• Source:JND
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JE News Desk:  A mayor of a small southern Mexico town took wedding vows with a female crocodile as people around him celebrated the matrimony. 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.

This matrimony as strange as it sounds is a traditional ritual of the city that is done to bring good fortune to his people. This ritual likely dates back centuries to pre-Hispanic times among Oaxaca state's Chontal and Huave indigenous communities, like a prayer pleading for nature's bounty.

The seven-year-old reptile, referred to as a little princess, is believed to be a deity representing mother earth, and her marriage to the local leader symbolizes the joining of humans with the divine.

According to Sosa, this matrimony 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.

"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.

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 colourful hand-embroidered tunic and a headdress of ribbons and sequins. Also, the creature's snout is bound shut to avoid any pre-marital mishaps. Later, she is put in a white bride's costume and taken to the town hall for the blessed event.

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.