Chupacabras

Puerto Rico
Canóvanas, barrio Campo Rico, and the valley of the río Grande de Loíza; for the 1975 precedent, Moca and barrio Parcelas Mamey in the north-west of the island

Chupacabras — the nocturnal predator that kills goats and leaves two holes in the neck, born in Puerto Rico in 1995 and documented day by day by newspapers and laboratories.

Variants and names

chupacabras is the Puerto Rican and Caribbean form, keeping the -s even in the singular; chupacabra prevails in Mexico and in English. A transparent compound of chupar, to suck, and cabras, goats. It is not to be confused with el vampiro de Moca, the name the press gave in 1975 to a different case, nor with la gárgola of Barceloneta, a later local variant. The word, however, was not born in 1995: Spanish has had chotacabras, the name of the nightjar, for centuries, and the Real Academia derives it «de chotar y cabra», with chotar in the sense of sucking. It is a calque of Latin caprimulgus, and Pliny (Naturalis historia X, 115) describes the caprimulgi as night thieves that enter the shepherds' stalls, suck the goats' udders and leave the animals blind. Jason Colavito documents chotacabra in print in Puerto Rico from at least 1948; that chota- then became chupa- through the obsolescence of the verb is his hypothesis, not a fact.

What is told

A nocturnal predator that kills goats, sheep, hens and rabbits, leaving two or three small deep holes on the neck or the chest, and that according to witnesses empties the carcass of blood without eating the flesh. The physical description that took hold is a single one, given at Canóvanas in August 1995 by Madelyne Tolentino: a biped between one and one and a half metres tall, grey hairless skin, oval head, large slanted eyes, very long limbs, webbed toes and a row of spikes along the back. The mayor of Canóvanas also had it winged, with a long tongue for sucking. From 2000 the figure changes body: in the Texan and Mexican cases the chupacabras is no longer an alien biped but a hairless quadruped with an elongated muzzle and greyish-blue skin, whose carcasses are photographed, weighed and put in freezers. The two images still coexist, and the second circulates more widely.

What it was forthe author’s reading

It does not do the work of a village being: it does not frighten children, does not enforce a prohibition, does not explain a place. It gives a public name to a loss — dead animals, no culprit, no compensation — and it lets someone be seen acting: the mayor of Canóvanas organised hunting expeditions, and the hunt was the rite. It also says, without saying it, that things are done to the island that are decided elsewhere: the suspicion of an experiment escaped from a military base belongs to the figure from the start. Lauren Derby reads the panic as rumour building a collective historical consciousness in a country where power has always been external. Television did the rest: the same figure served in Mexico, Chile and Texas to put into words losses quite unlike one another.

Where it is attested

The precedent, which is not the same thing: El Vocero of San Juan leads on 25 February 1975 with the exsanguinated animals of Moca, uses the headline «el vampiro de Moca» for the first time on 10 March 1975, and closes the story on 31 July 1975; the correspondent was Augusto «Tute» Vale, and when the coverage ended the deaths ended too (reconstruction with the dates in the Radio Ambulante episode «Un vampiro entre nosotros»). The chupacabras begins on 11 March 1995, when eight sheep, a cow and a bull are found dead at Orocovis and Morovis; the name appears in the press and on television around September 1995. The chronology is in the chapter «El chupacabras y el impacto social de una creencia mediatizada», in Vida en el universo. Del mito a la ciencia, ed. Ricardo Campo, Lulu and Fundación Anomalía, 2008, reprinted in the journal Pensar, which concludes: «el chupacabras, como tal, aparece en 1995». Madelyne Tolentino's testimony was collected in 1996 by Lucy Pla and José Manuel Rodríguez and translated in Scott Corrales, Chupacabras and Other Mysteries, Greenleaf, Austin, 1997; Benjamin Radford re-interviewed her in 2010 and published Tracking the Chupacabra. The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Historical reading: Lauren Derby, «Imperial Secrets: Vampires and Nationhood in Puerto Rico», Past and Present, 199, suppl. 3, 2008, pp. 290-312.

Caution

Grade B for one reason only: I have opened no newspaper page. The 1975 and 1995 dates reach me through reconstructions that are well made, not through the issues of El Vocero; of El Nuevo Día I have found only notice of a piece on Radford's thesis, «El chupacabras nació de una película de 1995», undated. I have read neither Radford's book nor Derby's article in full, and I have not seen Más humortivación by Silverio Pérez (2000), on which the attribution of the name rests: as early as 1996 a reconstruction in Contacto OVNI credited journalists instead with the calque on «chotacabras». The start of the wave wavers too: December 1994 in one source, 11 March 1995 in another.

On the film the planes should be kept apart. Radford shows that Species opened on 7 July 1995, a month before the sighting; that the creature H. R. Giger designed has slanted eyes and a dorsal crest; that Tolentino had seen the film and said so herself, «era un ser que se parecía al chupacabras»; and that her account changed, since in 1996 her mother chased the creature and a boy caught it, while in 2010 the two women watched from inside the house, and no other witness has come forward. It remains a hypothesis that the film produced the perception or the memory: the direction of the link is set by him, not by the document, and the 1996 testimony was already mediated by ufologists. The animals that died in March precede the film: it would account for the monster, not the carcasses.

Two things that are read everywhere are false. The chupacabras is not «the Moca vampire»: another case, another place, twenty years earlier, and in 1995 nobody invoked it. And it is not Taíno or pre-Columbian: no attestation is earlier than 1995. It is the word that has a past, not the creature.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.