MEXICO CITY (dpa) – In other parts of the world, people trying to find the right partner might resort to putting a small classified ad in a newspaper to help in their search.
In Mexico City, all people need to do is go the market place Mercado Sonora and then find the booth of Guadalupe Obaldo. For 10 pesos – about one dollar – she will sell them a human-shaped candle.Then she’ll tell the buyer to burn the candle daily and at the same time pray to St. Anthony. This, she assures, is guaranteed to bring fortune in matters of the heart.In Mexico, this is just one example of many as to how magic still holds a powerful spell over people.Every day the crowded halls of the Mercado Sonora in the old part of Mexico City are abuzz with hectic activity. For among the childrens’ toys and household items, Mexicans are also looking for all kinds of magic potions meant to solve their everyday cares.Candles help them to find a partner, mysterious lotions promise to provide them money or eternal youth, and textbooks reveal the “dogmas and rituals of high magic”, while powders not only protect against curses, but also promise success in business ventures.For example, any shopkeeper who spreads a powder called “Atrape Cliente” (catch the customers) among his wares and the cash register is guaranteed never again to have any sales problems. Those who decide on the powder “Pagame Pronto” (pay up quick) must no longer worry about getting their debts collected.Superstition and witchcraft have a firm place in everyday life in Mexico, whose culture is a mixture of Catholicism and ethnic Indio traditions. And this goes not only for the Mercado Sonora.In the “Plaza Galeria”, for example, a shopping centre in the smart western part of the capital, there are rows of booths run by fortune-tellers for those customers who, because of their social status, would not dare to be seen going to the Sonora.But the airwaves are also filled with the transcendent. The station “Radio Unio” each day airs a program in which the “Soothsayer and Psychoanalyst Cardini” offers advice on all kinds of problems.The wife has run off with the gardener? This, Cardini knows, is certainly a case of “trabajo de brujeria” – witchcraft – and he also is guaranteed to know an antidote for the problem.It has never hurt the reputation of magicians in Mexico that it didn’t help much when the Aztec Indians vainly conjured up the force of their gods to try to ward off the Spanish conquistadores.There is even a magicians’ capital, the town of Catemaco on a lake of the same name not far from the Gulf of Mexico. There, dozens of “Brujos”, “Chamanes” and “Curanderos” have set up shop to carry out their knowledge of black-, white-, green- and red-magic.With the help of magic incantations, candles, water, photographs and ritual dolls, these magicians make an array of promises – success in business, jobs for the unemployed, and faithless husbands going back to their suffering wives.Each first Friday in the March, magicians from throughout Mexico meet in the jungles of nearby Nanciyaga for a midnight summit session of sorcery.Even wealthy and prominent Mexicans are said to have visited with the magicians of Catemaco.But back in the Mercado Sonora of Mexico City, it is the little people who stand in line at the booth of Guadalupe Obaldo. When it’s their turn, they tell the young woman their problems and then come away with the right candle or powder. It’s a year-round business.“We are helping them after all,” Obaldo says. “And when things go well for them, they go well for us also.”
