Cancionero y Romancero General de Costa Rica (review)

Cancionero y Romancero General de Costa Rica (Songs and Romances of Costa Rica) is an annotated collection of Costa Rican folklore. The genres represented include romances y corridos (folk ballads), arrullos (lullabies), villancicos y cantos navideños (hymns and Christmas carols), versos políticos (political verses), and juegos y cantos infantiles (children's games and songs). The book also contains musical scores and significant variants of the songs and poems included in the collection.

The authors also offer an overview of the folkloristic studies that have been conducted in Costa Rica over the last 100 years, with special attention to works published between 1940 and 1964, when Costa Rican folklore studies were particularly strong. These studies, however, were mostly salvage operations, and very few of them employed systematic methods of investigation. This work demonstrates the need for a more comprehensive and academically rigorous study to gather a more "representative sample of Costa Rica's traditional poetry and songs" that could also "function as both popular entertainment and research tool" (p. 8). The authors remind us that "studies dealing with Costa Rican lyric poetry have been scarce, and those that are available at the moment barely tap into the cultural richness of our people" (p. 8).

Another goal of this book is to challenge the wave of elitism that currently exists among many Costa Rican scholars, who view folklore as a nonacademic discipline. The authors also question the erroneous assumption that folklore material can only be found and gathered in specific areas of the country (i.e., the northwestern province of Guanacaste) but not in more urban areas like the Central Highlands. Many of the songs and poems included in this work still thrive not only in countries that neighbor Costa Rica but also in places like Mexico and other regions of Latin America that share a "similar cultural legacy" (p. 11). Both the musical and poetic contents of this book lend themselves to a comparative study in Hispanic-American lore.

The fieldwork methodology employed in Cancionero y Romancero should prove useful to anyone interested in conducting fieldwork for the first time or wishing to refresh their skills in this area. The methods are so well described that the book could very well double as a field guide, which is exactly what the authors hoped to accomplish. They were not just collecting these songs but also studying, or trying to reconstruct from their informants' memories and narratives, the various social and religious contexts in which these genres of music and oral literature were created and performed, both in the past and contemporaneously. The authors collected the material through participant observation in various settings (school playgrounds, family reunions, during prayers, patron saint festivals, etc.). The majority of the texts, however, were obtained through oral interviews with informants ranging from five to 98 years of age. The most significant finding from this work is that it demonstrates a clear continuity in folklore transmission, of songs and poems, across generations.

The only drawback to this book is the authors' slight animosity toward mass culture, which they often view as a "degenerative" influence on folklore. For example: "mass communication had not yet 'mined' the repertory of oral material inherited from their parents" (p. 10). Aside from this blind spot, Cancionero y Romancero is a good example of the quality research and responsible scholarship that folklore scholars from Latin America have been conducting, although it has taken some time for American scholars to notice it. Given the fact that this publication is a collaborative effort by American and Costa Rican scholars, the authors have taken a major step toward narrowing this institutional and cooperational gap.