Perhaps the goatsucker is Nature's revenge for

what we have done to the environment.

—Scientist on Mexican task force investigating chupacabras,

The Washington Post, May 11, 1996.

The wild is predator. It is the unexpected and the unpredictable. It is also dream. The Tongva of Los Angeles, like other first peoples, made no ontological distinction between everyday animals and those that appeared only in dreams or at the end of vision quests. Their bestiary, for example, encompassed the nunas-i-s, dreaded creatures who survived from the time of the Ancestors, like the monster scorpion living in a cave at the eponymous Rancho El Escorpion in the west San Fernando Valley. There were also different species of were-animals—were-cougars, were-bears, were–sea lions, and so on—in whom masqueraded the spirits of the most powerful shamans. And, most astonishing perhaps, there was the great inland whale that lived in Big Bear Lake (in Tongvan, "the lake that cries"), high in the San Bernardino Mountains.

The cougar on the cover of the Los Angeles Times, of course, is not necessarily less imaginary than a giant scorpion or a mountain whale. Our bestiaries, deprived of the Tongvas' continuous, intimate, and deep knowledge of their fauna, are animal cartoons based on random encounters and behavioralist clichés. Too often we equate wildness with urban disorder, and wild animals end up as the symbolic equivalents of street criminals. Or, conversely, they acquire all the psychopathic connotations of sentimentalized pets and surrogate people. The Otherness of wild animals is the gestalt that we constantly refashion in the image of our own urban misunderstanding and alienation. Where nature is most opaquely unknowable, as it is in the "character" of animals, we intensely crave the anthropomorphic comfort of definition and category. Bestiaries, by definition, are hierarchies of allegorical fauna (including familiar species in their double role as social symbols) crowned by monsters. And monsters, which embody fears in sensual forms, are sometimes messiahs of consolation.

If Los Angeles's bad dreams in recent years have conjured monsters, like man-eating cougars, out of the city's own wild periphery, they have also laid out a welcome mat for monstrous tourists. In early July of 1996, for example, the famous goat-sucking vampire from Puerto Rico, el chupacabra, took up residence in the Latino barrio of Pacoima, in the northwest San Fernando Valley. A hybrid fad, midway between the hoola-hoop and the Devil in Salem, mass culture and mass hysteria, the chupacabra was simultaneously an avatar of poor people's deepest fears and an exuberant, tongue-in-cheek emblem of Latino cultural populism. I am not sure that the notoriously ill-tempered creature, with its bottomless appetite for cabra, gallina, and pato (not to mention the odd Doberman pinscher or two), would enjoy being called a messiah, but it certainly has been a lightning rod for immigrant anxiety. In a vast, strange city—sometimes more desolate than a desert, and more dangerous than a jungle—the chupacabra has brought the reassurance of a familiar monstrosity.

Like Southern California's parched coyotes of the early 1990s, the chupacabras were brought out of the hills and into the city by drought. Both in Puerto Rico, where the goatsucker first appeared in the town of Canovanas, twenty miles east of San Juan, in December 1994, and in northern Mexico, where scores of incidents were reported throughout 1996, there is good reason to credit local claims of a dramatic increase in mysterious attacks on livestock and pets. Puerto Rico was recovering from two years of drought and massive hurricane damage, while northern Mexico, together with the American Southwest, has been suffering through the driest period since the dust-bowl era of the 1930s. In both cases, as Puerto Rican veterinarians and Mexican agricultural officials have demonstrated in detailed investigations, there has been an unusual, drought-related hike in the number and ferocity of wild dog and coyote attacks. (In Sinaloa, a zoological task force blamed pollution rather than drought: "There's no goatsucker, but pollution is now so bad that it's driving ordinary animals mad, giving them the behavioral of crazed alien creatures.")

From the beginning, however, folk culture was suspicious of "expert" explanations—"Who, after all, has ever seen a dog kill a goat, like that?"—and preferred the agency of monsters and vampires. Indeed, the chupacabra may be an echo of the mythic bestiary of the Taynos, Puerto Rico's extinct aboriginal culture. At any event, its image underwent a fascinating evolution as sightings passed from the oral grapevine into the Spanish-speaking tabloid press, then into prime-time tabloid television, before a final apotheosis as an episode of "The X-Files". Thus the original witness at Canovanas described an apparition "just like the Devil . . . four or five feet tall with red eyes and a hideous forked tongue." A month later, the chupacabra grew a horn, which a mechanic, attacked by the creature just before Christmas 1995, amended to long, spiked hair or fur. Its body was portrayed as a hideous combination of a rat and kangaroo. After the chupacabra's immigration to Mexico in early 1996, however, its image was remodeled yet again, as the bug-eyed rat face and punk-rocker hairstyle were replaced by bat wings and a space alien's head. In Puerto Rico, there had been intense speculation that the chupacabra was a mascot or pet left behind by extraterrestrial visitors; now, according to Mexican UFO experts, there was proof that the chupacabra was E.T. himself.

The Mexican left, on the other hand, declared that the chupacabra was actually Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the runaway ex-president, who "had sucked the blood of his country," and T-shirts with Salinas's visage, bald and big-eared, on the body of a chupacabra soon became a popular rage. So did El Chupacabras, a masked wrestler and social activist, who began to appear regularly at some of the nearly one thousand anti-government protests held in turbulent Mexico City during 1996. Elsewhere in Mexico, the beloved devil-rat-alien, Latino if not literally raza, was supplanting Mickey Mouse and the Power Rangers as popular icon: bars offered chupacervezas, food stands sold chupatacos, and mariachis sang chupacarridos. The delirious embrace of chupacabrismo by Mexico was, first and above all, a celebration of the national sense of humor. Despite all the setbacks and infamies of the Salinas era, Mexico still owned its laughter. Yet, as in Puerto Rico and Florida (where a chupacabra panic broke out in the Sweetwater district of Miami in March 1996), there was also genuine terror. Scientists, government ministers, and even President Zedillo went on television to calm hysteria, while local investigators gathered irrefutable evidence of feral dog and coyote attacks on farm corrals.

In Los Angeles, the chupacabra craze was something of an antidote to the monomania of the Simpson trial. While O.J. was saturating English-language television in late spring and summer of 1996, the Spanish-language media, dominated by the huge Televisa chain, was covering chupacabra sightings in Sinaloa and Baja California, and debating whether the terror would strike in Southern California. In early July, two rabbits and a goat were found dead in a Pacoima barnyard. (Pacoima may possess some kind of occult locational significance since the Virgin Mary was widely believed to have appeared in nearby Lopez Canyon in 1990.) Although no one actually saw the chupacabra, there were tell-tale puncture wounds on the animals' necks and their bodies were totally drained of blood. Some people locked themselves in their houses and refused to send their children to school. Others had troubled sleeping and were afraid to take the trash out at night. The majority, however, simply chuckled: Los Angeles had recently acquired a first-rate futbol team; now it also had a genuine chupacabra to prove its Latin-Americanness. Meanwhile, in the chaparral-covered hills above Pacoima, a pair of well-fed coyotes were howling their own delight.

From Grand Street 61 "All-American" Issue, Summer 1997