RFG Talk: Fractured Fairy Tales and Subversion: Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos by Patricia Marcantonio

Inside a cardboard box, Mama packed a tin of chicken soup, heavy on cilantro, along with a jar of peppermint tea, peppers from our garden, and a hunk of white goat cheese that smelled like Uncle Jose’s feet.
That meant one thing.
“Roja, your abuelita is not feeling well,” Mama told me. “I want you to take this food to her.”
“But Mama, me and Lupe Maldonado are going to the movies,” I replied, but felt guilty as soon as I’d said it.

These are the lines that open Patricia Santos Marcantonio’s fractured version of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. In her retelling of this and other ten fairy tales published in the volume Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), the Mexican American author makes use of a series of elements to provide a Latinx version of these fairy tales to counterbalance the lack of representation of Latinx children in the books she read growing up in the United States. In this presentation, Marina Bernardo Flórez will explore the elements Marcantonio modifies in order to subvert these fairy tales with a Latinx flavour.

Dr. Marina Bernardo Flórez received her Ph.D. in Representation and Construction of Cultural Identities at the University of Barcelona. She researches Chicanx children’s literature and carried out postdoctoral research as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2023) within the Fulbright Program. She is a member of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) and the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Barcelona.

Zoom attendance link

Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group