Tag Archives: Narrative

The Church on the Hill

Nationality: Mexican-Chinese
Age: 37
Occupation: Student TA
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 19th, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The following are the informant’s exact words:

“This is a story that my grandmother tells. It’s a pretty popular story, umm… that involves that… Juan Diego, a young man’s name… a peasant and a Mexican. And when she tells it, it is that he is walking one day, uhh… and the Virgen di Guadalupe appeared to him and said, “I’d like you to build me a church, here.” It was a particular hill I believe. And uhh… and he was like, “Well okay, I guess”. And ummm…  then he goes to, I believe, the power that be, the kinda Catholic Church, the bishop. And he says, “Okay well we need to build this church because the Virgen di Guadalupe appeared to me and said she wants a church.” And, uhhh, the bishop, because of, you know,  the lowly statues of this peasant, Juan Diego, said, “Well you know, why should we believe you, you need to have some proof, you need to find some proof.” So he’s kinda turned away. And the next day, or I don’t know, a week later I suppose, he’s walking by the same place, but he actually tries to go a different way, he’s kind of trying to avoid her I think (laughs), but she appears again! And she’s like, “Hey, why are you trying to avoid me?” You know. And he proceeds to tell her, ummm, you know, “They don’t believe me, you know, there’s no proof.” And she says, “Well, climb up on this hill and uhhh pick some roses, and uhh pick these roses umm to bring to this bishop.” And umm so he does that, he picks these roses. And he carries them in his ‘thilma’, in his shirt, uhh kinda like this, like makes a kind of pouch with his shirt and carries them. And then goes to the bishop and says, “Okay, she appeared to me again.” And uhh the bishop’s like, “Well where’s your proof?”And so he, he drops the flowers from his shirt. And you know, he’s thinks like, here’s my proof, the flowers, the roses. But actually, the roses, being carried in the shirt, had stained his shirt, his ‘thilma’ and there was an image of the Virgen di Guadalupe. And then the bishops all got down on their knees, because this is a holy thing, you know, and imagine this miracle, ‘milagro’, and so he got down on his knees. And there’s a church there today, right this is a church, a famous church, and that’s the story of that church.”

The informant said that his grandmother told him the story when he was much younger. The informant is half Mexican, and he included several Spanish words in his retelling of the story. The story seems very personal to the informant, because he learned it from a cherished family member and it ties back to his heritage. However, he said that he could not remember the name of the church, though he knew it at one point. Thus, the story meant more to him as a tale in itself, tying back to his grandmother, his Mexican heritage, and his religion, than a tale about a specific church. When he was telling it to me, his voice became more excited towards the end of the tale, when Juan Diego’s proof succeeds in convincing the bishops to believe him and build the church. The informant believed in the tale and regarded it highly.

Many narratives have meanings beyond the literary plot. This narrative has ties to heritage and religion. The informant, living in Los Angeles, doesn’t often get to celebrate his unique heritage and religion, and narratives like this help to reaffirm some of his beliefs. The story venerates both the Virgin of Guadalupe, the new Catholic church, and the efforts of a poor peasant man following the will of God. Thus, it is held dearly by a religious common-man. I found the tale interesting, more so because of the informant’s enthusiasm and emotional connections to it. I don’t know if I believe that the roses stained the shirt in the form of the Virgin, but I believe that something similar could have happened, or that the stain could have looked similar to her form. In any case, the connotations of the story are more important that it’s actuality. I think this legend is a good example of the strength of Mexican heritage and familial ties, the prominence of Catholicism in Mexico and its emotional power, and the tendency of legends to connect with the common-man.

It should also be noted that I didn’t know how to spell some of the Spanish words, specifically “thilma”, and I couldn’t find it online. I spelled it phonetically.

 

Noble Thief

Nationality: Armenian
Age: 59
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: February 23, 2013
Primary Language: Armenian
Language: Russian, English, and Armenian

Form of Folklore:  Narrative (Marchen)

Informant Bio:  The informant was born and raised in Yerevan, Armenia until 1990, when she and her family moved to the United States (Glendale, California), at the age of thirty six.  Most of the folklore she has been exposed to is founded in Armenian culture.  Her social surroundings in Armenia and her father are her primary sources of folklore.

Context:  The interview was conducted in the dining room of the informant’s house.

Item:    There once was a thief who wanted to repent for his sins and stop being a thief so he went to the nearest church to ask for God’s forgiveness.  The priest at the church told him that he should simply try to be a good person.  The thief asks, “How will I know if God has forgiven me?”  The priest points to a tree in the yard of the church and says, “When the fruit from that apricot tree grows, God has forgiven you.”  So the thief leaves and doesn’t steal from anyone even though he is really poor and is in need.  He keeps coming to check if any fruit has grown on the tree, but every time he checks, there’s no fruit.  Finally, he’s so desperate that he knocks on the door of a middle aged woman to ask for some help and shelter (so that he doesn’t steal again).  The woman say, “Well, I live here alone with my three children and we don’t have much but you are welcome to stay.”  Later, that night the children are begging there mother to give them food and she tells them that food is cooking on the stove and will be ready soon.  The thief sees that the woman seems to be boiling some sort of soup.  The children asked if the food is ready and the woman simply says, “Soon, soon”.  The children are running around and playing with each other as they wait for the food to be ready.  They play so hard that they get exhausted and fall asleep.  The thief approaches the woman and tells her that she is a horrible woman for not feeding her children before they fell asleep.  The woman, with tears on her face, says, “Sir, come see, I have no food.  All I have is a stone boiling in this pot.  I lie to my children that there will be food soon so that they may fall asleep with the prospect of being fed.”  The thief is startled and deeply saddened by this news, so much so that he leaves in the middle of the night and steals food for the woman and her children.  He leaves the food at their house and leaves.  On his journey from the house, he passes by the apricot tree in the church yard and to his surprise sees that there is fruit on the apricot tree.

Informant Comments:  The informant loves this story and told it to her children as her father had told it to her.  She likes the fact that doing the right thing is not a matter of black and white.  The story implies that the thief is forgiven for his sins when he actually steals.  The informant does not believe that this actually happened but has seen acts similar to the thief’s in her personal experience.  She believes if more people heard this story and understood it, then people would look out for one another and try to do the right thing more often.

Analysis:  The idea of receiving God’s forgiveness and Christianity are apparent in this marchen but seem to lead the listener to the true moral of the story; this being that the intentions behind actions are of far greater importance than the actions themselves.  When the thief would steal for himself, he was not forgiven; when he would do nothing at all, he was not forgiven; only when he stole in order to help others less fortunate was he finally forgiven.  Regardless of how religious or non-religious one is, this story offers the listeners a comfort in knowing that when they do something that is not typically considered “right” bur for the “right” reasons, they are being moral, even if their direct actions are not so moral.

La Llorona

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Burbank, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish

“I don’t remember the details, but it’s this mother, in the myth, and her children drowned… or something like that, and then she died somehow. Anyway, this woman ended up dead and her children were drowned, so there was this link between La Llorona and the water… um… so the myth, the myth was that children were warned not to go out at night near pools of water because La Llorona would come to them and drown them and the key was that if you heard this woman crying and you were like, ‘ah, where are my children?’ or something spooky like that… if you heard it really close, that meant she was far away, but if you heard it really far away, that meant she was close, or something…

“My teacher told me the story that her grandfather told her, that one day, he decided to run away from home, or something like that, and it was nighttime, and he was somewhere in which this myth applied, and um… I guess he was… I always imagined he was by one of those pools, those, um… not inflatable pools, but like those gigantic ones that would stand and you would put water in them and they were really popular in, like, the 90s. I always imagined it like that, but it seemed to be some sort of water tower, some public means of storing water, and he was by it because he was thirsty and whatever, and he heard this crying, and he was by water, and he was a child, and he heard this crying, but it sounded far away, and he kind of… I don’t remember if he saw it, but he just, I think he looked into the water and he kind of saw over his—oh I think her eyes bled or something, something spooky, I think her eyes were bleeding—anyway, he looked into the water and he went, like, ‘AHHH! Jesus!’ and then he ran away, and he’s still here obviously because my teacher is still here.”

 

The informant was told this version of La Llorona in her 7th grade, Spanish class, which was dedicated to the study of Mexican culture on Fridays. La Llorona means the crier or the one who cries. After the recounting of the story about her teacher’s grandfather, she was asked by her teacher to illustrate the La Llorona tale.

The informant said the stories that stick with her most are ghost stories, which might be related to how her cousins told her that you can only see ghosts if you believe in them. She believed ghosts seemed like a neat proposal because it would mean that it’s possible to have life after death, but she also worried that it would be the a sort of half-life in which you would be stuck forever (where people would see you, but not come to know or understand you). She liked hearing these types of stories because she liked to draw frightening images as a child even though the stories themselves scared her. She also mentioned she was glad she did not live where the story applied, which is an interesting proposal because it implies that certain folklore only affect certain people from which it (supposedly) originated from.

What is most interesting about this telling of La Llorona is not the story itself (which is even incomplete), but the personal narrative that follows , which functions as a friend-of-a-friend legend. That part, tacked onto the first, more well known, part in a way, validates the original tale. The combination of the popular and the personal brings a big tale back to a human level and keeps it spreading.

 

For another telling of La Llorona, see:

http://www.literacynet.org/lp/hperspectives/llorona.html

Internet Predator

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 41
Occupation: Quality Assurance Manager
Residence: Harbor City, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English

“…Just remember there are a lot of fucking sickos and psychos and rapists and other terrible people that will say and do whatever they can to get you to meet up with them to hook up or do bad things to you or whatever. It worries me that you spend so much time on the internet. I heard just the other day from a guy at work that some guy was found dead in his apartment after he got some kid he had met through the internet to come over, and it just goes to show that you can’t trust anybody you meet like that. Not even if they aren’t old.”

My informant for this piece is a concerned father lecturing his daughter on the dangers of the internet. There are many tales circulating, many of them quite true, about internet predators that meet people throught the internet and do terrible things to them. This particular warning stands out in that it’s the younger party that’s the actual attacker. This may be a sort of comment on how it’s the younger generation who have a firm grip on today’s technology and maybe a subconcious fear of the young taking advantage of the old in a reverse of the usual “elderly man takes advantage of a young teen” story.

It’s certainly a vague story, but there is something threatening about the open-endedness of it.

Annotation: This particular story, though vague in detail, is brought to life in a chilling horror movie by the name of Hard Candy (2005), in which a 14 year old girl (Ellen Page, leading actress of Juno) turns the tables on a pedophile she met through the internet.

Peas in the Lungs

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 65
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Fullerton, Ca
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Okay so, this man was eating peas, and he accidentally inhaled one, and the pea grew in his lung because it was using the carbon dioxide and nutrients in his lung to get bigger. He went to the doctor’s and they x-rayed him and saw the plant growing. He went to the hospital and the doctor operated on him and took it out, then fed him pea soup as a joke.”

My informant heard this urban legend from his cousin. It’s a pretty blatant message that one should eat slowly and chew their food carefully. This narrative sounds remarkably like the watermelon-seed-in-the-stomach story, and my informant made it quite clear that he didn’t believe a word of the it. He said that his cousin isn’t known for being particularly believable. However, upon further research, it seems that this story is actually true!

An article from ABC news.com states that two years ago a man named Ron Sevden from Massachusetts had a pea go down the wrong pipe and lived with it for a month before going to the doctors, who had to surgically remove it. They even really fed him something with peas in it!

Reference: Blackburn, Bradley. Pea Sprout Removed From Massachusetts Man’s Lung. Aug 11, 2010.  http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2010/08/pea-sprout-removed-from-massachusetts-mans-lung/