Alux

The only one with a contract

Small guardians of place are normally already there. The nuno owns the mound before the farmer does. The maahiset live under the yard whether the household likes it or not. The chaneques hold the spring.

The alux of Yucatán includes something none of those do: in the recorded practice, a farmer can have one made.

A figure is prepared, a specialist brings it to life, and it is installed at the field with a house built for it. From then on it is the farmer's guardian, on terms, with obligations running in both directions.

That is not a nature spirit. That is a hire.

The seven years

The terms, as recorded in the Yucatec village material, are specific.

The alux is fed — maize drink, food, tobacco — at the proper times, for seven years. During that period it works: it watches the milpa, drives off people who have no business there, whistles in the dark, throws stones, startles the animals of anyone crossing the boundary at night.

At the end of the seven years the arrangement is closed. The little house is sealed with the alux inside it, and the relationship ends.

The logic is practical and slightly chilling. A guardian that has been fed for years and is then neglected does not simply leave; it turns the same tools on the household that kept it. Ending the contract on purpose is the safe way out.

What it is really watching

A milpa is cleared ground in the middle of dense scrub, worked by one family, often some distance from the village, and left unattended most of the time.

It is exactly the kind of property that cannot be watched and must be protected: by thieves, by animals, by neighbours with a different idea of where the line runs.

A belief that puts a guardian at the corner of the field does two jobs at once. It gives the owner something to do about an insoluble problem, and it gives everyone else a reason not to walk in. A field known to have an alux is a field with a reputation.

Noise in the dark

The signs attributed to an alux are consistent across the accounts and they are all auditory or indirect: a whistle, a stone landing nearby, footsteps in the dry leaves, a horse refusing to go on, a dog staring at nothing.

Almost nobody reports a good look at one. The descriptions that exist — small, knee high, in the clothing of an older generation — come from the rare sighting rather than the common encounter.

That distribution is the mark of a belief that grew out of real conditions: a cleared field at night, surrounded by scrub full of animals, with a lot of sound and very little visibility.

It did not stay in the field

The alux is among the most thoroughly living of these beliefs. Offerings are still made on the peninsula, and large construction projects there are still accompanied by local reports that permission has to be asked — reports that circulate in the national press, not only in villages.

Where the chaneque explains a child's illness, the alux explains ownership of ground, which is a question that has not stopped being urgent in Yucatán and is not going to.

Sources

Redfield and Villa Rojas (1934) for the village practice; Redfield (1941) for the regional setting. The seven years and the sealed house are recorded in that village material. The modern oral accounts of the living belief are abundant and only partly written down.

• Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas, Chan Kom: A Maya Village (1934). Carnegie Institution of WashingtonThe classic village ethnography of Yucatán, which records the alux among the beings of the milpa and the offerings made to them.
• Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatán (1941). University of Chicago PressFor the wider Yucatec setting and the gradient between village and town belief.