Leyendas Del Mundo Hispano - Book Review

 

 “Leyendas Del Mundo Hispano” (Legends from the Hispanic World), written by Susan M. Bacon, Nancy A Humbach, Aitor Bikandi-Mejias and Gregg O. Courtad is a ten chapter book for Spanish language education. The book uses the technique of teaching through storytelling at intermediate level, accompanied by exercises to enrich the reading and comprehension experience. It comes from the idea that you can't really learn language without learning the culture that molds it, and which it molds in turn. 

Each chapter dives into a new tale, some of which are based on true stories and some which are strictly fictional but explain another aspect of a tradition in the country it comes from. The authors could not include every country, but it is clear that they attempted to represent a little bit from each section of the world, where Spanish is spoken. They present the reader with stories from, North America’s Mexico, and the U.S.; Central America’s, El Salvador; South America’s Argentina, Paraguay, and Colombia; the Caribbean Islands’ Puerto Rico, and Europe’s Spain. 

This reading addresses several aspects of culture which are part of my Hispanic ethnicity. These aspects include: language, knowledge and stories, food and drink, the arts, traditions, and rituals.  It is exciting to see my country acknowledged in a book not once, but twice, especially when so many other wonderful stories exist in all communities where humans exist, but those didn’t make the cut. Chapter seven, for example, talks about a shared tradition between Argentina and Paraguay as well as Uruguay, and Brazil, which involves a plant called Ilex Paraguariensis, or Yerba Mate, and how the people in these countries grind it down and enjoy it as a cold or hot tea, like coffee. However the fun part is in the mythology, according to legend, the plant is a gift from the moon spirit. One fateful night, when the moon and her cloud friend descended to earth, in human form, for a night of folly, a jaguar tried to eat them alive! Luckily for them and for humanity, they were saved by an old man and his arrows who happened upon them. 

    While Chapters 7-as detailed above- and 8 -about local handicrafts called Ñanduti- were my favorites, simply because they were mythology and traditions from my native, Paraguay, I did enjoy reading all the others. Reading these tales helped me feel a sense of connectedness to the greater umbrella of what being “Hispanic” means to other people. I like the idea of the universal human, and noticed a lot of commonalities among the stories, which only reinforced this ideology that human experience and humans themselves are often more alike than they are different. In Chapter Two we learn about Colombia’s myth of El Dorado and how the myth, based on indigenous Chibcha tribes’s ceremony for crowning a king, ended up causing real expeditions in search for the golden city. If we stop to think about this myth we notice that we have heard it before by other names. Sometimes El Dorado may be Utopia, or Atlantis, or even the Seven Cities of Gold said to be found in our New Mexico, but the myth is always fueled by the common trope of finding places full of riches to escape to. 

    Continuing with the thought of tropes and themes, the authors of the book made sure to include historical context with every tale. As a reader, the most interesting thing I found, was that the shared experience of a history of colonization unites Latin America through the trauma that it instills in a society; countries which centuries later still carry pieces of that history through things like governing systems or class systems, and even nice things like typical foods, and traditional clothing styles and art. 

    All in all, because art draws from life and life is history it makes sense that the themes of: class struggle, loss of innocent lives, political difficulties, hard work, divine intervention, and tragedy in love, are recurrent in the stories humans pass down.

    I must mention, the most challenging thing for me was accepting that my Spanish is intermediate at best. It is hard because I was learning words and phrases as the book is meant to teach them, but Spanish was my first language. As someone who loves language and respects its unique role in preserving culture, it’s painful to see where I am allowing my own culture to slip away. Nevertheless, it is also a good portent of where I need to focus my time and energy, lest I continue to lose such an irreplaceable tool in cultural enrichment. 

    MLA 7th ed

Bacon, Susan M. Leyendas Del Mundo Hispano. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print.