Folklórico

The term folklórico (folkloric) may refer to either Latino cultural practices popularly identified in the United States with a traditional Hispanic American past, or to the field of folklore studies to which many early Latino scholars, such as Américo Paredes, contributed. To cite three examples of the former, Latino cultural practices identified with traditional Hispanic American culture include such customs as folkloric Mexican dances performed at Mexican American celebrations, Afro-Cuban music played at Cuban American festivals, or the traditional cultural practices [Page 892]of Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans as displayed, for instance, at the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York.

The second and broader definition of folklórico refers to the field of folklore studies as practiced by scholars like Paredes in the 1950s and 1960s who sought to recover ethnic minority history, in Paredes's case, that of Mexican Americans, by recuperating the “folk” narratives and other cultural practices of that group. Paredes and other early ethnic minority folklorists, such as the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, sought through their research to give voice to their submerged ethnic group, offering a resistant folk counter or oppositional narrative to dominant accounts that either neglected or erased that group's history. The resistant element in their work, set within the larger project to recuperate ethnic American (folk) history, laid the foundation for later fields such as Chicano/a studies, Latino/a studies, and African American studies. Despite the relative decline of folklore studies as a scholarly discipline (see below), ethnic minority folklorists such as Paredes and Hurston, today regarded as foundational ethnic minority intellectuals, continue to be the subject of scholarly studies across the humanistic disciplines.