El Sombrerón

A courtship with one element wrong

The structure of this legend is ordinary village courtship, carried out correctly, by the wrong suitor.

He arrives at night. He stands below the window. He plays and sings, which is what a young man did. He gives gifts — he braids, which is an act of intimate attention. He persists.

Everything about the procedure is recognisable. What is wrong is him: a very small man in a hat far too large for him, dressed in black, with silver on his belt, who was not invited, cannot be refused, and will not be deterred by the family.

That makes this a different kind of fear from the one most of these legends carry. The Siguanaba punishes a man for being where he should not be. El Sombrerón does something closer to besieging a household.

What the tellers describe

The description is short and it is remarkably stable. He is a small man — the smallness is always stated, and it is the first thing a teller reaches for. He wears black. He wears a hat so large that it is the whole silhouette. There is silver on him, usually on the belt buckle, sometimes on the hatband or the spurs. He carries a small guitar, and he is often said to arrive with mules.

What the oral accounts do not give is a face. The hat is described precisely because it takes the face out of the account: tellers say the brim hides it, or say nothing about it at all. Height is never given in numbers, only relative to a grown man. Age is not settled — some tellers describe a man, others something nearer a boy, which is one of the places where he and the Salvadoran Cipitío run together.

The sharper, more monstrous Sombrerón in circulation now — the one with a visible face in it — comes from illustration, print retellings and screen versions rather than from the collected tellings, which stay with the hat, the black clothes, the silver and the guitar and stop there. Miguel Ángel Asturias put a Leyenda del Sombrerón into Leyendas de Guatemala in 1930, but that is a literary reworking of the material and not a record of how tellers described him.

The braids are the evidence

Every durable legend has an anchor in something people actually find, and this one has an unusually good one.

Horses and mules are found in the morning with their manes and tails plaited into tight small braids that have to be cut out. This happens. Anybody who has kept horses in a stable has seen it, and there are several ordinary explanations — rubbing, burrs, wind, the habits of the animals themselves.

What the legend supplies is an agent and a motive: he was here in the night, and the braiding is what he does.

And then the motif moves indoors. The girl wakes to find her own hair braided. The remedy — cutting her hair off — follows directly, and so does the shape of the story: the sign appears on the animals first, then on her, and the family is told what is happening by the state of someone's hair.

What the family sees

The reported effects on the girl are specific and worth reading carefully: she stops eating, stops sleeping, becomes listless, withdraws, will not explain herself.

That is a description of a young woman in distress, written from the point of view of the household watching her. Whether the distress is caused by courtship she cannot refuse, by an attachment the family disapproves of, or by something with no romantic content at all, the legend assigns it an external cause and a practical response.

The same pattern is recorded of the tlahuelpuchi in Tlaxcala and of the mangkukulam in the Visayas: these beliefs are most often explanations for what happens inside households, directed outward.

The hat

The costume deserves a note because it is the most memorable thing about him and the least explained.

A hat so large it dominates the figure, on a man described as very small, is a deliberate visual joke and an unsettling one. It conceals the face from above. It makes the proportions wrong in a way that reads immediately even at a distance in the dark.

The Salvadoran Cipitío — the small boy with an enormous hat and backward-facing feet — shares the costume, and the two figures are regularly confused. Whether they are one tradition that split or two that borrowed from each other is not something the available material settles.

A note on sources

As with the cadejo and the Siguanaba, the record here is oral tradition collected from living tellers together with popular Guatemalan publication; there is no monograph.

What that record gives in exchange is a legend still in use, with variation intact, told by people who can name the street in the town where it happened.

• collected oral accounts, University of Southern California, USC Digital Folklore Archives, Sombrerón entries (2018)Transcribed first-person tellings from Guatemalan informants. Primary oral material; not scholarship.