Be Good or Else
Most New Mexicans have heard the story of La Llorona—“the weeping woman,” the ditch witch, the mysterious ghost who’s said to wander this state’s arroyos crying for the children she once purposefully drowned. Many people believe she really exists, most probably don’t, but nearly all are in agreement that telling stories of her seems to be a fairly effective method for scaring young children out of playing in ditches.
Another, although lesser-known, New Mexico figure of this sort is El Abuelo—“the grandfather,” the bogeyman. Known with variations as El Agüelo, El Cuco, El Coco, El Cucuye, and so forth, the idea of El Abuelo undoubtedly originated as part of the traditional, masked Matachines dances performed annually in so many rural New Mexico villages and pueblos—dances incorporating Native American dance steps and European costumes, music, and history. At these events, the aggressive but clownish figure of the dancing Abuelo can seem especially frightening to young children, with a power that seems to extend far beyond the dance; he appears, as folklorist Thomas J. Steele wrote in 2001, to somehow have “a life outside the theater.”
This frightening extra dimension may be thanks in part to such ominous sayings as “Si no te sosiegas, llamo el Abuelo”—“If you don’t behave, I’ll call in the grandfather.” And more than one traditional lullaby, such as the following included in Rafaela G. Castro’s Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans, tells of this bogeyman as well...
A la ruru, mi hijito,
Duérmase ya,
Que viene el coco
Y se lo comera!(Lullaby, my little son,
Sleep now,
For the bogeyman might come,
To eat you up!)
In northern New Mexico, the image of El Abuelo—striding across the ground cracking a whip, yelling about various children’s behavior, his face unseen behind a mask or slathered-on makeup—has long been used to frighten children into obeying parents or going to bed on time. In some tales, under some names, accounts of him seem to blur with stories of giants, and with stories of Bigfoot. Today, as El Kookooee, this traditionally feared and revered bogeyman meets a fiery death every October, when residents of Albuquerque’s South Valley construct a twenty-foot-tall wooden effigy of the figure, and then burn it to the ground.
In 2006, the October 24, 2007 Albuquerque Tribune recounted the words of local artist Tom Powell that “as El Kookooee was in flames, the image of [his] face came out from the smoke and started to glow”—as if the old bogeyman was trying to say that they might burn him, but he would be back.
And the following October, he was.
Then there are los duendes—“the dwarfs.” In an article in the July-September 1910 issue of the Journal of American Folklore, Alexander F. Chamberlain described los duendes as “Elves and fairies, little infant-faced angels, who cannot reach either heaven or hell, but must inhabit the air. They are said to be either male or female, some black, etc. Again, they are said to be just like gnomes.”
Author Stephen Ausherman recently resurrected the notion of los duendes in his terrific new guidebook, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Albuquerque, in which he credited los duendes for certain anonymous acts of trail maintenance in the desert east of Albuquerque.
Ausherman wrote:
I had driven along [the Golden Open Space’s] barbed-wire fences perhaps a half dozen times in as many years, assuming it was private ranchland. But then small Open Space signs mysteriously appeared on the posts of its padlocked gates. Later, pink and orange survey flags sprouted from the gritty earth, forming a dotted line that wended through juniper savanna. Unable to locate anyone willing to take credit for the trail work, I reached the only logical conclusion: the land was beset with los duendes.
Some people describe them as industrious elves, others as evil dwarfs. In his 1910 paper, “New-Mexican Spanish Folk-Lore,” Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa identified los duendes as “individuals of small stature who frighten the lazy, the wicked and in particular the filthy.” Their origins and motives remain a mystery.
Espinosa’s paper, which Ausherman cited, also tells of a Santa Fe woman who claimed to know almost for a fact that los duendes live communally underground in houses built inside of caverns, venturing out only at night to steal food and clothing or to go shopping.
And in support of the view of los duendes as helpful elves, Espinosa wrote:
The following story is one well known: A family once moved from one place to another, and, on arriving at the new house, the mother was looking for the broom to sweep. Her daughter, a lazy and careless girl, had forgotten it in the old home. Presently a dwarf appeared, descending slowly from the roof with the broom in his hand, and, presenting it to the lady, he said, "Here it is!"
(If any reader of "My Strange New Mexico" knows a word meaning something along the lines of “creepy, yet hilarious,” consider e-mailing it to mike@mystrangenewmexico.com. This column may have a use for it.)
If the idea of El Abuelo helps get one’s kids to sleep, and the idea of los duendes helps keep them clean and hardworking, then the idea of el basilisco—“the basilisk”—may be ideal to keep them crying softlyin their rooms, with their doors locked, feeling too paralyzed by fear and anxiety to do much of anything.
El basilisco, in most New Mexican accounts, is born as the result of a hen impregnated by an aged rooster; in some accounts it resembles a one-eyed feathered worm, in others, an almost shapeless black mass, or a cross between a snake and a chicken; in almost all of them, it takes only a single glance from its lonely eye for it to kill you. Legendary New Mexico historian Marc Simmons wrote about el basilisco in Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, recording that its “roots revert back to a fabled reptile of the African desert with a breath and look said to be fatal.”
In a recent personal interview with “My Strange New Mexico,” Tom Romero—a former resident of the town of Chico, in northeastern New Mexico’s Colfax County—recalled being told as a child that, once a basilisco hatches, “It gets out, burrows down, then peeks out of the ground, and anything it sees dies. ...In the northeast part of New Mexico and southern Colorado, people still talk of it. There’s no La Llorona away from the river, so that’s how they keep the kids home on the prairies.”
Romero recalled that whenever a farm’s lamb would die without an easy explanation, the basilisco would be blamed, and he recalled hearing that the only way to kill these wormy creatures was to show them their own reflections. He remembered hearing that some kids, before beginning to play a game of baseball or something called “Fox and the Geese,” would walk around through the fields first, holding mirrors at an angle, so that the creatures would see their own selves and wither away, instead of seeing the children and inadvertently murdering them all.
All of these entities—from the ghostly La Llorona, to the ever-evolving Abuelo, to the mischievous duendes and the deadly basiliscos—still receive a degree of belief from a number of New Mexicans, usually from those who grew up being told of them—and no doubt their believers’ worldviews are all the stranger and more interesting for it. The rest of us, however, can still enjoy a certain strangeness as well—that of a world in which people choose to terrify their children with the fear of ghosts and evil dwarfs instead of, say, teaching them to stay out of ditches so as not to be killed in a flash flood, or to work hard simply because there’s work that needs doing.
***
Be sure to check out the newest feature of Mystrangenewmexico.com—“The Daily Strange’’!
Updated once every weekday at Mystrangenewmexico.com/daily, “The Daily Strange” features a short posting about one of New Mexico’s strangest current events—from the woman who thought she saw her boyfriend in a pornographic film—to a recent attack with a barbecue fork.
And, if you get a chance, pick up a copy of the May 2008 issue of New Mexico Magazine, for an article by Mike Smith about a very strange 1940 symphony concert performed deep in a historic mineshaft.
***
