Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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The Egg and the Evil Eye

When I was growing up in the Rio Grande valley, you often saw the prettiest, healthiest-looking baby with a big black bean tied around a chubby wrist, bound with a red cotton string. This was called an aba. It protected the child from illness resulting from projected magnestism called "the evil eye."

Mother scoffed at these things, so although I was exposed to herbal and other indigenous remedies, I had little experience with the extensive healing techniques used in our culture.

Positive aspects of the evil eye include that it was never fatal and that the person who caused it was never intentionally trying to to make someone ill. Quite the contrary: they always apologetically referred to the undesirable effect they might unintentionally inflict and did everything to prevent all harm.

How were the effects of evil eye prevented and detected? If evil eye was the suspected cause of illness, prayers were said and a raw unbroken egg was rubbed all over the child's body, broken into a dish, and left under the child's bed overnight. In the morning, an eye was visible in the yolk, confirming the diagnosis. The child's features or those of the person responsible for the illness were discernable in the yolk's markings. The best remedy was a touch by the person responsible, but performing the ritual itself insured a recovery.

If illness was due to the spirit having fled your body, a curandera could heal you by calling it back. This healing ritual was performed on my behalf when I was five years old. The outward symptom was insomnia.

We'd moved to El Mexiquito from Brownsville. I was suddenly in a strange and friendless environment. The secure pattern of spending weekends with Mother and weekdays with nuns suddenly vanished. This may have caused some sort of shock.

People say you shouldn't wake a sleepwalker, that doing so may cause death. Mother followed me as I sleepwalked outside, circling the house. She was terrified for both our sakes, and found a local curandera.

I recall that we went to a middle-aged woman's house. I was asked to lie face-down on a bed while the praying woman gently massaged my spine and limbs, addressing the four cardinal directions and the element of air in particular. She explained the cause of my illness. A dog frightened the spirit out of my body, she said. True, one day as I'd walked with Mother, a barking dog jumped out from behind some bushes. I screamed and Mother reprimanded me for being such a baby. The curandera's ritual worked.

By the time I became a mother, I had my own ideas about the evil eye. To every mother her child is beautiful. Why, I wondered, was one woman's child affected while another mother's equally lovely child was not?

When I was a teenager babysitting for pin money, this point was brought home to me. A young mother introduced me to her five children and ended by saying, "And this is Freddie. He's cross-eyed but on him it looks good." Evil eye had little or nothing to do with beauty!

My pretty babies only suffered from the usual assortment of childhood diseases.

A neighbour in her thirties who happened to have shapely legs used to say that people had been casting the evil eye on her legs since she was a teenager. Her children also suffered evil eye effects every time she took them to the city on all-day expeditions.

My theory was that the children were tired, needed a nap, probably had diaper rash, and THAT'S why they were cranky. And that the broken egg might do the children more good if it were ingested instead of being put in a bowl overnight and thrown away the following day!

Years later, as a tertiary student, I discovered a similarity between techniques used by my curandera and those used by some indigenous Australian healers. A musicologist at university told me that she'd suffered a spiritual and cultural crisis during the course of her research. One day the tribal elders arrived at her home and announced that they were there to heal her because the spirit had left her body. The procedure she described was similar to my own. After the emotional release which followed the healing, she was able to return to her work.

I completed my studies in anthropology, and I reassessed my background, the evil eye, and its effect on our Mexican community. This is not an academic analysis, but in retrospect the evil eye seems to have served important cultural/community needs.

A ritual involving the avoidance of evil eye went something like this: you are in a public place surrounded by family. Someone walks up and says, "Please excuse the bother, but I've been told that I have the evil eye and I don't want to make your child ill. Please let me touch his/her hair [or eyes] so he won't get sick." Once the stranger had lightly touched the child's hair or eyes, introductions usually took place and information was exchanged, including hometown, mother's name, destination, names of friends and relations, places to seek work up North, and places to avoid.

We are a warm, demonstrative people. Caresses and embraces are freely given within appropriate relationships in our communities. If a child became suddenly sick, you'd ask, what stranger saw this child and may have caused this illness? So-and-so down the road has visitors!They were summoned to touch the child. Being people of good will, they came. The social niceties observed, the stranger was no longer a danger. By integrating a stranger into the community, my neighbours healed and protected their most vulnerable members.

Sadly, not one evil eye ever strayed my way. The cause, I suspect, was Mother's aloofness and refusal to allow me to socialize with neighbours.

Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published: November 14, 2005