Witch Tales of El Guache: An Ethnopoetic Analysis

“The one who tells the stories rules the world.”

—The Hopi

Las Bolas de Lumbre

Chimes sing as whispering gusts pass the small adobe homes while whipping colorful chile ristras, and buzzing past the rapid-flowing acequias in the Chama Valley and continuing through the small northern New Mexican village of El Guache.

The year is 1938. Dos hermanitas, afraid to stay alone at night, pick up a flashlight and scurry down the dirt road to their mother’s house. After repeatedly being told of the possibility of dijuntos loitering around outside after dark, the muchitas grab ahold of each other and just as they approach the infamous house of their Tía Carlota, whom everyone knew as the bruja of El Guache, they gasp at the lurid sight of giant bolas de lumbre flying in front of her house. Panicked and frightened, the sisters frantically run to their mother’s house to take refuge and to seek an explanation of what they just saw.

Introduction to Study

This cuento is one of many cherished stories passed down didactically as an oral narrative from grandmother to granddaughter and is the basis for the ethnopoetic analysis. Oral narratives such as the myriad of brujería or witchcraft stories of northern New Mexico are commonly present in much of the Chicano popular and literary culture, from the tales of Jovita Gonzales’s Dew on the Thorn to Cleofas Jaramillo’s Shadows of the Past to Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. These tales and many others are commonly recounted by elders to their family members articulating many different underlying motives. Many of the tales are told as a verbal art performance in which the performer relates the world of the past to the current one in order to reveal the intricacies of his or her moral economy as well as the moral economy of the communities that are described, which in this case is the community of the past, or of the bygone days. This is the key performative element, which Charles L. Briggs refers to as traer el sentido.

El Guache, New Mexico. (Photo by Carmella Scorcia.)

Community, both the past and current community of the performer, plays an essential role to traer el sentido, in which case the performer brings to life a collective consciousness of her past community in order to relate and understand her own moral economy with that of the present community. As Briggs points out, the performer will quote the words of others of that far-off community of the past, which shows that the performer is not merely describing the past, but rather expressing the past through the voices of others. Thus, the role of the collective consciousness of the community, both past and present, is crucial in understanding the underlying themes of the oral narrative.

This study of the performance and uses of such oral literature will be framed with an ethnopoetic analysis to determine the central strategies and themes of the El Guache brujería narrative. This involves breaking down the narrative into the specific structural and rhetorical layout to clarify, identify, and manifest the sometimes hermetic meanings of the story. Structural components include the linguistic features of the story, which range from expressing doubt to recounting real-life accounts with maximum specificity as well as content and dialectical movements the performer emphasizes, such as key values, quotation framing devices, imperfect forms, and tense-aspect changes. Each of these structural components helps explain the central theme of the narrative by discovering meaning through the examination of form, the central component of Briggs’s framework and analysis.

Another area of focus in determining the underlying themes of oral narratives, like brujería tales, is an estimation of the performer’s political unconscious. According to Fredric Jameson, the political unconscious is tied to a web of collective relationships that are formed within the context of actual historical events. This system of relationships includes the interplay of social, cultural, political, and economic factors. Thus a Marxist approach...