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 which 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 my paper I will explore the elements Marcantonio modifies in order to subvert these fairy tales with a Latinx flavor.