Oct08 folkmonsters

UNLEASHED! Scarier than Bigfoot, weirder than the Chupacabra, New Mexico’s spooks and spirits are guaranteed to make you lose sleep at night.

Folklorist Larry Torres explains. Intrepid reporter Arin McKenna takes notes. Illustrations by Holly Wood A Hollywood action character like Rambo may claim that he’s “your worst nightmare,” but he’d have a hard time competing with northern New Mexico’s village folk monsters. Can Rambo shower you with an army of lice? Smother you with cotton? Appear as a great ball of fire? His automatic weapons seem tame compared with the tactics of some of the monsters of New Mexico.

La Llorona, The Weeping Woman who mournfully searches the waterways for the children she herself drowned, is undoubtedly our most famous specter. But she’s only one of a pantheon of phantoms, some of them unique to New Mexico, others descended from Old World monsters.

Larry Torres, a scholar of northern New Mexico folklore and cultural traditions and an associate professor at the University of New Mexico, Taos, traces his family’s history in the state back 13 generations. The same monsters that frightened his ancestors into obedience terrified him while growing up in Arroyo Seco, north of Taos. Thus, he

52 NEW MEXICO | OCTOBER 2008

decided to exorcise his demons through an unusual method: research.

There are many practical reasons New Mexico is steeped in specters. Demons would haunt children for disobeying church law—useful tools in towns where a priest’s visits were months apart. Others personified the dangers colonists faced in this remote region. But most served to discipline or instruct, deterring children from dangerous situations and instilling such lessons as the importance of cleanliness and respect.

About three out of four monsters are female. That may seem a little unfair, but, Torres observes, “The females of the species seem to be very threatening to men. There is an old proverb that says, ‘Men have strength, but women have power.’” That raises the question: Did women create the monsters to instill fear and thus ensure their power? Or did men create them to put a face on their fear?

In honor of the season, we’d like to introduce you to some local ghouls.

EL COCO

The Bogeyman El Coco, also known as the Bogeyman or The Monster Under the Bed (or in the Closet), kidnaps children who refuse to go to sleep. El Coco’s strength is that he strikes without being seen.

At first, El Coco might seem a little counterproductive—what child could fall asleep knowing that a monster was watching her every move? Nevertheless, the threat of El Coco has staying power.

Torres explains: “Every summer, I teach in Memphis, Tennessee. Sometimes I take a nap in the afternoon, and my hand is hanging over the bed. Then I remember the Cocoman and I kind of bring my hand in. Now part of me—the professor—says, ‘What’s the Cocoman going to be doing 17 stories up in Memphis, Tennessee?’ But the Arroyo Seco boy knows better. We spend a long time recovering from our childhoods, and many of us never do.”

The Cocoman (El Coco’s Spanglish

www.nmmagazine.com | OCTOBER 2008 53

name) is found in many guises throughout Europe. Families in different cultures might have personal Cocomen, such as the benign house spirits of the ancient Celts and Romans, or benevolent spirits such as the Sandman, who brings good dreams.

Many New Mexico regions and villages have their own versions of this phantom.

Que Viene el Coco, an etching by well-known artist Don Francisco Goya y Lucientes, depicts El Coco as the early Spanish settlers represented him: a figure with its face wrapped in a blanket. When the settlers arrived in New Mexico, they encountered Puebloan people wrapped in blankets. These indigenous peoples became El Coco’s personification, and it was feared they stole children away.

Puebloans told their own children similar stories, but their bogeyman was Qu’ennah, and he was, of course, Spanish.

LA CURUCANA

The Lice-Infested One Children love secret places, from bramble patches to chicken coops, and these places are often infested with lice and fleas. In territorial New Mexico, children would carry these pests home and infest the entire household.

To discourage them, parents conjured up La Curucana (The Lice-Infested One).

Thought to inhabit chicken coops throughout northern New Mexico, La Curucana has a woman’s head and a chicken’s body.

She shakes her lice off on children, causing them to itch all day.

54 NEW MEXICO | OCTOBER 2008

LA MALOGRA

Possessed by el mal de ojo (the evil eye), even good-natured people can cause others harm. In many cultures, fear of the evil eye leads to unusual superstitions. For example: Owners of cars with only one functioning headlight are thought to have the evil eye.

Superstition dictates that, to bounce the evil back at them, you point an index and pinkie finger at the car. If you’re traveling with someone, before the one-eyed car passes you also must kiss or slap that person to ward off evil.

Imagine how feared a creature would be if it possessed the evil eye. La Tuerta is such a creature, and is perhaps the most ancient of our apparitions, dating back to Judaic and ancient Greek traditions.

In New Mexico, she is found in Valdez, north of Taos, where she is seen as a great ball of fire.

The Evildoer At seeding time, cotton from cottonwood trees moves like a living thing, shrouding plants in layers of gauze and clinging to skin and nostrils, seemingly intent on suffocating its prey.

That describes the hideous manifestation of La Malogra (The Evildoer): a huge, amorphous cotton ball that mesmerizes anyone who gazes at it.

Then, suddenly, it lunges at and suffocates its victim, who is found dead the next morning.

La Malogra is one of several similar specters that include Arroyo Hondo’s La Negra (The Dark Lady), whose mission is

LA BOTAS

Lady Boots Larry Torres feels especially close to La Botas, who is thought to live under El Salto Road Bridge in Arroyo Seco, next to the house he grew up in. Pilar and Española have their own versions of the lady, the New Mexican counterpart of European bridge trolls.

La Botas looks like a little old lady with huge feet. She tracks down bullies, stomps them with her gigantic soles, then whips them with a willow switch. Nothing stops her—if a building is in her path, she walks up one side and down the other.

As a child, Torres would find the big footprints of La Botas in fresh snow on the bridge near his home. And that’s another key to these monsters’ effectiveness: With a little sleight of hand, parents can create persuasive evidence of supernatural beings. It certainly kept Torres and his siblings from playing under the bridge, or crossing it to sneak into town.

One Halloween, Los Artisanos, in Questa, created a haunted house inhabited only

by Larry Torres’s beloved Southwestern monsters. He was thrilled when he overheard the older people remembering these ghoulish characters from New Mexican folklore, but worries that his might be the last generation for whom the monsters—now displaced by modern Hollywood creatures—are real. He tells stories about the monsters at schools, in special presentations, and to New Mexico Magazine readers, “to ensure that these things will not be forgotten. These are the mirrors of our past.”

Arin McKenna is a freelance writer who has won national awards and lives in Nambé, surrounded by cottonwoods. La Malogra was a very real presence as she was writing this article. She has always been a night owl, and is very thankful her parents didn’t terrify her with El Coco as she lay awake at night.

to squelch children’s desires to sneak out into the dangers of the night. La Malogra can also represent a bad neighbor—a truly frightening reality on the isolated frontier.

La Malogra resides in Cañon and is thought to be exclusively New Mexican.

LA TUERTA

The She-Cyclops Catholic legend says that when Lucifer rebelled against God, St. Michael gouged out his eye during the battle that eventually drove the rebel from heaven.

The eye fell to earth as a great ruby and was discovered by Spanish conquistadors.

But when they tried to divide it among themselves, it exploded, and its fragments were carried on the four winds, to lodge in the eyes of all the people of earth.

Ever heard of La Calamasa? Learn more and make your own La Calamasa costume at www.nmmagazine.com.

www.nmmagazine.com | OCTOBER 2008 55