The Bossy Gallito and Medio Pollito

One of the picture books from the Viva Cuba! article was The Bossy Gallito. As I was reading, it sounded vaguely familiar.

When I was young, we had a Reader's Digest book of fairy tales that pulled from various sources (possibly condensing them). One of the stories was "The Half-Chick" from Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book  

The half-chick, Medio Pollito, only has one leg and eye, but he is bold and adventurous and wants to meet the king. He sets off on a journey to Madrid. His mother tried to discourage him, but failing that she advises him to be polite and helpful. As water, fire, and wind ask for his assistance, he is neither helpful or polite.

In The Bossy Gallito a rooster is heading to a wedding, but shows poor self-control in not being able to resist some grains of corn in mud, dirtying his wedding finery. He asks the grass for help getting clean but is refused. The rest of the book is him asking various entities to punish his refused requests, going up the line in search of vengeance and coming up empty-clawed.

Add together those two tales and "The Little Red Hen", and it would seem that poultry tales must be about assistance getting requested and refused. I think I could make "Chicken Little" fit into that framework too, but I digress.

Medio Pollito ends up needing help from water, fire, and wind, and finds them to be a bit vindictive. While he does get out of the palace cooking pot, he ends up stuck on a weather vane, sadly overlooking the city.

While the rooster is initially asking for help and getting refused, his bossiness does not seem right. Then by being so vindictive, with all of his other requests being for revenge, he seems like an unsympathetic character. I was expecting there to be some comeuppance.

I was so wrong.

Finally he gets help from the sun, who will gladly punish for his friend (there is a special relationship between roosters and the sun). In the end the rooster gets exactly what he wants, despite being a jerk.

How did this happen?

In a way it is the same, where there is punishment for being unhelpful, but children's stories are often about encouraging behavior. Still, with the rooster as the protagonist, and his ultimate success, this seemed like a strange thing to encourage.

(In that way the story was very unsatisfying, though Lulu Delacre's illustrations of the avian wedding party were gorgeous.)

Based on other reading, I think it came down to machismo.

Tomorrow I want to spend some time on that.