Detail map

Mexico

3 entries in 3 subareas: 2 at grade A, 1 at grade B. The points fall where the entry was collected, not where the story is set. Hover a point to see the subarea, click it to open the entry.

The entries, in brief

The folklore of Mexico documented in this atlas: La Llorona, Nahual and Aluxo'ob. Every entry is placed on the map at the point where it was collected or attested — not where the story is set — and carries its declared grade of documentation (2 at grade A, 1 at grade B), with the sources it comes from. The 3 subareas are not an administrative division: folklore lives in cultural areas, which rarely coincide with state borders.

Aluxo'ob A
Small bearded men with hats, who inhabit a lower world and are neither human nor divine. They come out at nightfall from the ruins and the heaps of stones, walk about around the houses, guard the milpa and in exchange for…

Nahual A
A person — not an animal — able to change shape or to act through an animal: coyote, jaguar, dog, owl. He does so in order to heal, to foretell, to harm. In the colonial sources the nahualli is a ritual specialist with a defined…

La Llorona B
A woman dressed in white who at night, along the canals and the rivers, weeps for her children and calls: «Ay, mis hijos». In the form now canonical she drowned them herself, out of jealousy or out of despair, and is condemned…

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