Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Red Ribbons on Fruit Trees

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 26
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“My parents used to tie red ribbons on the fruit trees during an eclipse… it was I don’t know…  so that the trees wouldn’t die, supposedly like lunar events like would or an eclipse and stuff would mess with the harvest of that.”

My informant learned this practice from his parents who were practitioners of this themselves. We were discussing the color red and what it had to do with lunar eclipses. There seems to be a connection with lunar eclipses, pregnancy, and fruit. I believe that  fruit may symbolize a women’s fertility and that is why the red ribbon somehow protects the fruit from dying, just as the color red may protect an unborn baby from dying.

Lunar Eclipse and a Red Towel

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 26
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“During a lunar Eclipse, You’re supposed to put a red towel on your belly to protect the baby”

My informant learned this piece of folklore from his parents who were practitioners of this. My informant himself never tried it on his child and never knew why his parents did it. He shared this with me when the topic of pregnancy superstitions came up. This piece of folklore was very interesting to me and made sense because of all the connections that a lunar eclipse has to women, pregnancy and fertility that we learned in class. I also thought it was weird that the superstition says particularly a red towel. This reminded me of Vaz de Silva’s argument that the color red usually symbolizes women and fertility in folklore.

Dream Premonitions: Yolanda

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 41
Performance Date: April 16, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

This had to be about like 15 years ago because we were in our late 20’s when she… umm… when this happened and I just remember it was the wednesday night before Thanksgiving. Yeah, Yolanda was a neighbor that we grew up… that I grew up with, that was a year older than me but her and I were in the same grade so we used to play together  as kids and then when we got older we kinda grew apart, we went to different high schools and we had, you know, different sets of friends and stuff and… so anyway the wednesday night before Thanksgiving  we were living in uptown Whittier in that little yellow house duplex that we had and I hadn’t talked to Yolanda, I hadn’t heard from her, I hadn’t seen her in years. As adults, we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The last time I saw her she had just had a baby and she was walking her baby around in the neighborhood by my mother’s house and I remember going outside saying “Aww let me see your baby, she’s so cute!” and it was like two months… the baby was like two months old. So, I had this umm…I had this umm… dream about her and in my dream I was the same age I was as an adult. I think I was like 27 or 28 at the time and but Yolanda came to me as a little girl and how I remember her when she was little. When she got older, I mean the last… like I said the last time I saw her she had just had a baby but she had gained a lot of weight and I just assumed it was from the baby, but when we were little she was like the scrawny, boney little kid… little blond girl.And so, in my dream I was an adult but she was little girl and I don’t remember anything specific about the dream other than I dreamt about her and I just remember waking up in the morning on Thanksgiving morning thinking “God that was so weird, like why would I dream about her, I haven’t talked to her in a long time,” I haven’t like nothing in my mind had kind of provoked thinking about her other than to think, “Oh well maybe I’m gonna see her, because I’m gonna go to my mom’s house and if she goes to her mom’s house for Thanksgiving so … I… I figured well maybe I’ll see her today because I’m going to my mom’s house and maybe she’ll be at her mom’s for Thanksgiving.” So I remember going to grandma’s house and we were you know chopping food and getting things ready for Thanksgiving and I just remember asking grandma like, “Hey you know who I dreamt about last night, I dreamt about Yoli like have you talked to her, have you seen her?” And she’s like “No, I haven’t seen her in a long time.” You know and I said “Oh maybe she’s going to Emma’s today.” No big deal but we had the conversation Thanksgiving morning. I told her about my dream and that was that. The next day after Thanksgiving, friday morning, grandma called me and she’s like, “You’re not gonna believe what happened” she’s like “Yolanda died.” And Yolanda died wednesday night the night I had a dream about her and she had… she had what the newspaper reported as an accidental overdose. She was 28 years old and she mixed um… alcohol with prescription drugs and overdosed. And it just was like the weirdest thing to me that I dreamt about her on the night that she died when I hadn’t seen her or talked to her in years.

My informant told me this story in its entirety over dinner, though I had heard bits and pieces of it from her before. My informant experienced this strange phenomenon first-hand and after telling me her story, I found that other members including her mother had experienced the same thing. They all had dreams of friends or relatives on the night of or before they died. This story was very personal to my informant as she was close with the woman in the story, Yolanda.

Brandon’s Satan worship

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 26
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English

So he started studying like he started reading books about Satanism, he was just… he was just really interested in it and it was like probably about a month that he was really into it like buying books and like reading into it and I was like “You need to stop this, like this is creepy, I don’t like it.” So I was against it but, so during that month some weird things were happening. So there were umm… a bunch of flies that would just come into his… just his room, only his room and they would I don’t know where they would come in from but they were just like everywhere in his room. And then one night we were asleep and in the middle of the night like dead silent his guitar just like knocks over and it woke us up because it like you know it made the guitar noise, that was creepy. And the whole month we both had really creepy dreams, in our dreams it was always something about the room, like something was getting us. It was really creepy.

My informant lived through these strange events. She told me this story after the topic of Satan and devil worshippers came up. I found this story interesting because my informant was telling this story about Brandon, an ex-boyfriend who cheated on her. Hearing these strange things about him made me wonder if this was part of the reason for their break-up or part of her method of rationalizing the break-up, as folklore often does with things we do not understand.

UCLA Steps

Nationality: American
Age: late 30s
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English

There’s a big set of steps on campus, these stairs they’re called Jan’s steps and the myth or the legend is that you can’t step on the fourth step from the bottom and that every time you step on that step you’ll be in college for one more year.

My informant learned this piece of folklore through a sorority at the University of California Los Angeles. She told me this along with other superstitions and traditions about college while we and some friends were discussing it. She did not actively participate in this practice, it was just one superstition that she heard.