Books to Note from VOICES

Volume 34
Spring-Summer
2008

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New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses, by Elizabeth Tucker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 241 pages, photographs, index, $20.00 paper.

Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses provides an introduction to a variety of ghost stories told and collected by college students, faculty, staff, folklorists, and the author, Elizabeth Tucker, a professor of English at Binghamton University. Tucker seeks to provide a framework for understanding these stories by linking them to the Aarne- Thompson Tale Type and Stith Thompson Motif indexes, legend study, and her own interest in the paranormal, as well as to what she labels the “social, psychological, and cultural elements” of the tellers (mostly late adolescent college students) and the stories.

Tucker breaks the tales into a number of categories including sensory evidence, ghostly warnings, troubling encounters, desperate lovers, wailing women, spectral Indians, and legend quests. She cross-references many of the stories with representations in popular culture, such as movies and television shows, and material culture. One example is the Emory University mascot “Dooley,” a ghost whose skeletal figure is sold in the campus bookstore and who has his own entry on the university’s Facebook page. This survey of campus ghostlore does a good job of demonstrating that the introduction of the computer to campuses over the past thirty years has not discouraged the telling of personal ghost narratives. Technology has perhaps enhanced the circulation of ghost stories students have been told, researched, or experienced during “legend quests,” through the use of web sites devoted to campus ghosts, instant messaging, text messaging, and e-mail.

As a former residence hall adviser of an all-freshmen coed dorm, I found these stories of collegiate suicides, mysterious noises and smells, rites of passage and initiation, and the use of legend to describe, explain, and deal with the new opportunities and pressure of campus life both familiar and believable. The section on legend quests particularly resonated with my experiences of teaching students about fieldwork and urban legend research at Columbia College in Chicago, since several of my students undertook legend quests of their own in order to research ghost stories from the area.

Haunted Halls does raise a few areas of concern. Tucker sometimes fails to connect these ghost stories to urban legend research, seemingly in order to claim new ground for locating the stories in psychological theory. While she quotes Jan Brunvand and other American contemporary folk legend researchers who collect outside the walls of academe, her emphasis on Freudian and Jungian analysis and the work of Eurocentric legend scholars sometimes seems to miss the obvious. Many of the stories told in the sections on troubling encounters with ghosts that warn students against binge drinking, drugs, and date rape or desperate lovers that provide examples of the dangers of a broken heart or appear as wailing women are clearly cautionary tales, a term Tucker never uses. In addition, Tucker’s strong personal belief in the paranormal seems, at times, to be an impediment to scholarly detachment.

In the area of cultural studies, I was particularly bothered by this author’s use of the term “Indian.” While it is now considered acceptable to use either “Native American” or “American Indian,” Tucker consistently uses the term “Indian,” echoing the shorthand of her informants and perhaps inadvertently underscoring the racism of many of the stories, which are often told by students with little or no knowledge of Native American culture or history. Tucker notes, “through spectral Indians’ stories, students learn to question mainstream history and to try to prevent new acts of injustice from harming ethnic groups in the future,” but the stories she quotes—a mix of fakelore about Indian burial sites, revenge stories, and legends that often don’t include ghosts—are not convincing evidence for this claim.

Tucker has documented an important aspect of collegiate life, and Haunted Halls will certainly appeal to many college students in folklore and related subjects. In my opinion, it bears careful review before use as a basic text because of the issues of interpretation I have outlined. It has an extensive bibliography, and those teaching or researching campus folklore in New York State or elsewhere will find plenty of local and regional examples ripe for further research and study.

—Susan Eleuterio, independent folklorist

Response from Libby Tucker, Author of Haunted Halls

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Susan Eleuterio’s review of my recent book, Haunted Halls. Eleuterio’s review makes some interesting points that deserve further discussion. Terminology, documentation, fakelore, and belief are important issues that I am glad to address here.

While writing the “Spectral Indians” chapter of Haunted Halls, I knew that many scholars prefer the term “Native American” to “Indian.” I decided to use “Indian” for three reasons. Within the legend texts that I collected, “Indian” is the word used by student narrators. More importantly, a significant number of scholars refer to themselves as Indians. Philip J. Deloria, for example, has written Playing Indian (1998) and Indians in Unexpected Places (2004). Being of Cherokee descent, I do not find the term “Native American,” based on the name of the Italian merchant/explorer Amerigo Vespucci, to be any better than the term “Indian,” which mistakenly heralded finding India. We would show more respect by choosing the term “First Nations,” common in Canada.

Regarding documentation, Eleuterio suggests that I should connect more of the texts in my book to legend research. I extensively refer to the research of Simon J. Bronner, Bill Ellis, Janet Langlois, Linda Dégh, Sabina Magliocco, Jeannie B. Thomas, W. K. McNeil, Jan H. Brunvand, Alan Dundes, and other legend scholars. I also discuss feminist Jungian scholars’ conclusions; since few folklorists have done Jungian analysis, however, I have fewer citations of comparable Jungian research. I do not include the term “cautionary tale,” as legends—not tales—are the subject of my book, but I do refer to “cautionary messages.”

When I was a graduate student, Richard M. Dorson taught me and other students to avoid fakelore. While I agree with Dorson that deliberate scams based on fake folk traditions are unfortunate, I do not agree with Eleuterio’s assertion that students’ rumors about campuses being located on Indian burial grounds should be discounted as fakelore. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of rumors and even more difficult to assess rumor spreaders’ motivations.

Like rumors, stereotypes can be controversial. Eleuterio is quite right in suggesting that some characters in college legends conform to stereotypes, including the image of the angry, vengeful Indian. If I had suppressed that image, I would not have represented the texts accurately. Stories about angry Indian ghosts, as told by members of other ethnic groups, may seem overly reliant on stereotypes, but they reflect awareness of injustices that should never be repeated.

Belief is another complex subject. If my book’s purpose were to prove the existence of ghosts, I would agree that a “strong personal belief in the paranormal” would impede scholarly objectivity. The book’s goal, however, is to explain how ghost stories circulate on college campuses. While I have never had any experiences on a college campus that support belief in ghosts, I believe that the world holds many wonders. Belief in the possibility of amazing events keeps many of us coming back for more ghost stories, which add excitement and enchantment to our daily lives.

Woodstock: History and Hearsay, by Anita Smith. 1959. Second ed. Woodstock, New York: Woodstock Arts, 2006. 335 pages, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $37.30 cloth.

Anita Smith was born in 1893 to a wealthy Pennsylvania family. Her ancestors had sailed with William Penn in 1682 and then settled in Philadelphia. Smith was taken abroad by her mother in 1904 and began her education in Switzerland. In 1912, a year after making her debutante debut, she traveled to Woodstock to join a small but growing colony of artists. She would return many more times before permanently settling in Woodstock in the early 1930s. In 1931 she presented a paper at the Historical Society of Woodstock based on the lore and history of the area. That paper evolved into the book Woodstock: History and Hearsay.

The introduction to Anita Smith’s book, written by Alf Evers, quickly chronicles the history of the small village and introduces readers to Anita Smith. The second edition, published in 2006, includes the entire 1959 edition, along with additional material by Weston and Julia Blelock, who grew up as children next door to Smith. When the Blelocks inherited Smith’s home, Stonecrop, they chose to publish this second edition. The Blelocks have added many things to the new edition, expanding it from a local history book to include a biography of Smith, a portfolio of her work, endnotes, illustrations, and other visual pieces that enhance Smith’s own story about the town of Woodstock. It is through the Blelocks that we come to know something about Smith herself, her work, her herb shop and gardens, and her love for Woodstock.

Smith’s writing style in this book is anecdotal, as if she were speaking to fellow Woodstockers— as indeed she was, giving the paper at the Historical Society of Woodstock. About the area’s first inhabitants, she writes, “Little is known regarding the Indians who are said to have camped on our village green” (22). Woodstock: History and Hearsay is less a history, and more a charming series of recollections. It reads like a mix of the real and the imagined, especially the “hearsay,” which she defines as a story told to her “by someone who heard it from someone.” At times these stories are seamlessly woven into her historical narrative, as she mixes historical data with stories told to her by longtime locals with her own opinions and thoughts about the area. In their introduction to the second edition, the Blelocks are careful to point out that they have not changed words or terms Smith used, such as Negro or squaw, but instead let Smith’s own Quaker-influenced regard for all living things speak for itself. Nor have they attempted to update the book to the present, feeling that it serves well as “a prequel to the Woodstock Festival of 1969, which took place just a year after her death” (9). Instead, the Blelocks have gently left Smith’s speech and cadence alone.

The book’s first four chapters cover the earliest periods of Woodstock’s history, from the sixteenth-century native settlers though the Anti-Rent War of the 1840s. Again, Smith writes these as a combination of hearsay and researched facts. At Chapter Five, the book takes a decidedly artistic turn with the founding of the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in 1902. The famous art colony became known and identified with Woodstock because of its flamboyant members, as well as the enormous output of its teachers and students, whose work included pottery, furniture, graphics, fiber arts, and paintings. Byrdcliffe is still an important part of the Woodstock landscape, and the objects created there, highly sought-after collectibles. Members also produced and presented original theatrical works, magazines and other publications, and musical performances and recitals.

Another group began the Maverick Art Colony in 1905, following a quarrel between Byrdcliffe’s founders over artistic direction. In the summer of 1916, the Maverick Festival started. It was the first large festival held in Woodstock, and Smith spends many pages describing the artists and events that occurred. Articles written about it at the time describe the festivalgoers as “boisterous revelers” with a “shortage of inhibitions.” In supporting its raucous reputation, Smith states, “For example, at one festival, an outsider, abiding by the stricture to wear some clothing, covered his body with tights, but then painted his entire anatomy on the outside” (114). The festival was ended in 1931 by what Smith claims were the behaviors of “outsiders.” It is interesting to note that not that many years later another festival would put Woodstock on the map, and this one would have a “shortage of inhibitions” and “boisterous revelers” of its own, along with many “outsiders.”

Smith focuses on the burgeoning arts scene for several more chapters and then returns to what to her would have been more recent his tory with a story of Woodstock’s involvement in World War II. Chapter Thirteen is a collection of stories told to Smith by several soldiers from Woodstock. The final two chapters bring back Smith’s easygoing society-page style of writing, focusing on other “local personalities” and finishing where she began: why she came to Woodstock and what she knows best, “Artists Talk about Art.” The book then concludes, rather oddly, with memoria to the Woodstockers who died in war. She begins this part by discussing the memorial in town and follows with a listing of those who died in the Civil War through World War II. The book ends with detailed biographical notes for the World War II soldiers.

Smith’s original book is a quirky collection of anecdotes, facts, oral narratives, and lists wrapped around the artistic topics that most interested her. The Blelocks’ edition enhances the original, adding a more complex look at Smith herself. Together, the book is a delightful, if somewhat nostalgic, look at an important place during an important time.

—Mary Zwolinski, Portland, Maine

Weird Northern New York, by Cheri Revai. Utica, New York: North Country Books, 2006. 137 pages, introduction, photographs, acknowledgments, bibliography, $16.95 paper.

North Country author Cheri Revai adds to her growing collection of haunted texts with her recent book, Weird Northern New York. A lifetime fan of all things supernatural, I couldn’t resist learning a little of the North County’s supernatural legacy and was intrigued by the inclusion of weird, yet natural, phenomenon. I am always on the lookout for books, television programs, and movies on the subject of supernatural folklore. As a graduate student in folk studies, I became accustomed to academic texts on supernatural folklore and the context and discourse they provide. I have often been disappointed by popular texts that, while clearly enthusiastic about the subject, lack a greater understanding of supernatural folklore. Weird Northern New York, a nonacademic survey of the weird and supernatural in the North Country, unfortunately lived down to my expectations.

Residents of and travelers to the North Country will enjoy seeing the names of the places they live and visit mentioned in this book. I enjoyed learning interesting bits about Watertown, where my grandfather lived as a child; Potsdam, where I attended college for a short time; and Blue Mountain Lake, where I have been attending work retreats for the past few years. Readers with no ties to northern New York, however, should not bother with this book.

This slim volume—Revai’s fourth on the North Country—is packed with information. This is unfortunate for the information, as it has been crammed into the author’s meandering, overly long sentences. I found myself wishing that the author had left the stories in the words of the people and sources from which she obtained them, because her awkward writing style did not do them justice. At times I felt as if I were reading the script of a cheesy television program. Furthermore, Revai spent far too much time trying to convince readers that the people and places mentioned in the book are indeed weird, when she should have let the stories speak for themselves.

The problems with this book start in the introduction. Revai begins by berating people who do not believe in the supernatural and goes on to provide dictionary definitions of both supernatural and weird. This sets a tone of condescension that continues throughout the book. She expresses enthusiasm for some of the weird and supernatural occurrences mentioned in her work, yet seems appalled by others. She is clearly impressed by the Shadow Chasers, a group of paranormal investigators made up of students from SUNY–Potsdam, and presents them and their research favorably, but her rambling rant against the Skull and Bones Society left me wondering if she wasn’t upset about being rejected by Yale.

Perhaps it is because Weird Northern New York is Revai’s fourth book on northern New York that what should have been fascinating factoids ended up as dull dronings. The book may work well when read with the other volumes, but alone it is a survey of mismatched stories barely drawn together through their weird or supernatural content. I have not read Revai’s previous works, but I am fully aware of them, as she constantly reminds the reader of the other books she has written and those she plans to write in the future. At times this work felt more like an advertisement for the other books than a new book on the supernatural in northern New York.

—Claire E. Aubrey, Niagara County

Chorus and Community, edited by Karen Ahlquist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 336 pages, introduction, thirteen essays with endnotes, index, contributors’ biographies, CD with transcription of lyrics and translations, $30.00 paper.

Chorus and Community is a remarkable collection of essays about the community roles of historical and contemporary choral music. Assembling an edited volume into a coherent whole is an enormous undertaking, and Karen Ahlquist is to be congratulated on her vision in creating a piece that examines—from many perspectives—the social roles of collective singing. Ahlquist began her professional career as a conductor and is now director and chair of the Department of Music at George Washington University.

Ahlquist is clear that this volume is not exhaustive, but she did well to organize the volume’s thirteen essays into five parts: “A Communal Art,” “Grassroots Aesthetics,” “Minority Identities,” “The Activist Chorus,” and “In the Western Tradition.” These sections invite readers to range through topics that capture their attention. The contributors come from varied viewpoints; it is a pleasure to read the work of ethnomusicologists and music historians, musicologists and historians, as well as choral directors. The essays are uneven, ranging from richly descriptive to critically analytical, but this variety of approach provides texture and is not a distraction. The book includes both classical and folk music examples that sample choral music from Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America.

The first essayist in the section “A Communal Art” took responsibility for exploring the intricacies of choral range and community definition in order to provide a strong framework for the book. The choral music in this section draws from broad geographic locations, reaching from Tanzania, through Decatur, Illinois, and on to the Russian steppes. In the second section, “Grassroots Aesthetics,” one learns about chorus and community concord and discord in Sardinia, music and morality in Great Britain, and the choral circles of early Soviet workers’ clubs. “Minority Identities” has essays on the 1877 Fisk Jubilee Singers’ tour of Holland and the “New Negro” chorales of the 1920s and 1930s, and an essay titled “From Communism to Yiddishism” examines the history of the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus in New York. The next section, “The Activist Chorus,” examines labor union choral groups and GLBT choruses. The final part of the book, “In the Western Tradition,” offers essays on social models in nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe and comments on near-professional symphonic choirs.

Chorus and Community is well indexed, and one can easily find song titles, composers, conductors, choirs, religious sects, and geographic locations. The volume includes the rich feature of a compact disc with eighteen samples of choral music, a list of the contents of the CD, text translations of foreign language pieces on the CD, and contributors’ brief biographies. The book misses the opportunity, however, to integrate these valuable supplements into a meaningful whole that serves to strengthen the essays. A serious reader finds it cumbersome, but necessary, to connect the elements to make the best use of the volume’s fine features. For example, to understand how the choral examples on the CD relate to the organization of the book, one must comb through more than three hundred pages of text to remember how they make sense.

While each essay could stand alone, it is the conceptual nature of the whole, enriched by the supplemental material, that is the real achievement of Chorus and Community. Ahlquist’s introduction is valuable, as it comments on the essays she has chosen for this book. In addition to this overview, the reader would benefit from short editorial essays that discuss strengths, weaknesses, and future directions for the five parts and connect the eighteen recorded choral pieces to the thrust of the book. The book’s value would be greatly increased if it provided more of a framework to facilitate thinking about the community chorus as a statement of values and exploration of identity and the role of choral music for the performer and the listener.

It is Karen Ahlquist’s hope that this volume will be read by singers, musicians, listeners, community leaders, policy makers, and musical philanthropists. Make a note right now to pick up a copy of Karen Ahlquist’s Chorus and Community, and when you do, also grab Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, about the role of social connections, the “social capital” that has been a very real commodity in the collapse and revival of American community. Personal or classroom study of the concept of music and community would be rounded out by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, which examines the changes in community celebration throughout time and space.

—Karyl Denison Eaglefeathers
SUNY–Empire State College

The Baseball Songbook: Songs and Images from the Early Years of America’s Favorite Pastime, by Jerry Silverman. Van Nuys, California: Alfred Publishing, 2007. 171 pages, introduction, index, photographs, CD, $19.95 paper.

Jerry Silverman’s The Baseball Songbook provides a glimpse into what it would have been like to be around baseball when it was getting started as an American pastime. Using his knowledge of baseball history and musicology, Silverman has put together a friendly and fun historical text and songbook that will appeal to folklorists, musicians, and teachers, not to mention your everyday baseball fan.

Describing forty-one baseball songs composed and performed between 1867 and 1922 could be a dry task, but not for Silverman. Along with lively text and some humor thrown in for good measure, he effectively uses close to ninety historical photos of sheet music covers, baseball players, teams, stadiums, crowds, landscapes, and advertisements to illustrate the words, music, and meaning of these songs. The book includes full musical notations and guitar chords for each song, as well as a CD. The recording contains partial samples—usually a minute or less of each song—sung by the author himself with his guitar.

The strength of the book is in the research and the little doors Silverman leaves open for the reader to explore. In a short time, you can learn about some of the lesser known but still very important composers and lyricists of the time, the role of women as baseball players in 1867, or how Red Barber (Brooklyn Dodgers) did his early radio broadcasts. You also learn about baseball, of course: the star players, the defunct Federal League, and—believe it or not—the benefits of wearing padded trousers for stealing bases.

Teachers could make good use of this book, along with folklorists and musicians. The book could be an alternative way to present history to students. The authentic photos could be easily used as practice for document-based questions on standardized tests. Musicians and performers would welcome the musical notations and CD to assist with learning these songs. Silverman also provides interesting stories tracing the origins of some songs, especially the popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1908). Finally, the book opens up many research questions and provides some answers for folklorists.

In his introduction, Silverman hints at the large amount of material that went into creating a book such as this. I hope he continues his research and produces more books on this subject. The Baseball Songbook is certainly an important resource for learning about American life.

—Cristina Muia, independent folklorist

The Pied Piper: A Handbook, by Wolfgang Mieder. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007. 189 pages, glossary, index, $55.00 cloth.

This study of the Pied Piper legend makes an important contribution to contemporary folklore scholarship. Eminent folklorist Wolfgang Mieder, author of Der Rattenfänger von Hameln: Die Sage in Literatur, Medien, und Karikaturen [The Rat Catcher of Hamelin: The Legend in Literature, the Media, and Cartoons], has considerable expertise in this area. The author first visited Hamelin on a tour for schoolchildren. Enchanted by “the spell of the Pied Piper who lurks around every corner” (21), he has maintained his interest in the subject ever since.

Like other works in the Greenwood Folklore Handbooks series, this volume targets an audience of high school and college students, as well as general readers. The author presents his subject matter eloquently, in a lively and engaging style. Although the book is accessible to general readers, it also achieves impressive scholarly depth, with many thoughtprovoking and interesting examples. Most Pied Piper scholarship has been published in German, so this in-depth study in English, including texts translated by the author, provides a significant resource for English-speaking scholars in a variety of fields.

In Chapter One, Mieder explains the book’s purpose: “to show and explain how and why the ‘Pied Piper’ legend has found such wide distribution geographically and such long-lasting significance historically” (1). Originating in thirteenth-century Germany, the Pied Piper legend describes a mysterious musician who rids Hamelin of rats by playing his magic pipe. After the townspeople refuse to pay his fee, he leads all of the children away from their village. Their sorrowing parents suppose that the children have died; sadly, they never see their children again.

Mieder observes that the Pied Piper, a strong and charismatic leader, has both positive and negative potential. In various forms, the Pied Piper “is indeed everywhere, always looking to enchant or deceive people to follow him en masse without much thought or analysis” (2). Historically, the Pied Piper narrative may originate from the Children’s Crusade of 1212, the Battle of Sedemünder in 1259, the Black Death, Saint Vitus’s dance, or children’s and young adults’ departure from Germany to participate in colonization of the East (8–10). No matter how the story originated, it has become iconic of dangers related to leadership. Magazine and newspaper headlines like “Pied Piper for Industry” and “The Pied Piper of Video” show how broadly people have applied the Pied Piper image to everyday life (149–51).

Classifiable as either a folktale or a legend, “The Pied Piper” presents a fictive world with a kernel of truth. Mieder examines the historical documents that connect the narrative to specific times and locations, demonstrating the depth and duration of people’s interest in the story. He provides representative variants in Chapter Two: early texts, the Grimm brothers’ version of the story in their 1816 collection of German legends, later variants from 1839 to 1978, English publications from 1605 to 2002, and Pied Piper folk songs. Some songs portray the Pied Piper as a jolly traveler, rather than an evil kidnapper of children. This positive image may come from the likelihood that “the Pied Piper of the legend was made into a scapegoat by the townspeople of Hamelin because of their guilty conscience at having been involved in one way or another in the departure of the children” (64).

Chapter Three, “Scholarship and Approaches,” concisely summarizes historical, folkloristic, and literary analyses of the Pied Piper. These details give the reader an excellent basis for understanding the story’s broad appeal. In Chapter Four, Mieder presents a fascinating array of examples from literature, music, film, art, stamps, puzzles, and print journalism. His enthusiasm for discovering varied incarnations of the Pied Paper makes this chapter a delight to read. Among the literary examples are poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, Ambrose Bierce, Bertolt Brecht, and Günter Grass. Illustrations for the chapter include amusing cartoons and photos of decals, pamphlet covers, and sculptures, as well as a photo of the Rattenfängerhaus (in English, the Pied Piper House) in Hamelin.

Mieder reminds us that “nobody knows who the next Pied Piper will be and what that Pied Piper has in store in the eternal struggle between good and evil” (162). With this book in hand, we have a much better understanding of folk wisdom regarding the ambiguity of leadership.

—Libby Tucker, Binghamton University

Chicano Folklore: A Handbook, by María Herrera-Sobek. Greenwood Folklore Handbooks. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006. 296 pages, photographs, glossary, filmography, bibliography, web resources, index, $55.00 cloth.

María Herrera-Sobek, Luis Leal Endowed Chair in Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and perhaps one of the most highly published of contemporary Chicano scholars, has produced a handbook that surveys the field of Chicano folklore from several perspectives. It is at once a compendium of cultural creativity in a gamut of folklore genres, a cultural and political history of the Chicano movement, and a history of the discipline of Chicano folkloristics.

The book is chock-full of interesting examples in a range of genres, which give the reader a glimpse into the artfulness and humor of Chicano folklore. The sample texts and analysis are particularly strong in the author’s areas of expertise: literary forms such as ballad (corrido), legend, oral tradition, and feminist theory. Her discussion of the three key legendary female figures—Doña Maria or La Malinche (Cortés’s Aztec interpreter and consort), La Llorona (the Wailing Woman), and the Virgin of Guadalupe—is compelling, as is her treatment of key male social bandit figures Joaquín Murieta and Gregorio Cortez. The range of folklore forms is encyclopedic—from narrative to song, folk speech, children’s songs and games, folk theater, belief, and medicine, with a cursory mention of dance, costume, and visual arts. A few family recipes are included that look enticing.

The “Scholarship and Approaches” section is particularly strong. The author divides her subject matter into four phases. The first generation (1893–1930), epitomized by Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, focused on the Spanish origins of Hispanic folklore of the United States. The second generation (1930–50) of Arthur León Campa stressed the Mexican origins of Mexican American folklore. The third generation (1950–70), dominated by the towering presence of Don Américo Paredes, “adds the concept of race and class to the study of folklore” (204) and introduces the role of folklore as social mediator in an engaged, performative context. The final phase (1970–present) is composed of the heirs of Paredes, the leading theorists in the field. These include the author, José Limón, John McDowell, Enrique Lamadrid, Norma Cantú, and Olga Nájera-Ramiréz, among others. The emergence of gender studies is a hallmark of this most recent period. Notably, feminist cultural critique resuscitates and reevaluates maligned female cultural figures.

The term Chicano/a, as the book’s preface explains, is a folk term popularized by the Mexican American civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I would add that the term has had its greatest currency in those areas with the largest communities of Mexicanos in those decades: Texas, California, and the Chicago area. The fact that “Chicanos in New York” as a phrase gets no hits in Google is further indication that the term is not in active use in our region. While the author makes reference to the current waves of migrants, stating that “the continued expansion of the Chicano and Latino population in the United States guarantees that more and more Chicano folk traditions will become part of the cultural landscape of the entire United States” (222), I am not sure that term has emic currency throughout the entire Mexican immigrant community.

One dynamic tension that threads through the volume—and is inherent in discussions of the history of the discipline—is the differentiation of Chicano folklore from Mexican folklore. In the section on folk narrative, all the examples of myth are derived only from pre-Columbian Mexican origins. I am curious to hear if and how the Chicano interpretation of Aztlán, the legendary ancestral home of the Aztecs, differs from the Mexican. Also, the author asserts that Chicano folklore descends from three cultural strands: indigenous, European, and African. I had hoped for some supporting details of the African dimensions of Chicano culture in the United States, beyond the references to the Afro-Mexican communities in Guerrero/Oaxaca and Veracruz, Mexico.

The author provides a vibrant, firsthand picture of the birth and early growth of the United Farm Workers Movement. Clearly Cesar Chavez understood the power of communicating messages through folkloric forms, especially song. There is also a comprehensive discussion of the varied ways in which contemporary Chicano authors have used the materials of folklore in their works.

The handbook is not adventurous in its discussion of emergent folklore forms. While the author mentions narcocorridos, the corridos of September 11 are also an important genre, especially for us in the Northeast. The aesthetics of lowriders, the imagery of tattoos, the musical artistry of sonideros, and the verbal arts of hiphoperos could have also been included. There are some omissions in more traditional forms, as well: a discussion of dance should mention genres like folklórico, Danza Azteca, and concheros. A survey of traditional medicine might have included legendary healers like Don Pedro Jaramillo from Los Olmos, Texas. The choice of photographs could have been more comprehensive, and the failure to include a portrait of Américo Paredes is unfortunate.

Herrera-Sobek has written Chicano Folklore: A Handbook in a highly accessible style for general readers, and the volume will certainly find a wide audience. Its extensive bibliography and web resources give students of all levels the necessary tools for further research and analysis.

—Emily Socolov
Mano a Mano:
Mexican Culture without Borders

Books-to-Note is a regular feature of Voices and was published in Voices Vol. 34, Spring-Summer 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.