TRIBUNE
As onlookers clapped and danced, a mayor of a small southern Mexico town entered into holy matrimony with a female reptile in a traditional rite to bring good fortune to his people.
Victor Hugo Sosa, mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, a town of Indigenous Chontal people in the Tehuantepec isthmus of Mexico, took as his betrothed a reptile named Alicia Adriana, re-enacting an ancestral ritual.
The reptile is a caiman, an alligator-like marsh dweller endemic to Mexico and Central America.
Sosa swore to be true to what local lore calls “the princess girl.”
“I accept responsibility because we love each other. That is what is important. You can’t have a marriage without love… I yield to marriage with the princess girl,” Sosa said during the ritual.
Marriage between a man and a female caiman has happened here for 230 years to commemorate the day when two Indigenous groups came to peace — with a marriage.
Tradition has it that frictions were overcome when a Chontal king, embodied these days by the mayor, wedded a princess girl of the Huave Indigenous group, represented by the female alligator.
The Huave live along coastal Oaxaca state, not far from this inland town.
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