Traditions of Mexican Corridos in Rolando Hinojosa’s “The Valley” and “Klail City”

The paper dwells on the traditions of Mexican and Mexican-American ballads called “corridos,” such as “Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” in the novels of Texas writer Rolando Hinojosa. Corrido that emerged in the XIX century and continues developing today is a unique phenomenon of Mexican and Mexican-American literature. It serves as a worthy material for understanding the problems of cultural interaction, cultural border and multiculturalism. The paper aims at defining the role of corridos in the fictional world of Rolando Hinojosa, the novels “The Valley” and “Klail City” were taken to be analyzed. It gives a brief overview of the genre development based on the key works of the top scholars who study corridos in Russia and abroad. The article also dwells on the creation of the corrido about the folk hero Gregorio Cortez. There is a hypothesis proposed to explain Hinojosa’s decision to opt for the Mexican ballads: the writer was averse to the didactic and propagandistic ideas of Chicano literature of that time which prompted him to use corridos as a means of the hidden moral. Traditional corrido motifs such as revenge, injustice and social inequality are analyzed. The article concludes that in Hinojosa’s polyphonic and fragmented novels, corrido type stories perform plot-forming and compositional functions, direct the reader’s perception.

Antip Panov from the White Sea Coast in the Historical Memory of Russian Society

This article turns to the episode of the rescue of Peter I by a local peasant Antip Panov during a storm on the White Sea in June 1694 and covers its reflection in the historical memory of Russian society. This incident is confirmed by several written sources, the most valuable being the story of the Arkhangelsk merchant M.A. Mamonov retold by I.I. Golikov, which contains information about the conflict between the tsar and Panov. Until the mid-19th century, all Peter the Great’s biographers mentioned his rescue in a storm in 1694, but kept silent about the conflict. N.G. Ustryalov rejected I.I. Golikov’s information about Panov, who “boldly shouted at the terrible tsar”, considering it an “invention”. At the same time, a complex of historical legends about Panov had been formed, recorded by S.V. Maksimov in 1855. In fact, Antip Panov became one of the central figures in the historical memory of the Pomors about Peter I and his era. The 19th-century legends contain fictional details and migratory subjects. By the early 20th century, Panov had been viewed by society as both a real historical character and a folk hero. This happened because Panov was mentioned in written historical sources as well as in oral history, which after several generations was transformed into historical legends. These folk traditions have influenced regional historical descriptions as well as Russian historiography. Using the legend about the rescue of Peter I by Antip Panov as an example, the article concludes that collective historical memory is formed on the basis of oral history, which is eventually converted into historical legends, which, in turn, affect both regional historical descriptions and national historiography

The Myth of Louis Riel

In recent years Louis Riel has become somewhat of a Canadian folk hero. At the official, scholarly, and popular levels the rebel hanged in 1885 has become the subject of much attention. Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the site of his two uprisings, have commemorated him in statue while the federal government which allowed his execution to take place in the 1880s has, in the 1980s, designated Batoche a national historic site. Canadian government money has also provided a half million dollar grant designed to allow the compilation and publication of all of Riel’s writings. Such scholarly and official interest is complemented by popular interest. Plays, poems, television dramas, and even an opera have been written about him. Riel has assumed mythical stature.

Thirty Years of Mission in Taiwan: The Case of Presbyterian Missionary George Leslie Mackay

The aims of this paper are to analyze the missionary endeavors of the first Canadian Presbyterian missionary in Taiwan, George Leslie Mackay (1844–1901), as described in From Far Formosa: The Islands, Its People and Missions, and to explore how Christian theology was established among and adapted to the Taiwanese people: the approaches that Mackay used and the missionary strategies that he implemented, as well as the difficulties that he faced. Given that Mackay’s missionary strategy was clearly highly successful—within 30 years, he had built 60 churches and made approximately 2000 converts—the question of how he achieved these results is certainly worth considering. Furthermore, from the outset, Mackay was perceived and received very positively in Taiwan and is considered something of a folk hero in the country even today. In the present-day narrative of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, Mackay is seen as someone whose efforts to establish an independent church with native local leadership helped to introduce democracy to Taiwan. However, in some of the scholarship, missionaries such as Mackay are portrayed as profit seekers. This paper seeks to give a voice to Mackay himself and thereby to provide a more symmetrical approach to mission history.

Labyrinths as Figures

Rosi’s groundbreaking trilogy Salvatore Giuliano, Il caso Mattei, and Lucky Luciano addresses the profound cultural and political transformations of postwar Italy. In Salvatore Giuliano (1962), which concerns the enigmatic death of the legendary folk hero, Rosi offers a complex portrait of Sicilian society violently ruled by the Mafia in collusion with the police and the state. Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) investigates the suspicious death of one of the most influential figures in the postwar economic boom. Lucky Luciano (1973), the treacherous figure of organized crime, is at the center of Rosi’s inquiry into the Mafia’s labyrinthine web of political alliances. Deploying his own metodo dell'inchiesta (“method of inquiry”), Rosi digs beneath the surface of official accounts of these public scandals, unearthing an underlying pattern of corrupt and lethal connections. His open endings attest to his belief in the director’s ethical responsibility to create an actively engaged spectatorship.

Remembering Pablo: Escobar refuses to be forgotten

Synonymous with Colombian cocaine and narcoterrorism, Pablo Escobar (1949–1993) was despised by the leaders of nations and became the primary target of the US government’s war on drugs. At the same time, Escobar gained fame and adulation, he entered popular culture through television and cinema, and became romanticized, idealized and turned into a myth. The aim of the paper is to analyze how Pablo Escobar became a legend and attained immortality, why this mythologizing occurred and how cultural industries added to the mythmaking process and his shaping as a folk hero.