Mayor Marries Caiman in Strange Yet Beloved Mexican Tradition
The bride was dressed in white and wore a veil. However, she had a special something most blushing novias don’t have — a set of sharp teeth.
That’s because most brides are not a seven-year-old caiman nicknamed the “little princess.”
Mayor Victor Hugo Sosa, mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, a town of Indigenous Chontal people in Tehuantepec, Mexico, wed the caiman named Alicia Adriana as a re-enactment of an ancestral ritual.
In a video that has gone viral on social media, Sosa gingerly kisses a wedding-dress-clad Alicia, whose snout was secured shut for the occasion.
The scene may be Kafkaesque, but it’s tradition
“It is the union of two cultures between the Huaves and the Chontales,” Sosa told reporters.
For over 230 years, this Mexican town of Oaxaca state has celebrated the union between a man and a female caiman. These animals are native to Mexico and Central America and live in swamps.
The tradition or ritual began because of friction between two indigenous communities of the state — the Chontals and the Huaves.
Both communities healed the strife when the Chontal King (today represented by the mayor) married a Huave child princess, embodied by the female caiman.
Since then, the ceremony marks the day two ethnicities united in peace at the wedding. The celebration brings prosperity and good luck to their communities.
A caiman and the symbol of love and prosperity
In the cosmogony of these communities, “Alice” symbolizes a deity linked with Mother Earth. Her “marriage” to Sosa is a union of the human with the divine.
“I accept responsibility because we love each other. That is what is important,” the mayor said during the ritual, as reported by Sky News.
“You can’t have a marriage without love… I yield to marriage with the princess girl,” he said.
Before the wedding ceremony, the mayor and Alice, wearing a colorful tunic and a wreath of flowers, parade around town. All around them, well-wishers clap and dance to traditional music, celebrating the happy couple.
The bride-to-be is also taken from house to house so that people can hold and dance with her.
“For us, she (the caiman) represents a lot because she is the queen princess who brings water, a good harvest, and rain,” Olivia Perez, who was in charge of dressing the caiman, told the BBC.
The best part for “Alice” is after the wedding, when she gets to spend the rest of her life lounging comfortably — like the princess she is — in a special marshy pond.
