Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Citlali Diaz Humanities

Storytelling as Cultural Preservation: The Stories Still Singing in Lowland Jalisco

Scholars Journal

How can the process of storytelling—through fiction, photography, and poetry—be incorporated into the preservation of folktales and oral stories of rural southern Jalisco? To what extent is the preservation of these folktales and oral stories, as well as the act of storytelling itself, intertwined with the preservation of the culture, language, and history of this region’s small villages? Juan Rufo’s two short novels, El Llano en Llamas (The Burning Plain) and Pedro Páramo, vividly portray Rulfo’s home state of Jalisco, Mexico. Specifically he represents the state’s southern region which is defined by its scattered country villages. Scholars of Rulfo have stayed true to his illustrations of lowland Jalisco, further describing the regions as primitive places of hard labor filled with dying frugal people. They seem to have forgotten that despite Rulfo’s own words asserting the region as one of no hope, there is still life in this region. Citlali aims to return to these villages to demonstrate what some scholars may have missed. By interviewing individuals in the southern Jalisco countryside for their own folktales and oral stories, Citlali’s project strives to preserve the historical and cultural tales of a select few of southern Jalisco’s rural communities through written documentation. In studying these folktales and incorporating them into one long fictional narrative, Citlali hopes to investigate how the process of storytelling contributes to the preservation of the culture, language, and history of this region’s beautiful rural villages.