Latin American Folklore

Latin American folklore is one of the most layered and most living folk traditions in the world. It is a body of story, song, ritual, and belief that has been built, layer by layer, over the course of five centuries, from the great pre-Columbian civilizations of the Aztec, the Maya, and the Inca; through the long centuries of colonial rule, in which the Catholic religion, the Spanish and Portuguese languages, the African diaspora, and the survival of the older indigenous traditions all worked on one another; to the modern era, in which the syncretic world of the mestizo, the mulatto, the caboclo, the zambo, and the criollo has become the foundation of a new and distinct cultural inheritance. The tradition is, in a real sense, the folklore of the encounter, and it carries the marks of that encounter in every part of its being.

The geography of the tradition is vast. It stretches from the Rio Grande and the Caribbean to the tip of Patagonia, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It includes the highland Peru of the Quechua and the Aymara, the tropical lowlands of the Amazon basin, the great cities of Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, the small villages of the Andes, the plantations of the Caribbean, and the cowboy country of the Argentine pampas. In every one of these places, the older stories are still told, the older songs are still sung, the older rituals are still performed, and the older being — the goddess, the saint, the devil, the ancestor — is still honoured.

The Pre-Columbian Inheritance

The pre-Columbian civilizations of Latin America were among the most sophisticated and the most developed of the ancient world, and their mythologies are among the great bodies of world folklore. The Aztec of central Mexico, the Maya of the Yucatan and Guatemala, the Inca of Peru, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, the Mixtec of the same region, the Totonac of the Gulf Coast, the Taíno of the Caribbean, the Arawak of the same region, the Guaraní of Paraguay and southern Brazil, the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina — each of these peoples had a rich and developed mythology, and each of them has left traces in the modern folk tradition.

The Aztec mythology is one of the most complex of the pre-Columbian world. The great figures include Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, the bringer of culture, the morning star, the patron of priests, scribes, and merchants; Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, the god of night, of sorcery, of the unseen; Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird of the south, the god of war, the patron of the Mexica; Tlaloc, the rain god, the bringer of the life-giving water; and Coatlicue, the serpent-skirted mother, the goddess who gave birth to the moon and the stars. The Aztec cosmology was a cosmology of five worlds, of which the present world, the Fifth Sun, was created by the sacrifice of the gods. The Aztec calendar of 260 days, the tonalpohualli, is one of the great achievements of pre-Columbian culture, and it is still in use in some communities of Mexico and Guatemala.

The Maya mythology is the mythology of the Popol Vuh, the great K’iche’ book of the dawn of life. The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who defeat the lords of the underworld in a ballgame, are the great culture heroes of the tradition, and the story of their battle is one of the great mythic cycles of the Americas. The Maya calendar of 260 and 365 days, the Long Count calendar of thousands of years, and the great astronomical knowledge of the Maya are all part of the inheritance.

The Inca mythology is the mythology of Viracocha, the bearded creator god who walked among his people; of Inti, the sun god; of Pachamama, the earth mother; of the Apus, the mountain spirits; and of the Ayar brothers, the four brothers who emerged from the cave of Pacaritambo to found the Inca dynasty. The Inca road system, the Qhapaq Ñan, ran for thousands of miles along the Andes and carried the older stories and the older trade goods across the continent.

These mythologies were not destroyed by the conquest. They were folded into the new order, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in ways that are still being discovered. The Day of the Dead tradition of Mexico, for instance, is now recognised by folklorists as a continuation of the older Aztec month of the dead, the Miccailhuitontli and the Hueymiccailhuitl, overlaid on the Catholic feasts of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. The feathered serpent of the Aztec tradition, Quetzalcoatl, became in the colonial and post-colonial period a folk memory conflated with the figure of the Apostle Saint Thomas, said to have evangelised the Americas, and the modern folk figure of the return of Quetzalcoatl is part of the modern Latin American tradition of the return of the king.

The Catholic Overlay

The Catholic religion, brought to the Americas by the Spanish and the Portuguese, was the second great layer of the Latin American folk tradition. The Catholic religion was not only a set of beliefs; it was an entire system of practices, a calendar of feasts, a processional world, a way of marking the days and the seasons. The Catholic festival calendar of the year — Christmas, the Epiphany, Carnival, Lent, Easter, Corpus Christi, the feasts of the saints, the Day of the Dead, the Immaculate Conception, the Nativity of the Virgin — provided the rhythm of the year, and the older indigenous festivals were fitted into the new rhythm.

The saints of the Catholic calendar were particularly important. The Virgin of Guadalupe, said to have appeared to the indigenous man Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in December 1531, became the great patron of Mexico and one of the great images of the modern Latin American tradition. Her image, painted on Juan Diego’s tilma and preserved in the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, is one of the most visited shrines in the world. The Black Christ of Esquipulas in Guatemala, the Christ of the Andes, the Lord of Miracles (Señor de los Milagros) of Lima, the Christ of Oz — these are some of the great popular images of the tradition.

The festival of the patron saint of a village or a town, the fiesta patronal, is the principal calendar event in many places. The festival is a multi-day event that brings the people together for processions, masses, music, dance, food, and the occasional religious drama. The Danza de los Viejitos of Michoacán, the Danza de los Negritos of the Pacific Coast of Colombia and Ecuador, the Baile de los Diablitos of Costa Rica, the Danza de Tijeras of the Peruvian Andes, the Baile de la Conquista of Honduras and Guatemala — these are some of the great festival traditions of the modern region.

The African Diaspora

The third great layer of the Latin American folk tradition is the African diaspora. The transatlantic slave trade, beginning in the early sixteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, carried millions of West and Central African people to the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the coastal regions of the Americas. The African survivors brought with them the religious traditions of the Yoruba, the Fon, the Kongo, the Ashanti, the Ewe, the Mandinka, and many other peoples, and they preserved these traditions through the long centuries of slavery in the form of the syncretic religions of the modern region.

The syncretic religions of Latin America are the great achievement of the African diaspora in the Americas. Santería (also called Regla de Ocha or Regla de Ifá) is the Cuban form of the Yoruba religion, in which the orishas (the Yoruba gods) are identified with the Catholic saints. Candomblé is the Brazilian form, especially in the Bahian state, in which the orixás (the Brazilian Portuguese form of the name) are honoured in the terreiros (the Candomblé temples). Umbanda and Quimbanda are the Brazilian forms of the urban working-class tradition, in which the orixás, the caboclos (the indigenous spirits), the pretos velhos (the old African spirits), and the exus (the trickster spirits) are all honoured. Vodou is the Haitian form, in which the lwa (the Haitian Creole form of the name) are the great spirits. Shango is the Trinidadian form. Obeah is the Jamaican folk form. Myal is the older Jamaican form that influenced both Obeah and the later Revival Zion.

The great literary voices of the African-diaspora tradition include Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, whose novels El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953) brought the Afro-Cuban world into world literature. Wilson Harris of Guyana, whose novels of the 1960s and 1970s explored the African-diaspora world of the Caribbean. Édouard Glissant of Martinique, whose Poetics of Relation (1990) is a major work of postcolonial theory. Maryse Condé of Guadeloupe, whose novels of the 1970s and 1980s explored the African-diaspora world of the Caribbean.

The Folk Saints

The folk saints of Latin America are the great un-authorised figures of the Catholic tradition. They are not recognised by the official church, but they are venerated by the people, and they have their own feast days, their own miracle stories, their own altars, and their own pilgrimages. The most important is Santa Muerte, the Holy Death, a skeletal female figure venerated across Mexico and the Mexican-American borderlands. Santa Muerte is associated with healing, protection, and the safe passage of the dead, and her cult has grown enormously in the twenty-first century, despite the repeated condemnations of the official Catholic Church.

Other folk saints include San La Muerte, the Saint of Death, a skeletal male figure venerated in Argentina, Paraguay, and southern Brazil. The San La Muerte is often represented as a small carved figure of bone or wood, kept in the home and consulted in times of trouble. Jesús Malverde, said to have been a bandit in the early twentieth century in Sinaloa, is venerated in northern Mexico and the Mexican-American borderlands as a folk saint of the poor and the outcast, and his cult has become closely associated with the narco tradition of the region. El Niño Fidencio, said to have been a folk healer in the early twentieth century in Espinazo, Nuevo León, is venerated in northern Mexico and parts of Texas as a folk saint of the poor. Pancho Villa, the revolutionary general of the early twentieth century, is venerated in northern Mexico as a folk hero. The Niño de Atocha, a folk saint of the Spanish colonial period, is venerated across Latin America and the Mexican-American borderlands.

The Curandero and the Brujo

The folk healer, the curandero (man) or curandera (woman), is a central figure of the Latin American folk tradition. The curandero is a person with a special gift for healing, who can cure illness through a mixture of herbal medicine, prayer, and inherited formulae. The curandero’s medicine bag, the mochila, holds the tools of the trade — the yerbas (herbs), the veladoras (candles), the incienso (incense), the aguabendita (holy water), the carbones (coals), the piedras (stones), the huesos (bones) — and the knowledge of how to use them.

The brujo (man) or bruja (woman) is the folk sorcerer, the one who has chosen the darker side. The brujo is feared as a person who can lay a curse, can make a love potion, can cause illness, and can bewitch a person with the mal de ojo (the evil eye). The line between the curandero and the brujo is often a matter of reputation, and the same person can be called one or the other by different members of the community.

The great curandero and brujo tradition of the Maya highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, the Mesoamerican tradition of the huehueteotl (the old god of the fire), the Andean tradition of the paqo (the Andean priest), the Brazilian tradition of the pajé (the indigenous shaman), the Mapuche tradition of the machi (the Mapuche healer) — all of these are part of the modern folk tradition of the region.

The La Llorona and the Chupacabra

The two great folk figures of the modern Latin American tradition are the Weeping Woman and the Chupacabra. The Weeping Woman, known as La Llorona in Mexico, in Guatemala, in Honduras, and across the Spanish-speaking world, is the ghost of a woman who has lost her children and who wanders the rivers and the roads at night, wailing for them. She is one of the great folk figures of the Hispanic world, and her story is told in many forms. The ñatita of the Andes is a related but distinct tradition: the skull of a relative, dressed in clothing, kept on a household altar, and honoured on the Day of the Dead. The Trauco of Chiloé is yet another figure, a small hairy forest spirit of fertility, not a weeping woman. The three belong to different streams of Latin American folk belief, and should not be conflated.

The Chupacabra, the “goat-sucker,” is a more modern figure, first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995. The Chupacabra is described as a reptile-skinned dog-like creature with spines running down its back, and it is said to kill livestock by sucking their blood. The Chupacabra has become one of the great folk figures of the modern Latin American world, and it has spread to the Mexican-American borderlands, the Caribbean, and the southern United States.

The Gaucho, the Samba, the Cumbia

The folk music of Latin America is one of the great bodies of world music. The gaucho tradition of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil is the tradition of the cattle-ranching frontier, the payador (the improvised singer) tradition, the milonga, the chamamé, the chacarera, the zamba. The great figure of the gaucho tradition is Martín Fierro, the literary gaucho of the José Hernández poem of 1872 and 1879, who is one of the great folk heroes of the modern Argentine tradition.

The samba of Brazil is the great urban folk music of Rio de Janeiro, with its roots in the African-diaspora tradition of the Bahia and the Recôncavo. The samba of the escolas de samba (the samba schools) of Rio, which compete in the great Carnival parade every year, is one of the great popular spectacles of the world. The Candomblé drums of the Bahian tradition, the maracatu of Pernambuco, the frevo of Recife, the forró of the Northeast, the baião of the Luiz Gonzaga tradition, the tropicália of the Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil tradition — these are some of the great bodies of the modern Brazilian folk music.

The cumbia of Colombia, the son jarocho of the Mexican Gulf Coast, the son cubano of Cuba, the rumba of Cuba, the bolero of Cuba and Mexico, the corrido of northern Mexico, the huapango of the Mexican Huasteca, the marimba music of Chiapas and Guatemala, the carnavalito of Bolivia, the huayno of Peru, the chicha music of Peru, the nueva canción of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay — these are some of the great bodies of the modern Latin American folk music.

The Modern Influence

The Latin American folk tradition has had an enormous influence on the modern world. The magical realism of the modern Latin American novel, from Gabriel García Márquez to Isabel Allende to Laura Restrepo, has brought the folk world of the region into world literature. The cinema of the region, from the Cinema Novo of Brazil to the Third Cinema of Argentina to the Cinema of the Mexican Revolution to the modern Cinema of the Mexican-American borderlands, has brought the folk world to the screen. The telenovela, the great Latin American television form, has spread to the Philippines, to Turkey, to Russia, to Portugal, and to the Hispanic communities of the United States, and it is one of the great popular art forms of the modern world.

The Day of the Dead tradition has been adopted, in modified form, by the Mexican-American communities of the United States, and it has become a national holiday of the Mexican-American community. The Santería tradition has spread to the Cuban-American communities of Miami, New York, and New Jersey. The Candomblé tradition has spread to the Brazilian-American communities of New York, Boston, and Miami. The Carnival tradition has been adopted, in modified form, by the Caribbean-American communities of New York, Boston, and Toronto. The Cumbia tradition has spread to the Mexican-American communities of the borderlands, to the Andean communities of the United States, and to the Andean communities of Europe.

Latin American Folklore

In this section

Chupacabra Sightings

La Llorona Origins