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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe Ciguapa is an elusive being of Dominican folklore, known for backward-pointing feet, a haunting cry and encounters beside nighttime streams.
Also recorded as La ciguapa
Marcelina chooses the tree beneath which Jacinto will build their home. He asks her to stay beside him a little longer. Then two cries interrupt them: one from the mountain, the other from the woman he has just promised to protect. [1]
Read the manuscriptThe Ciguapa of Jimmy Sierra’s Dominican cultural dictionary appears at night beside flowing water. Her feet point backward, her cry resembles a partridge’s, and she can enchant men. A familiar clue to a traveller’s direction becomes misleading. The tracks remain visible; following them does not promise to bring the pursuer closer. [2]
The nineteenth-century writer Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi gave the creature a particular Dominican journey in La Ciguapa. On 4 June 1860, his narrator leaves Santiago de los Caballeros for Puerto Plata, intending to continue by ship to Havana. He chooses the newer Palo Quemado road rather than the familiar Altamira route. It is shorter, but repeated climbs and river crossings exhaust his horse. After five hours, he stops on the banks of the Bajabonico. A young man approaches and loosens the saddle. His uncle, he explains, is carrying the traveller’s luggage along the other road. [1]
Beside the resting horse, the traveller assures his new acquaintance that there are no robbers to fear along this route. The young man answers that something worse can steal and kill without taking money or life. He names the Ciguapa, then looks around in alarm. The traveller calls him Jacinto—a name chosen for the telling—and asks him to explain. First, Jacinto says, he must tell the misfortune that makes the creature’s power intelligible to him. [1]
His father had spoken his political convictions openly and been forced into exile, leaving Jacinto behind at twelve. He does not know whether his father is still alive. Andrés, the head of a large household, takes him in out of gratitude for the father’s earlier help. One daughter, fifteen-year-old Marcelina, becomes his constant companion. She follows him when he cuts firewood; he follows her when she carries a gourd to the river for water. Their pleasure in each other’s company makes them neglect the work expected of them. [1]
Andrés recognizes what is happening. One evening he tells them that he approves of their growing attachment: they need not hide it or fear his opposition. Jacinto thanks him with a look, then turns toward Marcelina. She has not understood and remains absorbed in her sewing. That night Jacinto cannot sleep. He imagines her hearing his declaration and weeps with happiness. Three months pass before he finds the courage to speak plainly. [1]
They go to collect water and sit beneath a tree beside the river. After nearly an hour, Jacinto takes her hand. She feels how hot his hand is and asks whether he is unwell. His intensity puzzles her; she wants to know what has changed between them. He kneels, still holding her hand, and finally says that he loves her. She answers that she adores him. They begin planning a shared future. Marcelina chooses this very place for their home, so that the tree will always recall their vows. [1]
Jacinto’s description makes the Ciguapa small but proportionate: a vara tall, roughly a yard. It has dark eyes and abundant, lustrous hair, reaching the female’s calves. It can run through the hills like a hare and leap among branches like a bird. Jacinto imagines golden skin and compares it with an idealized Indigenous body. The beauty belongs to his account, with its own racial language; it is not the same portrait as Sierra’s backward-footed woman. Guridi describes both males and females but never specifies reversed feet. [1][3]
In Firelei Báez’s 2019 painting the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing), a Ciguapa arches across a printed railway plan. Green leaves and pink flowers surround the head; pale blue marks move over the sheet. The figure occupies a surface originally meant to describe a structure, giving the plan a body and a new direction. [5]
Jacinto gives the mountain beings a tenderness that makes capture deadly. They flee other creatures, communicate only through cries and are ordinarily harmless. Yet a Ciguapa trapped in the woods may die within hours, overwhelmed by sorrow. Its extraordinary sensitivity also becomes jealousy: seeing lovers together provokes cries of desolation that end only with death. In his explanation, a male Ciguapa’s death coincides with the woman’s, and a female’s with the man’s. This is the rule by which he accounts for Marcelina’s loss. [1]
Sierra’s dictionary gives another means of capture: a white dog on a night with a full moon. The captive likewise dies from grief. The brief description never turns successful pursuit into lasting possession. The being that can enchant a man is also one that cannot endure being confined. [2]
According to Jacinto, Ciguapas sleep in cedar crowns and live on fish, birds and fruit. Their country lies immediately beside the lovers’ daily tasks. River water brings Marcelina and Jacinto together; a cry descends from the overlooking mountain. The traveller reaches this place because his horse needs rest. Three different uses of the landscape—shelter, household labor and passage—meet at the same riverbank. [1]
Curator Katie A. Pfohl connects Báez’s railway painting with New Orleans and the Illinois Central route to Chicago. Tracks could divide communities by race and class; the same railway carried people during the Great Migration. The painted figure spans the division, turning a plan associated with separation into a place where belonging can be imagined. [5]
The journey takes place in 1860 within a story published in 1866. Guridi’s traveller begins by praising scientific discovery and lamenting the survival of superstition. He thinks it has retreated from enlightened centers into forests and villages. His own taste for the new and surprising takes him into precisely that country. When he meets the grieving young man, his curiosity is strong enough that he admits he will press for the story even at the cost of reviving its teller’s pain. [1]
Sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario situates the 1866 publication within Dominican indigenismo: the use of an imagined Indigenous past to support national identity. She disputes an uncomplicated precolonial Taíno origin for the figure and connects Guridi’s writing with arguments about race, sovereignty and belonging. That is a historical interpretation of the literary creature’s formation. A fictional speaker’s claim that its people inhabited the mountains before Europeans arrived cannot, on its own, establish the age of an oral tradition. [3]
Guridi’s lovers have parental permission, mutual affection and a place to live in mind. Their future fails at the moment Jacinto promises protection. Marcelina names what she sees, but never supplies the long explanation that follows: that belongs to Jacinto, and the final judgment belongs to the traveller. The woman’s brief, broken speech is enclosed by the men’s confidence in their interpretations. [1]
Candelario reads the interrupted marriage as a disturbance in the imagined continuity of family and nation. Her argument gives the beautiful, elusive figure a place within a struggle over who belongs and whose future can unfold. The story’s rural home and its lost descendants carry political implications in that reading. [3]
Julia Alvarez’s picturebook The Secret Footprints reverses the direction of fear. Its Ciguapas live in underwater caves and distrust humans. The publisher describes Guapa, a curious child drawn toward a boy she notices while looking for food on land. Scholar María Augusta Albuja Aguilar recounts her attempt to collect a family’s picnic leftovers: she falls, and the adults think her unusual feet are injured. They seek a doctor while the boy stays to feed her. When he goes for water, she escapes, leaving a seashell that he keeps. Other Ciguapas have watched his kindness; their queen must reconsider her judgment of humans. [6][7]
The publisher’s description supplies the quiet continuation. Guapa promises caution but still visits the boy’s house, finding a warm pastelito—a small pastry—in a jacket pocket on the clothesline. Secrecy survives the encounter alongside friendship. The child need not surrender her separate home for the boy to keep making room for her. [6]
Writer Yohanca Delgado explains a different choice in her interview about Our Language. Her speaker, Celi, addresses a granddaughter and answers accounts that have defined Ciguapas from outside. Delgado imagines transformation as an unpredictable inherited trait, giving the conflict between escape and belonging a place inside a family. The fictional genealogy is part of her invention. Celi’s speech allows the creature to correct the people who have presumed to describe her. [4]
Delgado connects that address with her own fear of losing family histories that were passed down orally. She found the Ciguapa through research, read Guridi and began imagining its point of view. Her granddaughter listener may be Americanized and only partly familiar with Dominican language and culture. The story becomes a way for a voice from the past to reach someone who might otherwise inherit only fragments. [4]
Guridi places his most complete description after the death, when the survivor is trying to account for what has happened. Jacinto’s description gives his loss a rule, but his final condemnation of belief leaves the rule unsettled. At the riverbank, the traveller has heard one man’s grief; Marcelina’s experience remains in the few words Jacinto remembers her saying. [1]
Guridi’s Spanish story supplies the principal narrative. The Secret Footprints is represented through its publisher’s description and Albuja Aguilar’s analysis; Delgado discusses her own fiction in an interview. [1][6][7][4][5]
Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi · Artístico RD, public reprint of Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi · 1866 · Spanish; original English paraphrase
Complete story from opening civilization/superstition frame through narrator’s final departure; journey date, Jacinto/Marcelina encounter and final creature account
The Spanish text is a modern transcription of Guridi’s story, rather than a facsimile of the 1866 edition.
Checked 2026-10-11
Jimmy Sierra; collaborators Reynaldo Disla, Héctor Martínez Fernández, Carlos José Peña and León Félix Batista · FUNGLODE / Diccionario Cultural Dominicano · July 2017 · Spanish
Ciguapa definition and dictionary credits
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑She wants to go and tell her father. Jacinto asks for a little more time alone together. Then she says she is afraid, although she cannot explain why. He reassures her that God has heard their promises and that he is there to defend her. Two cries break across that assurance. One comes from the mountain, echoing among the rocks. The other is Marcelina’s: she names the Ciguapa and faints. Jacinto lifts her onto his shoulders and carries her home. [1]
Her father’s tenderness, her siblings’ care and Jacinto’s love cannot restore her. She lies in a terrible stupor interrupted by convulsions and sobs. When she speaks, she recalls their promised happiness, says that she saw the Ciguapa and bids him farewell. Three days after the encounter, they bury her beneath the same tree. A grave occupies the place where they had imagined their home. [1]
The traveller prepares to leave, but asks for the promised account of the creature itself. Jacinto describes its mountain life, appearance and fatal jealousy, while insisting that his city upbringing has protected him from rural superstition. Finally, he calls the belief the true cause of his misfortune. He shakes the traveller’s hand and disappears along the path at the mountain’s foot. The traveller resumes his journey, still condemning the errors that progress has failed to dispel. The two men leave the river carrying different burdens from the same conversation. [1]
Ginetta E. B. Candelario · Small Axe 20(3), pp.100–112 / author's uploaded text · November 2016 · English
Printed pp. 100–105; DOI 10.1215/07990537-3726890
The discussion draws on pages 100–105, where Candelario develops the literary and historical argument.
Checked 2026-10-11
Yohanca Delgado in conversation with Taylor, credited by first name in the dialogue · A Public Space · 2020-12-01 · English
Introduction and complete Taylor/Yohanca dialogue
Delgado’s fiction is discussed through this author interview.
Checked 2026-10-11
Katie A. Pfohl · New Orleans Museum of Art · 2020-11-04 · English
Opening Báez acquisition section and artwork identification
Checked 2026-10-11
Random House Children's Books editorial collective; book by Julia Alvarez, illustrated by Fabian Negrin · Random House Children's Books · English
About The Secret Footprints
The publisher’s synopsis supplements the account in Albuja Aguilar’s study; the picturebook itself is not the source used here.
Checked 2026-10-11
María Augusta Albuja Aguilar · Camino Real 14(18), pp.127–144 / Instituto Franklin-UAH · 2023 · English
Printed pp. 135–140 for The Secret Footprints analysis; introduction pp. 127–128
The Guapa sequence follows Albuja Aguilar’s discussion of the picturebook, especially pages 137–139.
Checked 2026-10-11