El Cadejo

Guatemala
the Guatemalan highlands, from the capital to Sacatepéquez and Amatitlán; the same figure in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama

El Cadejo — the dog with the matted coat and ember eyes that appears at night on the roads of Guatemala and Central America to the man walking home from the cantina: black when it attacks, white when it escorts

Variants and names

el cadejo, always with the article; in Costa Rica the singular is el cadejos, with the s attached to the noun, and that is how Costa Rican dictionaries have recorded it since 1892. The ASALE Diccionario de americanismos (2010) gives the word for Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama, and distinguishes cadejo blanco, 'cadejo bueno que conduce a los borrachos', from cadejo negro, 'cadejo malo que extravía a los borrachos en el camino'; it also records the idioms andar como el cadejo and cargarse el cadejo, and in Honduras and Nicaragua the adjective cadejo said of a person, 'mala, perversa'.

The etymology is no mystery: the dictionary of the Real Academia prints cadejo as 'cruce de cadarzo y madeja' and gives as its first sense 'parte del cabello muy enredada', the matted lock of hair. The derivation from cadena, for the chain the animal drags, is a folk etymology: I have found no scholar who argues for it. Santiago I. Barberena, in the Quicheísmos of 1894, proposed instead two K'iche' roots, gax 'to kindle' and teh 'to open', that is '(eyes) kindled and open'. In Honduras cadejo is also the name of a real animal, the tayra (Eira barbara); in Argentina it means a portion of wool ready to be spun.

What is told

The earliest printed descriptions disagree about the number and agree about everything else. Carlos Gagini, in 1892, makes it 'un enorme perro negro, de ojos encendidos y pelo largo y envedijado' which at the late hours of the night comes out to frighten passers-by and horses. Ramón A. Salazar, in 1896, remembers it in the streets of the Guatemalan capital as 'perro lanudo, con ojos de carbunclo y patas herradas': a shaggy dog, carbuncle eyes, shod feet. Adrián Recinos, in 1916, writes that the cadejo 'tiene la figura de un perro negro o blanco, según la localidad', with eyes lit like embers; it appears on the roads and in the dark streets, frightens travellers, lovers and night-walkers, startles the mounts so that they throw their riders, and makes dogs howl.

Alberto Membreño, in Honduras in 1895, reports instead a quadruped with red eyes and, apparently, horns as well, because it butted the drunks it met in the street in the small hours. The dragged chain and the white-and-black pair enter the sources later.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The cadejo keeps watch over the hour and the place where a grown man ought not to be: the road between one house and the next after the cantina. Membreño in 1895 already shows it bent on one thing, butting the bolos, the drunks; the informants recorded by Celso Lara Figueroa give it the task of 'cuidar que no les pase nada a los bolos que se quedan tirados en las calles', and another adds that if it finds you lying there and licks your mouth 'ya lo jodió para siempre'. To the undamaged homecoming it gives an escort; to the bruises and the night in the ditch, a cause with a name. Outside the stories the name becomes a measure of failure: 'me salió el cadejo' meant, already in 1916, coming to grief in an enterprise or being caught by the law.

Where it is attested

The earliest dated attestation I have been able to trace is lexicographical and Costa Rican: the article 'Cadejos' in Carlos Gagini's Diccionario de barbarismos y provincialismos de Costa Rica, 1892 (some records give 1893). I have not opened that volume, but I have read its text quoted verbatim twice: in Santiago I. Barberena's Quicheísmos, San Salvador 1894, chapter XXXI, read in full on Internet Archive, and in a 2012 academic article that gives the page (Gagini 1892: 13).

Three testimonies from the 1890s follow, all read in full online: Alberto Membreño, Hondureñismos, 1895 (the article 'Cadejo'; I read it in the second edition, Tegucigalpa 1897, p. 27, on Internet Archive), which also tells of an infantry captain butted in the streets of Tegucigalpa and adds that 'hace muchos años que dejó de salir'; and Ramón A. Salazar, El tiempo viejo. Recuerdos de mi juventud, Guatemala 1896, p. 125.

The first description in a scholarly journal is Adrián Recinos, 'Algunas observaciones sobre el folk-lore de Guatemala', Journal of American Folk-Lore 29, 1916, pp. 559-566, read in full on Internet Archive. The white-and-black pair comes later: in snippet I have dated it to 1946 in Ernesto Barahona López's 100 años de Managua, and I find it set out in Enrique Peña Hernández, Nicaragua Indígena 1956 and then Panorama masayense, 1957, p. 57, with the bloody fight between the two. In Guatemala the university collections are those of the Centro de Estudios Folklóricos of the Universidad de San Carlos: Tradiciones de Guatemala, vol. 5, 1976, p. 294, and Celso A. Lara Figueroa, Leyendas y casos de la tradición oral de la ciudad de Guatemala, Editorial Universitaria, pp. 71-72, where the informants at last speak.

Caution

Grade B, and the line short of an A is a precise one. I have a dated first attestation and two citation chains that confirm it word for word; I have read Barberena 1894, Membreño 1897, Salazar 1896, Recinos 1916 and Baratta 1951 in full. But I did not open Gagini's dictionary, I read the testimony of Lara Figueroa's informants quoted in a 2019 article rather than in his book, I saw the pre-1970 sources for the white-and-black pair only as Google Books snippets, and above all none of the narratives I could read carries an informant's name, a date and a place of collection. That is the datum that is missing.

The pre-Columbian Maya origin does not hold. I know of no attestation earlier than 1892, and one can say where the idea comes from: Barberena in 1894 broke cadejo into two K'iche' roots, but on the same page he did the same with calchona, which is Chilean, and the method refutes itself. Baratta in 1951 then used the modern Spanish word to describe masks in pre-Hispanic festivals, and the backdating was done. Lara Figueroa, who is the principal collector, places the core of the legend in medieval Europe, carried over by the colonies. Nor does Asturias hold as an ethnographic source: the 'Leyenda del Cadejo' in the Leyendas de Guatemala (Madrid, Ediciones Oriente, 1930) is literature, and invents a plot that is not in the collections — the novice Elvira de San Francisco, the monastery of Santa Catalina, the poppy-man who turns into the Cadejo when she cuts off her braid. Finally I have cut the smell of sulphur: I did not find it in any of the sources I read. And the cadejo is not a nahual: no source says it is anybody.

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