Juan Bautista Rael, a native of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico was a highly influential ethnographer of his Hispano people of Northern New Mexico- Southern Colorado. Trained as a linguist and folklorist at the University of California-Berkley, he came back to the little Hispano villages tucked away in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to record the Spanish folktales, songs, and linguistic patterns that make this region culturally unique.
He recorded over 500 New Mexican folktales for Cuentos Españoles de Colorado y Nuevo México, his monumental and still the largest collection of spanish-language folktales. Under the mentorship of the renowned folklorist Aurelio Espinosa, Rael completed his doctrinal studies at Stanford and remained there as a professor for 31 years.
In 1940, on equipment borrowed from Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress Archive of American Folksong, Rael began recording alabados -New Mexican hymns-, wedding songs, folk drama, and dance tunes that he would later transcribe and donate to the Library of Congress.
This is available today online and is a great resource for the student of New Mexican folklore!
Included are hundreds of recordings of songs recorded in the 1940s, most with textual transcriptions, but without much analytical development.
Check it out:
Al Pie de este santo altar,
an alabado at the crucifixion scene of Our Lord.
The Juan B. Rael Collection- Library of Congress
Stanford Memorial Resolution of Juan's Death
Stanford's Latin American and Iberian studies collections
