Oral Literature of San Basilio de Palenque: European, African, and Creole

We built a representative corpus of the Palenque oral literature based on primary sources collected in the field by the authors, and complemented by written sources existent in archives and libraries. This article is part of a major research that undertakes the difficult task of taking oral expression into writing. The triple operation of coding (oral), recoding (writing), and decoding (critical-scientific) that forms the backbone of our work constitutes a new adjustment of the specialized discourse (academic) about Palenque. The inhabitants of Palenque themselves have incessantly reinvented their tradition from this discourse. Based on the ethnolinguistic notes and literary analysis, we make a distinction between the Hispanic, Congolese, and original elements developed in situ by this African-Creole community of the Colombian Caribbean.