Women's Tales from the New Mexico Wpa

History. Folklore. Latino/Latina Studies. At the height of the 1930s' Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt instituted a Federal Writers Project as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Many writers participated through activities such as compiling a series of state guides, gathering folksongs, and recording the oral narratives of still-living ex-slaves. New Mexico's project workers included two women interviewers, Lou Sage Batchen and Annette Hesch Thorp. Their work placed particular emphasis upon gathering Hispanic women's tales, or cuentos, both folktales and vivid details of a way of life now gone. These retellings from the 1930s and 1940s, translated from the Spanish by unknown contemporaries, have been preserved in WPA archives till now, and are for the most part reaching publication only with this volume from Arte Publico, diligently edited by Tey Diana Rebolledo and Maria Teresa Marquez.