Charro Negro

Also Known As: El Charro Negro, “the black horseman”; called simply el charro in rural speech, and identified across central Mexico with el Diablo, el Chamuco, el Catrín, el Señor del Monte and, at Xalatlaco, with Tlaxinqui
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mexican Mythology, Latin American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He is the Devil riding out in the dress of a wealthy horseman, offering gold, buried treasure and a place on his saddle in exchange for a soul.
Role in Mythos: He is the figure through which central Mexican storytellers make the owner of the land and the owner of the hills into the same person.
Relation to Humans: He meets people alone, on roads and hill paths and at the mouths of caves, and he opens with a courtesy rather than a threat. Every teller agrees that he asks, and that whoever ends up on the horse got on by himself.

A man in Guadalcázar, in the dry north of San Luis Potosí, told a collector in 2010 how it goes. You call the Devil. The Devil answers, and asks what shape you would like him in. A charro on horseback, the man said, because that was the shape everyone in that country knew him by. He walked on without thinking much about it, and at the corner the horse came round, and what he remembered afterwards was not the rider but the sound: the whole saddle creaking, all that new leather and silver working against itself in the quiet.

He is a tall man in black. The suit is a charro suit, the short jacket and the tight trousers of the Mexican horseman, cut and finished the way a rich man has them cut, and over it a sombrero wide enough that the face beneath it stays in shadow no matter where the light is coming from. The horse is black. In some tellings he is on it and in some he is standing beside it, and the standing is worse, because a mounted man is going somewhere and a waiting one is not.

Nobody had to invent him. Long before anyone wrote the legend down, rural Mexican speech already had the phrase: *llevárselo el charro*, to be carried off by the charro, meaning exactly what *llevárselo el Chamuco* means, which is that a man has died and where he has gone is not upward. The linguist Juan M. Lope Blanch recorded it in 1963 as ordinary country usage in parts of the interior. The Devil in the black suit was not a story people told. He was a thing people said.

The stories came with the recorder. In the villages of the Lerma basin, in the Toluca valley, a folklorist collected six of them in the spring of 2012, and they are unnervingly domestic. A woman was walking back from the centre of her village with her daughter at three in the afternoon, cutting across the maize, and there at the corner of the path stood a big man dressed entirely in black with a horse beside him. The horse was standing exactly where they needed to pass and it would not move. They went around. That is the whole story, and it is the most frightening one.

The rest are stranger. On the peak above Santiago Miltepec a cousin fell, and the children looked up where he pointed and saw a rider all in black on the very top of the hill, and looked away, and looked back, and there was nothing. Near San Buenaventura a man walking behind a figure in a sombrero got close enough to see that one foot was a rooster’s and the other a goat’s, and kept walking anyway, and the charro simply stayed the same distance ahead of him, never once turning his face. A boy watched a sombrero rise out of the water of a reservoir, and then a child in a charro suit come up under it, bone dry, with nothing where his feet should have been, and go across the surface into a house that everyone in the family had always been afraid of.

The version the Nahua of Temixco in Morelos tell has the shape of a transaction. Two in the morning, boys drinking in the main street, and hoofbeats coming up out of the dark. First it sounds like a horse on its own; then there is a rider on it, an old man in black with a hat, and you cannot really see his face. He asks them to stand him a drink. There is no beer left. *Yo tengo mucho dinero*, he says, and takes a purse out of his trousers and shows them gold coins, and tells them he has a great deal more hidden and will show them where if they come along. They get up and follow the horse. Somebody thinks to ask where he lives. On the Cerro del Jumil, he says, and is not there any more, and they are standing in the middle of the crossroads. The Nahuatl telling ends with the flat gloss that carries the whole thing: that was the Devil, who went off to leave a lot of gold coins on the Cerro del Jumil.

Up at Cholula he keeps house on the cerro Zapotecas and has a taste for music, and in one story he hires a whole band, very correctly, to come and play inside the mountain for himself and his friends. In Ocotepec in Morelos, in the 1980s, the villagers set up an altar on a hill and had masses said there to drive off something that had been appearing as a charro, or as a soldier in the uniform of the turn of the century, and frightening people; in that district he prefers to arrive as a bad wind.

The clothes are the argument. Wherever he turns up he is a stranger and he looks like a Spaniard or a mestizo or a ladino, an encomendero, a soldier, a mine owner, a foreman, an estate steward, and he is always on a horse or dressed to get on one. He wears the outfit of whoever holds the deeds. Underneath that costume sits something a great deal older than the costume: the owner of the hill, the one who lives in the empty high country and minds what is on it and expects to be asked before anybody takes wood or water or game. At Xalatlaco he is the lord of the Cuáhuatl volcano and goes by the name Tlaxinqui. Elsewhere the same power has answered to Tezcatlipoca, to Tláloc, to Tepeyollotl, to the Dueño del Monte, to Juan del Monte. Turning him into the Devil was not simply something the friars did to him. It was also a way of keeping him, and of dressing an old landlord in the new landlord’s suit.

His powers follow from that ownership. He knows where the gold is because it is his gold, lying under his hills. He can come and go between one glance and the next, and can travel as weather. He appears at the hours and places where the land stops being anybody’s property, at crossroads and cave mouths, at two and three and four in the morning, on the path through the maize when there is nobody else on it. And what he trades in is not fear but consent. In the caves of El Calvario in Toluca, where people went specifically to ask him for money, the rule as one man learned it in secondary school was that once you had offered your soul you could only get it back by bringing him twenty-seven others.

His limits are the same shape. He asks, and an answer of no appears to stop him dead. The woman in the maize field went round the horse and got home. The man at San Buenaventura never closed the distance and never came to harm. Consecrated ground and a said mass moved him off the hill at Ocotepec. He cannot take what has not been handed over, which is why every one of these stories turns on a small polite question and not on a chase. Nobody in them is carried off. They all climb up.

There is one more thing, and the tellers themselves would not thank anyone for hiding it. The silhouette everybody now pictures owes an enormous amount to the cinema. Raúl de Anda’s film *El Charro Negro* came out in 1940 and Rodolfo de Anda’s sequel *El hijo del Charro Negro* in 1961, and the man in those pictures is not a devil at all: he is a landowner who takes to the hills after a love goes wrong, whose black clothes are mourning for a dead woman, and who is generous, and hands out rough justice, and unmasks himself to stop imitators trading on his name. The Devil in the charro suit is older and came from somewhere else. But the name, and the hat, and the exact black of the outfit were sharpened by a film, and the villages then took that icon back and made it carry what they had always meant.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is El Charro Negro?

El Charro Negro is the Devil as he appears in central Mexican folk tradition, dressed as a wealthy Mexican horseman in a black charro suit and a wide sombrero, riding a black horse. He meets people alone on rural roads and at cave mouths and offers them money or hidden treasure in return for their souls. Rural Mexican speech has long used the phrase *llevárselo el charro*, “the charro took him”, to mean that someone has died and gone to hell.

What does the Charro Negro want?

He wants a soul, and he wants it given rather than taken. In the collected stories he opens with a courtesy, offers gold coins or the location of buried treasure, and invites the person to follow him or ride with him. One Toluca account holds that once a person has promised their soul, the only way out is to deliver twenty-seven other people in their place.

Where does the Charro Negro come from?

Stories about him have been recorded across the Bajío, the central highlands, Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, the Estado de México and San Luis Potosí, and popular accounts most often trace him to Jalisco. Scholars who work on Nahua oral tradition connect him to a much older figure, the owner of the hills, known variously as the Dueño del Monte, the Señor del Monte, Juan del Monte and, at Xalatlaco, Tlaxinqui.

Is the Charro Negro real folklore or something from a movie?

Both, and the order matters. The Devil appearing as a charro is attested in oral tradition and in everyday rural speech well before the films, but the modern name and visual identity were sharpened by Raúl de Anda’s *El Charro Negro* (1940) and its 1961 sequel, in which the character is a masked hacendado hero rather than a demon.

How do you escape the Charro Negro?

By refusing him. In the field-collected accounts nobody who declines to follow him or ride with him comes to harm; a woman who found his horse blocking her path through a maize field simply walked around it and went home. At Ocotepec in Morelos, villagers built a hillside altar and had masses said there to drive him away.