![\"Mexican](\"https:\/\/c.ndtvimg.com\/2023-07\/8mn6b3ns_mayor-crocodile-bride_625x300_02_July_23.jpg\"\/ "\\"Mexican")
<\/div>\nVictor Hugo Sosa swore to be true to what local lore calls “the princess girl.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
San Pedro Huamelula, Mexico: <\/b><\/p>\n
As onlookers clapped and danced, a mayor of a small southern Mexico town entered into holy matrimony with a female reptile in a traditional rite to bring good fortune to his people.<\/p>\n
Victor Hugo Sosa, mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, a town of Indigenous Chontal people in the Tehuantepec isthmus of Mexico, took as his betrothed a reptile named Alicia Adriana, re-enacting an ancestral ritual.<\/p>\n
The reptile is a caiman, an alligator-like marsh dweller endemic to Mexico and Central America.<\/p>\n
Sosa swore to be true to what local lore calls “the princess girl.”<\/p>\n
“I accept responsibility because we love each other. That is what is important. You can’t have a marriage without love… I yield to marriage with the princess girl,” Sosa said during the ritual.<\/p>\n
Marriage between a man and a female caiman has happened here for 230 years to commemorate the day when two Indigenous groups came to peace — with a marriage.<\/p>\n
Tradition has it that frictions were overcome when a Chontal king, embodied these days by the mayor, wedded a princess girl of the Huave Indigenous group, represented by the female alligator.<\/p>\n
The Huave live along coastal Oaxaca state, not far from this inland town.<\/p>\n
The wedding allows the sides to “link with what is the emblem of Mother Earth, asking the all-powerful for rain, the germination of the seed, all those things that are peace and harmony for the Chontal man,” explains Jaime Zarate, chronicler of San Pedro Huamelula.<\/p>\n
Before the wedding ceremony, the reptile is taken house to house so that inhabitants can take her in their arms and dance. The alligator wears a green skirt, a colorful hand-embroidered tunic and a headdress of ribbons and sequins.<\/p>\n
The creature’s snout is bound shut to avoid any pre-marital mishaps.<\/p>\n
Later, she is put in a white bride’s costume and taken to town hall for the blessed event.<\/p>\n
As part of the ritual, Joel Vasquez, a local fisherman, tosses his net and intones the town’s hopes that the marriage may bring “good fishing, so that there is prosperity, equilibrium and ways to live in peace.”<\/p>\n
After the wedding, the mayor dances with his bride to the sounds of traditional music.<\/p>\n
“We are happy because we celebrate the union of two cultures. People are content,” Sosa told AFP.<\/p>\n
As the dance winds down, the king plants a kiss on the snout of the “princess girl.”<\/p>\n
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n