Casos, historias, and tallas are all forms of storytelling that originate in Latin American folklore and have spread to the Texas and New Mexico borderlands, where large pockets of Hispanic populations reside. To assimilate into Anglo-American culture, Hispanic Americans have had to adopt many of the customs (and language) of the dominant culture, including a predominantly scientific and secular worldview. Casos, historias, and tallas can be understood as one form of subconscious resistance to this dominant cultural milieu, as these stories challenge the values of the Anglo culture through a subtle critique made through humor and sentiment. All three also attempt to negotiate a Hispanic American identity in the borderlands through narratives, often utilizing humor and subtle jests to navigate toward an ethnic and clan identity. These narrative forms are usually passed down orally (though some have been recorded and transcribed in recent years) and are complemented by both material culture and foodways to forge identity.
Casos, literally translated as “cases,” are short first-person narratives that convey a particular belief or narrate a miraculous or extraordinary event that supposedly happened to the narrator of the story. The more popular casos are testimonies that often relate the miraculous healing of a sick person by a Mexican folk healer when an Anglo doctor has been unsuccessful. In the casos found in Texas, for example, a sick person is urged by his companions to visit a local medical healer practicing traditional folk medicine. He goes, often as a last resort and only to humor the wishes of his concerned community, and is cured by the traditional medical healer, often with a deceptively simple remedy. The message here is clear: Hispanics should not forget the values of traditional culture; and the fact that the visit is prompted by the community, and not undergone alone, reinforces the importance of the larger clan identity.
Historias, literally translated as histories, are “true” stories related about someone or something. They are usually narratives that add to the history of an already well-known event, which contribute additional or missing information to the established history. In this way, they can be said to “fill in the gaps” of existing written histories, and they often provide a counternarrative to the existing official history. The importance of these historias is that they often offer a different perspective from those who are in the existing elite, with many of these historias originating as oral histories that challenge traditional class and power structures—be they Anglo, or simply of the educated and wealthy.
Tallas, which comes from the Spanish verb tallar, meaning “to rub” or “chafe,” are funny tales meant to make fun of someone present at the time of the telling. Tallas might be thought of as a Hispanic equivalent to a “roast,” an event in which the tellers express how much a person means to them counterintuitively by making fun of him or her. Richard Bauman writes that Américo Paredes, the most important ethnographer and folklorist of border culture in the United States, argues that tallas in Hispanic American culture in Texas are in many ways intercultural jests in which the teller (and audience) are struggling with maintaining a Hispanic and American identity in a border culture that is predominantly Anglo.
Candi K. Cann
See also Folklore and Folktales; Storytelling; Yarns, Yarn-spinning
Further Reading
Alvarez, Robert R., Jr. 1995. “The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 447–470.
Brunvand, Jan Harold, ed. 1996. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis.
Herrera-Sobek, María, ed. 2012. Celebrating Latino Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Cultural Traditions. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Mendoza, Louis Gerard. 2001. Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Paredes, Américo. 1995. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Austin: University of Texas Press.