El Sombrerón

El Sombrerón is a figure of Guatemalan legend who braids the manes of horses and the hair of young women he courts. In Chiapas the name belongs to a tall rider in black.

Wikipedia describes El Sombrerón as fond of riding horses and plaiting their manes and tails, and of plaiting dogs' hair when there are no horses. He courts young women with long hair and large eyes. When one catches his fancy he follows her and plaits her hair, and serenades her on a silver guitar. He also puts earth on her plate, so that she can neither eat nor sleep.

Prensa Libre has written about where the figure came from. In 2016 it reported the view of the Antigua historian Víctor Miguel Díaz, who said the Sombrerón grew out of a story that followed the sentence the Inquisition passed on Juan Bayona, first charged with a crime and later accused of satanic dealings. In 2005 the same paper called the legend advice to teenage girls to keep to their society's shared values.

Miguel Ángel Asturias wrote a Leyenda del Sombrerón. The scholar Donghoon Lee, in Sincronía, says Asturias worked the Mesoamerican ballgame into it as a symbol of the struggles of cosmic life, a layer of older belief that outlasted the religion the Church imposed in colonial times. In Chiapas, El Universal reported in 2020, the Sombrerón appears in Zoque communities such as El Jobo in Tuxtla Gutiérrez and the nearby towns of San Fernando and Berriozábal. There he is a very tall rider dressed in black, his face hidden under an enormous hat.