This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“There is this story about all these women who were born in the 1950s in Puerto Rico, a lot of them are named Usnavy and people couldn’t figure out why and then they realized that in the 50s or the late 40s the United States military had a port in Puerto Rico and all the locals saw these huge boats and the boats said  U.S. NAVY but the letters were all evenly spaced and they thought the name of the boat was Usnavy and so they named all these little girls Usnavy.”

Background information about the performance from the informant: “I think I was visiting a friend in Puerto Rico and he was just telling me little known fact about Puerto Rico and this was one of those. Like did you know that the national frog is not even native to Puerto Rico? It’s from Hawaii ETC.”

Final thoughts: This piece of folklore is an example of folklore connected to the tourist industry the story operates a s apiece of trivia specifically designed for tourists from the United States who will get the joke. It is a piece of folklore designed by the population of the Philippines but the audience is meant to be a tourist.