vacuum: Personal and Professional Differences

3 Jíbaros’ Authorship through Literary Self-Characterization

A Countryside-Inspired Folklore through Jíbaros’ Authorship

Juan Bobo and Other Native Picaresque Characters: Surviving the Rural Campo

4 Telling a Story about Class and Ethnicity through Fairy Tales, Cuentos Puertorriqueños, and Leyendas

Expressing Jíbaro Cultural Values through Native Oral Folklore

El Campo as a Site of Puerto Rican Identity in Cuentos de Encantamiento, Cuentos Puertorriqueños, and Leyendas Puertorriqueñas

5 An (Un)colored Puerto Rican Culture: Unpublished Negro Fieldwork in Old Loíza

Loíza as a Site of an Afro–Puerto Rican Culture

Reconstructing a Post-slavery Afro–Puerto Rican Popular Folklore: The Unpublished Field Notes

6 Tropicalizing the Puerto Rican Racial Past: The Quest of an Indian Area

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore

Introduction

RETENTION AND REINVENTION OF PUERTO RICAN ORAL FOLKLORE TALES

Do you know what people mean when they speak of Our New Possessions? What are they? Where are they? Why are men, in the streets, in the shops, everywhere, talking about them? Why are the newspapers full of articles in regard to them? Why are lawmakers at the capital devoting so much time and attention to them? Can you tell?

—Marian M. George, A Little Journey to Puerto Rico for Intermediate and Upper Grades (1900)

My principal work here is to collect the folk-lore and I am getting an enormous pile, with the cooperation of the department of education. I have a pile sixteen inches thick now and probably get as much more before I quit. What I am ever going to do with it I don’t know.

—John Alden Mason to Alfred L. Kroeber, January 21, 1915

POST–SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR U.S. SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATIONS

When the signing of the Treaty of Paris on August 12, 1898, ended the Spanish-American War, large numbers of Americans flocked to Our Possessions, the newly acquired Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and to the Philippines in the Pacific basin. Extensive press coverage had produced a record number of readers who for the first time eagerly followed a media-dominated war through reading newspapers (or looking at the pictures) more than ever before (Collin 107).¹ In search of an exotic geography, the first American civilian explorers wrote a large number of diaries and travelogues that served as formal presentations of these military-occupied territories. Their views were not broad; they either focused on the islands as commercial wastelands with great financial potential for U.S. enterprises or took a paternalistic attitude in hopes that a rising twentieth-century American-made technology would turn the Spanish islands into a showcase of modernity.

In the early part of the twentieth century, technology also allowed for massive and complex projects abroad, such as the Panama Canal, which, as Katherine A. Zien stresses, was hailed as an example of social engineering’s triumph over tropical degeneration (41). Along with Puerto Rico as part of the Spanish Islands Empire, the canal became a great symbol of the United States’ increasingly powerful geopolitical dominance. Indeed, Peter James Hudson has traced the intricate ways in which U.S. federal policies facilitated the emergence of American banking as a powerhouse in the Caribbean after the Spanish-American War: The War and State departments required fiscal agencies to support the infrastructure of US colonialism, and financial institutions were an important conduit of colonial policy and financial and commercial diplomacy (6).

Although the implementation of the Foraker Act in 1900 provided Puerto Ricans with a civilian government, it also imposed a governor appointed by the U.S. president. Thus, the island was subjected to congressional laws as federal regulations pertaining [to] governing of Puerto Rico responded to economic needs of an American market (García Muñiz 47). The numbers of the earliest American investors, as historian Andrés A. Ramos Mattei has documented, were high. Some three hundred were already on the island in 1898, even before Spaniards were mandated to evacuate the island (54). This early commercial interest in Puerto Rico may explain in part the high number of travelogues and diaries published in the United States. Intended to be more than literary texts, travelogues written about Puerto Rico emphasized the economic benefits of maintaining the island under American political control. A newly constituted Porto Rico was an outstanding booty, as Murat Halstead observed in The Story of the Philippines and Our Possessions (1898): [Puerto Rico] falls into our possession without the impoverishment and demoralization of the devastation of war—one of the fairest gems of the ocean (577).²

After Cuba’s independence in 1902, Puerto Rico remained a colorful yet backward representative of an island culture, strikingly different from U.S. modern practices that attempted to transform ancestral Spanish cultural practices (Anazagasty Rodríguez & Cancel, Los textos 38). Lured to the island as the only Spanish-speaking Caribbean U.S. possession, American travelers wrote about local traditions and often commented upon unique race-based social types.³ Their curiosity led them to capture a native Puerto Rican identity doomed to disappear amid the aggressive Americanization campaign leading to an eventual annexation of the island.

The Scientific Survey of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands as an Organized Colonial Laboratory

Notable American academic institutions performed scientific fieldwork in Puerto Rico. In 1913, the New York Academy of Sciences, cohosted by the Puerto Rican government, started the Scientific Survey of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, a comprehensive study of the islands’ geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, and anthropology. The obtained data have been described to this day, as one of the most complete descriptions of the natural history of any tropical area ever attempted (Figueroa Colón viii). The findings of subsequent scientific excursions were published from 1919 until 1941 as Scientific Survey of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Its multidisciplinary impact upon developing branches of science in Puerto Rico was long-standing; however, it has also been labeled as part of an initial fase de intervención cultural (phase of cultural intervention; Iranzo Berrocal 21).⁴

The Scientific Survey included extensive documentation of anthropological and oral folklore components under the direction of Franz Boas (1858–1942). An outstanding anthropologist and ethnologist with an international reputation, Boas had become the most important single force in shaping American anthropology in the first part of the twentieth century (Stocking 1). He was also a pioneering scholar in the field of folklore studies (Darnell, Franz Boas 3; Krupat 82; White, Ethnography and Ethnology 5; Zumwalt, American Folklore 69).

Boas arrived on the island in May 1915, staying for a period of about five weeks. His visit went unnoticed by contemporary readers of Puerto Rican newspapers, including Puerto Rico Ilustrado, an arts and literature weekly magazine that regularly documented the arrival of important international personalities. There are no surviving fieldwork notebooks, and most of his biographers have either ignored his trip to Puerto Rico or treated it as an afterthought in Boas’s busy international and national travel schedule.⁵ He was not in top physical condition, still recuperating from recent facial surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. Only close family members were aware of his weak physical condition.

The survey included field research in the areas of botany and entomology, zoological reconnaissance and entomology, geology, and anthropology and archaeology. Boas chaired the anthropological component, supported by a team of young, rising scholars: Herman Karl Haeberlin, John Alden Mason, and Robert T. Aitken. Their most critical contribution was the mapping of Capá, as the remains of an indigenous Taíno ballpark site were known at the time. They are considered today to be part of the first wave of American anthropologists who arrived in Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War (Anderson Córdova et al. 15). Their research has been challenged, however; most of them lacked basic linguistic Spanish competency, knowledge of previous bibliographical documentation, and general knowledge of Caribbean history (Rodríguez López 30; Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation 60–61).

Boas had given Mason specific instructions for the identification of a particular type of cultural informant. Mason’s whereabouts on the island put him in contact with jíbaros, peasants who provided a variety of expressions of oral folklore, including hundreds of stories, conundrums, sayings, and popular poetry. They also uncovered samples of native musical forms, mainly décimas and aguinaldos (Christmas songs). The resulting collection, as Jorge Duany described, enshrined the mountain jíbaro as the archetype of the folk. It thereby contributed to construct Puerto Ricans as a predominantly white population with strong ties to European traditions (The Puerto Rican Nation 83).

Boas’s Fieldwork in Puerto Rico

Boas’s projects in Puerto Rico fall into two distinctive scientific categories. He excavated indigenous Taíno physical remains in Capá, located in the town of Utuado, on the island’s central highlands, reputedly at the heart of an Indian territory, which had already attracted the attention of fellow American anthropologists. After mapping and sketching complex courts for ball games and plazas skillfully connected through a street system, Boas made a formal proposal for turning Capá into a public educational park. His archaeological findings did not immediately catch the attention of the Puerto Rican government, however.

A second area of scientific data gathering in Puerto Rico included anthropometric research, a crucial component of Boas’s ongoing campaign to debunk the strong international appeal of a unilineal evolution (Rohner and Rohner xvi). Writing to the American governor of Puerto Rico, Arthur Yager, on November 6, 1913, Boas explained his intention to produce controlled anthropometric measurements in order to explore the effects of race-mixture with reference to form of heredity in man and the effect of tropical environment upon the development of man (American Philosophical Society).⁶ With these data he also desired to address an unstated number of exceedingly important and attractive problems.

Boas could have considered Puerto Rico a permanent site for anthropological and ethnographical fieldwork. In 1910 he had been involved in the founding of the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico City (Hyatt 115). His research at various geographical Mexican sites produced Notes on Mexican Folk-Lore (1912), among the first articles on Latin American oral folklore published by the Journal of American Folklore, of which he served as editor. Events surrounding the Mexican Revolution interrupted his work in Mexico in 1914 and led to the closing of the International School.

While in Mexico, Boas worked alongside young scholars who served as his assistants in the field. John Alden Mason (1885–1967), a young archaeologist, linguist, and folklorist, after receiving his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1911, joined Boas in Mexico between 1911 and 1912.⁷ Mason was a student of Alfred L. Kroeber, who, in turn, had been Boas’s student at Columbia University.

Mason’s Ethnographic Fieldwork: Indian, Jíbaro, and Afro–Puerto Rican Folk Cultures

Mason preceded Boas on his trip to Puerto Rico, where he arrived on an undocumented date in 1914. His first letter to Boas from the island, dated December 8, reveal an overly excited young scholar eager to start tackling several complex projects. He badly desired to serve his notoriously demanding mentor, who often ordered last-minute changes to grueling work schedules and physically demanding field work protocols. His exploratory excursions (gathering oral folklore and documenting archaeological sites) around the island were literally exhaustive. Mason also identified numerous male volunteers for Boas’s anthropometric measurements (mainly children and soldiers), and while performing that task he surveyed the rough mountainous areas of the Cordillera Central (Central Mountainous Range).

At the time Mason wrote his first letter to Boas from Puerto Rico, he had already engaged in "a twelve days reconnoisance [sic] and field trip to Utuado" (APS). This picturesque pueblo, a rural town located in Cordillera Central, had become for Puerto Ricans, the sentimental home of a peculiar type of rural culture, known as jíbaro de la montaña (high ground peasant). The peasant culture of this iconic region was also well known for its rich oral folklore. Not surprisingly, Mason made Utuado his permanent home base. In his letters to Boas he frequently praised the Utuado Gibaro, his preferred spelling, while highlighting some local traditions and expressing admiration for the skillful abilities of jíbaros to deliver oral folk stories. The end result, as it has been charged, produced a collection overwhelmingly focused on "forms of verbal art [that] enshrined the mountain jíbaro as the archetype of the folk (Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation 83).

Mason did, however, also come to Loíza, a predominantly Afro–Puerto Rican fishing village on the northeastern coast, where he uncovered oral samples representative of a Negro type of culture. As he did throughout the island, in Loíza he collected oral poetry and songs, stories, and children’s rhymes and games. Of great historical value, he met a former enslaved individual, Melitón Congo, an old man who spoke to Mason about customs of the enslaved, mainly medicinal and religious practices that had survived after the abolition of slavery in 1873.

Surprisingly, the final publications made no indication of geographical or racial origins of any of the oral samples. More puzzling, none of the Loíza material was published, nor were the field notes made available to Puerto Rican scholars.

Mason’s Collection Process: Cultural Informants as Writers

The oral folklore project had the full support of Governor Yager, who was instrumental in helping Mason develop connections with administrators of the public school system, who provided him direct contact with children in rural schools. Edward M. Bainter, Puerto Rican School Department director, facilitated the participation of hundreds of schoolchildren who were asked to write down oral samples as part of their school work. The decision to involve Bainter was controversial. He had pushed radical proactive measures for the establishment of English as the preferred language in the public school system, including a requirement that teachers develop working skills in the English language as a condition for the renewal of their teaching licenses. These policies incited frequent boycotts by teachers and students alike, leading to his eventual decision to quit his post in 1915.

Adults were also commissioned to write oral folklore samples. They were rural men of varying ages and from a variety of geographical locations. Mason’s preferred informants were, however, jíbaro men from Utuado, as indicated in notations from surviving field notebooks. He also made transcriptions from reputedly well-known storytellers, using his own type of phonetic script that highlighted the linguistic peculiarities of jíbaro speech. This interest in documenting jíbaro phonology was an important component of Boas’s ongoing collection of oral folklore among Antarctic Eskimo groups.

Mason kept Boas abreast of his busy research schedule. His rather large correspondence with Boas details the multifaceted compilation processes (children and adults as writers, as well as his own recording and transcribing of oral renditions of oral folklore) and some brief discussions about his own preferences in compilation. He was rather simplistic in his listing of his geographical explorations; those pueblos, although iconic in terms of rich regional oral folklore, remained mainly undescribed. His aloofness went against the American travelogues that often described with voyeuristic interest newly discovered cultural practices on the island.

In the end, Boas’s arrival in Puerto Rico took place at an undetermined date in late May, 1915. He did not take part in Mason’s ongoing compilation of oral folklore. Instead, Boas worked industriously on anthropometric field research with male children and men and on an archaeological dig of Capá’s ballpark. His noticeable withdrawal from working on the oral folklore tier continued during the subsequent editing process, augmented by the addition of a dissenting copy editor.

Ignoring Ideological Differences during the Editing Process: The Language Issue

Folklorist and Spanish professor Aurelio M. Espinosa (1880–1958) served as the editor of all of Mason’s field notebooks. A proud native Nuevo Mexicano, although a native speaker of Spanish, he had no experience with or knowledge of jíbaro linguistics. No scholar from Puerto Rico was invited to take part in either the collection or the editing of the oral samples, though. Nonetheless, Mason had had the support of Puerto Rican folklorists, whose recommendations fully enriched the compilation process.

As a more significant oversight, in asking children to write in Spanish oral samples, the ideological implications of such a request were not considered. English, as the language of instruction, had been imposed upon them. Americans traveling throughout Puerto Rico in the early part of the twentieth century often reported that the teaching process was convoluted at best, and, controversially, it also generated demeaning reports on the socioeconomic conditions of jíbaro children as members of an underprivileged social class.

Indeed, neither Mason nor Boas was concerned about the political scene that they encountered on the island in late 1914 and throughout 1915. In 1914, José de Diego, as spokesman of the Puerto Rican legislature, managed to approve an official declaration stating the boundaries of a Puerto Rican nationality. General elections on the island were followed by official concerns about the serious legal limitations of self-governing placed upon Puerto Rico by the Foraker Act of 1900. Public discontent taken to the streets as political rallies and worker and teacher strikes, widely covered by newspapers, reflected a local preoccupation with expanding American political power over the island’s internal affairs. Although indicators of the island’s long-standing colonial background could be present in the collected samples, such sociopolitical indicators were completely ignored.

The Puerto Rican oral folklore is composed of hundreds of samples—riddles, Christmas carols, poetry, songs, and stories—and was edited in standard Spanish. Appearing in nine volumes in the Journal of American Folklore from 1916 to 1929, these publications were among the first and largest oral folklore samples in Spanish published by this distinguished journal. Except for the riddles—published many years later in book format as Folklore puertorriqueño: Adivinanzas (Puerto Rican Folklore: Riddles; Mason 1960)—the oral folklore project remains unpublished in Puerto Rico.

The conclusion of such a monumental project took a toll on all participants. Although Espinosa maintained his commitment to edit all samples, his relationship with Boas was always formal, to the point that he never fully expressed his feelings about being a participant in this historical project. Espinosa did break up with Mason, whose professional relationship he never sought out.

In a more public stance, Boas withdrew himself from his professional association with Mason. Writing in an editorial for the Nation on December 20, 1919, he accused four anthropologists of espionage in Central American countries during the First World War. Although the names of the accused individuals were withheld, Mason was immediately implicated, leading to a controversial censure of Boas by the American Anthropological Association. However, Mason did maintain a public admiration for Boas.

Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore reassesses Boas’s and Mason’s ethnographic and anthropological fieldwork in Puerto Rico within the context of ongoing American scientific projects abroad and against the political arena that they encountered on the island. As Jorge Duany has articulated in his groundbreaking study of Boas’s trip, this reputable scholar’s intentions reflected ethnographic imperative to rescue the Island’s Hispanic folklore before the onslaught of Americanization (The Puerto Rican Nation 62). Indeed, as I will highlight, their ample correspondence reflects that Boas expected Mason to collect a significantly large amount of oral folklore samples within a relatively short period. Their detailed letters describe Mason’s preparation prior to his trip to Puerto Rico, his busy whereabouts on the island before Boas’s arrival, and his tedious dealings with governmental and public figures while performing fieldwork. The collection procedures, which included native informants, children and adult men from rural areas, were also frequent subjects of their letters. In particular, details pertaining to a well-organized plan to have school children draft their own renditions of oral samples are discussed here, including my analysis of the ideological implications that, for the first time in literary history, jíbaros were given the opportunity to act as writers of their own cultural practices.

Although not originally targeted as an important source of oral folklore, Mason scouted surviving slave customs and a strong mulatto (Afro-Puerto Rican) ethnographic heritage in the coastal town of Loíza. Neither Boas nor Mason was initially aware of Old Loíza (Mason’s preferred naming) which Mason targeted as his principal geographical site of a representative Puerto Rican rich black cultural heritage. Mason’s letters to Boas describing his whereabouts around this predominantly black area are, however, rather bland. He ignored any descriptions of Loíza’s rich popular traditions, such as manual artisan productions and musical performances. Mason’s most groundbreaking finding was his documentation of Melitón Congo, who as a former slave born in Africa, provided Mason with a rich data of local cultural practices, mainly religious-based medicinal procedures and so called superstitions. My reconstruction of these data through Mason’s notes in surviving fieldnotes highlights the outstanding significance of Loíza as a notable cradle of a so called Afro-Puerto Rican culture.

The editing process was also well documented. Letters between Boas, Mason, and Espinosa clearly reflect not only their professional disagreements but ways in which they failed to understand the importance of the oral folklore samples as a reflection of a complex sociopolitical colonial history operating on the island. These letters provide an insightful look into a rather monumental task that, as I discuss, all parties politically and critically mishandled in one way or another. I will also underscore ways in which local scholars, historians and ethnographers, were heavily utilized as consultants of Mason’s fieldwork procedures, however, their important input remained unacknowledged in the serial publications of the oral samples. None of them were ever invited to participate in the editing process, a decision that could have avoided most of the ideological disagreements that occurred between Mason and Espinosa.

Within the ideological context of the earliest American scientific trips to Puerto Rico, I have two critical goals. First, this book documents a myriad of organizational details behind Boas’s historic visit to Puerto Rico. Although neither Boas nor Mason considered themselves travelers, at least not in the sense of those who came to the island in pursuit of experiencing a recently politically constituted Porto Rico, they closely followed geographical sites that American and foreign visitors had regularly commented upon. Indeed, first-person travelogues, historical accounts, and Puerto Rican cultural artifacts brought to U.S. anthropological fairs initially informed Boas’s and Mason’s knowledge of certain types of cultural informants. In particular, the jíbaro, as an emblematic inhabitant of the island’s campos, the untamed countryside, was designated as a repository of a vibrant identidad criolla, a Puerto Rican hybrid Spanish creole cultural identity.

A second goal is to trace in representative folktales those specific types of geographic settings, character types, and plot lines that reflect expressions of a national identity through jíbaro culture. Folktales, which dominate the oral project, highlight iconic characters immersed in social and cultural parameters that describe the island’s long colonial history, a sort of psychological profile of a stubborn Puerto Ricanness defying an American political intervention.

In their documentation of jíbaro culture, Boas and Mason might have been following a similar intellectual project operating in Puerto Rico. Local literary writers, political analysts, and politicians were simultaneously engaged with a pro-nationalist project in which jíbaros, depicted as white people of Spanish descent, stood as representatives of a well-developed Hispanidad. As descendants of rural Spaniards, a hybrid race, la raza, not only reflected unique expressions of a developed national identity but also highlighted Puerto Ricans as culturally and linguistically different from the newly arrived U.S. Americans. In reappraising jíbaros as the uncontested symbols of a national identity, however, the Afro–Puerto Rican elements of the so-called Puerto Rican raza were obliterated.

Chapter 1, Porto Rico as a Colonial Scientific Laboratory: Documenting Puerto Rican Oral Folklore, highlights the ethnographical and anthropological components of the Scientific Survey of Porto Rico as part of the island’s increasing popularity as a stage for scientific exploration. Although without practical value for a fast-developing, heavily agrarian economy, these areas of investigation were designed to increase the national reputation of the New York Academy of Sciences through Boas’s public profile as an indefatigable traveling scientist. Indeed, The Island of Porto Rico, thanks to the Scientific Survey, took a forefront position in numerous U.S. scientific excursions after the Spanish-American War. Popular interest in the island was already high, with frequent articles published in learning publications, such as National Geographic.

Within the popular topic of racial connections with Puerto Rican cultures, Boas’s oral folklore stands out as the largest such project produced. It included a large number of informant adults and children from rural areas who wrote down their own material. Jíbaro traditions shaped not only the content but also the themes of the folk material. The project, which was exclusively supervised by Mason, managed to produce an overwhelming number of oral folklore samples.

Chapter 2, A Post–Spanish-American War National Identity: Editing Puerto Rican Folktales in a Sociopolitical Vacuum, surveys the intellectual opposition that Mason and Boas were exposed to, particularly through public statements by Puerto Rican politicians and intellectuals concerned about the negative influence of American ideological and cultural policies upon native cultural traditions. Unbeknownst to Mason and Boas, key Puerto Rican politicians and writers were heavily involved in public debates concerning the impact of American political and social policies imposed on the island. One passionate topic in particular, the proposal to use English as the island’s official language, had also been highly debated by locals and by American travelers alike.

Nonetheless, such contested sociopolitical issues were not considered to have a potential influence on the compilation of the oral samples or during the editing process, given the impassioned partisan scene that both Boas and Mason encountered in Puerto Rico. There was yet another ignored fact. Mason would have come across a booming Puerto Rican nationalist literature, which advocated for an emerging national identity through documentation of native folklore. Although some of these native folklorists actually served as his consultants, they were not invited to work on the rather convoluted editing processes that eventually followed.

Chapter 3, Jíbaros’ Authorship through Literary Self-Characterization, discusses the role of an emerging jíbaro literature that, at the time of Mason’s visit, had become an integral component of the highly nationalistic discourse. Two critical angles explore outstanding characteristics of Mason’s oral samples. On the one hand, in serving as writers of oral folk samples, jíbaros performed such a task for the first time in literary history, indirectly joining in an ongoing literary trend known as criollista, which since the beginning of the twentieth century had been exploring jíbaro motifs while highlighting native creole elements. On the other hand, as writers, jíbaros drew from themes, characters, and subjects that spoke to them within the harsh socioeconomic environment of the Puerto Rican countryside. One outstanding iconic character is the picaresque peasant boy, Juan Bobo, a mischievous child who often finds himself involved in borderline criminal situations from which he escapes by sheer maña, or luck.

Chapter 4, Telling a Story about Class and Ethnicity through Fairy Tales, Cuentos Puertorriqueños, and Leyendas, focuses on Mason’s compilation methodology, which was mainly Boasian in practice. It also included archiving jíbaro linguistic expressions and assessing oral deliverance techniques, documentation lost today that I reproduce from his reports to Boas and letters generated during the editing process between Boas and Espinosa. These stories feature local folk types who exemplify particular cultural traits of the Puerto Rican campo, the countryside that was a setting of sentimental importance to the cultural informants. Traditional cuentos de encantamiento (tales that involve spells) display identifiable native cultural traits with plots that reveal local struggles against economic scarcity found in the countryside throughout the early part of the twentieth century, gracefully overcome by fantastic interventions.

Rural cultural themes and motifs pertaining to religious practices are notable components of two categories of oral folklore narratives: cuentos puertorriqueños (Puerto Rican tales) and leyendas (legends). They clearly reflect a strong connection to jíbaro traditions, particularly religious belief systems. Bad men turned into folk legends are common characters, such as the infamous Puerto Rican–born pirate Roberto Cofresí and other bandidos (bandits), a fixed, dangerous component of the Puerto Rican countryside throughout the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth.

Chapter 5, An (Un)colored Puerto Rican Culture: Unpublished Negro Fieldwork in Old Loíza, explores Mason’s fieldwork in Old Loíza, home of the island’s predominantly African-heritage population, located on the northeastern coast. At the time of his visit it was an iconic black geography, well