The Latin American Story Finder: A Guide to 470 Tales from Mexico, Central America and South America, Listing Subjects and Sources by Sharon Barcan Elswit (review)

Elswit is a children's librarian and, as we are informed, she currently teaches in New York City. Before this title, she has published two texts based on a common topic named story, although focused on very different cultures: The East Asian Story Finder: A Guide to 468 Tales from China, Japan and Korea, Listing Subjects and Sources (2014 [2009]); and The Jewish Story Finder: A Guide to 668 Tales Listing Subjects and Sources (2012), both by the same publishing house (McFarland).

In her entry on the term "story," Nina Kolesnikoff cites Boris Tomashevskii to define it: "[a story] consists of a series of narrative motifs in their chronological sequence, moving from individual cause to effect" (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, 1997: 631–32). Elswit applies well this notion and understand stories as "selected tales told in 21 countries, where stories from people in over 75 indigenous tribes melded with the culture of Spanish and Portuguese colonials who arrived in the sixteenth century. Tales collected and told by Catholic missionaries and Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition from Europe also were adopted and changed by native Quechua, Maya and Amazonian cultures" (1).

Let's not forget the works of monks, 'conquistadors,' poets and writers who dedicated their works to the written and printed representations of these tales and stories from the sixteenth century: Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and so forth. Later on, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, we can cite a few names of authors who continued the task of rescuing from oblivion many colonial and postcolonial indigenous traditions: Ricardo Palma and Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala), José María Arguedas (Peru), Rosario Castellanos (Mexico), and many others.

With this book, readers have access not only to a collection of stories but also to a large inventory of cultural syncretism. This vast anthropological environment is the site of many ethnicities, languages, social, political and economic formations.

For Elswit the result of this process is positive: "This mix makes the stories richly captivating and unique, and yet they have been greatly underrepresented in both folklore collections and individual books in English" (1). Here lies the main contribution of this book: to reach an audience who otherwise will not have access to the richness of a collection of the nature described, at a time where there are millions of people of Latin American background living in the United States, and whose academically documented history and stories are barely known outside the educational and intellectual circles, mainly colleges and universities.

The book's structure contains acknowledgments, a preface, and the tales themselves, divided into sixteen topics: gods, seeking justice, heroic, magical escapes, etc. Elswit explains that each story has "a given number" [that] "includes subjects for all variants listed below the featured story" (5). In addition, at the bottom of them the reader will find a list of connections in alphabetical order which function as descriptive words used to "define the main subjects covered by a particular story" (5). Appendix A serves as a guide if the reader is "looking for stories from a particular people" one cannot find in the index (5). Appendix B contains a glossary. Finally, there is a bibliography, a story title index, and a subject index.

There is a claim in this collection that might provoke some criticism. In "Chapters and Challenges," Elswit declares the following: "Changing sensitivities in our modern world did mean that I had to reject other tales, though, since I am promoting stories to be shared with diverse groups" (3). She mentions a tale about women that in her opinion "isn't funny now"; or "stories which depict native...