Those searching the Internet for Latin American fairy tales in English will need more than the sites recommended in our last post: “International Fairy Tales Online.” Though one can find tales from Brazil and from Mayan culture on the sites we recommended, a search for Mexican tales (for example) yields nothing.
Yesterday's announcement of the Día de los Muertos Barbie, and the recent movies Coco and The Curse of La Llorona, prove that Mexican fairy tales are of interest to English-speaking audiences—if not yet easy for them to find online. Back in 2001, this subject came up on the SurLaLune Discussion Board, and members of the community, including site author Heidi Anne Heiner, made suggestions of print resources that the interested reader may wish to note or bookmark.
In 2016, the Latin Folktales blog was published with the purpose of helping to fill the online fairy tale gap addressed in this post. All we know about the authors of Latin Folktales is that they are “four Latin American girls from different countries, Colombia, Peru and Brazil, living in New York City.” A click on the site's menu icon reveals an organization of the site's twenty-one tales according to country, including: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru.
Another site that offers an engaging first glance at Latin American fairy tales (or folktales with supernatural elements) is a post from WhyNotSpanish.com called “Latin American Folktales and Legends.” This post introduces readers not only to La Llorona but also to eight other fairy tale figures from Latin America. General introductions such as these are a great way for interested readers to find search terms to use in further Internet research or in library catalogs, which will lead to many rich resources in print.
One such print resource is The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library series. SurLaLune's blog offers this description of the Latin American volume from that series, Around the World: Latin American Folktales: Stories from Hispanic and Indian Traditions by John Bierhorst (2007), and this title is also available as a Kindle book.