Mal de Ojo (Evil Eye) and Other Superstitions
My introduction to this belief came with a conversation that I had with an elderly family member some fifty years ago. She was telling me about her little daughter that had died as a tot. She had been a beautiful child with abundant curly hair, but she got sick and died quite suddenly. When I asked about the cause of death, the woman firmly declared that her daughter had received the evil eye from a jealous neighbor woman.
This subject comes up in Luisa, Chapter 6:
As more people arrived, baby Mina was passed around from one willing set of arms to another,
exclaimed over and blessed many times. It was customary to add, “Dios la bendiga—God bless her,”
after any compliment as superstition was common among them. If someone said, “Ay, que linda,”
referring to how cute the infant was, without adding, “Dios la bendiga,” people thought that the baby
might be getting what they called “Mal de ojo”—evil eye. They believed that it could cause some harm
to the infant in the form of sickness or even death.
Another superstitious belief crops up in Chapter 17, when Chenta declared that she was not going to move Mina out of the crib until the new baby arrived and they knew that it was healthy and strong. Luisa's reaction to this was to set her coffee cup down slowly and look at Chenta in surprise.
"Are you afraid that moving Mina out of your room before you deliver could somehow jinx the
wellbeing of the new baby?” she asked.
Chenta shrugged her shoulders, and murmured, “Well, you never know. Things like that happen
sometimes.”
Luisa was hard put to find the words to respond to that, but she finally said, “You know, for a
woman of faith, you have a lot of superstitions.”
Chenta gave a sheepish half smile. “I know,” she admitted. “Sometimes the ideas that were
passed down from my mother and grandmother are hard to shake. I do trust God and respect His will,
but…I will still wait until after the baby is born to move Mina to the other room.”
I, too, am a woman of faith and trust in a sovereign God, but agree with Chenta that some habits are hard to break. If you post a picture of your baby or grandchild on Facebook, I will say, "So cute!" or "Adorable," followed by "God bless him/her,"...just in case!
“Luisa,” began Rosa, “I couldn’t help but notice that Chenta is expecting another baby. I guess when I saw her five weeks ago it either was not so obvious, or I was just unaware of anything but Micaela at that time. When is she due?”
“I don’t know for sure,” replied Luisa. “You know that she never talks about these things. She has a round figure anyway, which is probably why you did not notice it before, but now it is at the stage where there is no denying it.”
“I would think that she only has two or three months left,” observed Petra. “What are they going to do? You are already bursting at the seams at that house.”
“I have been wondering that myself,” Luisa admitted. “The babies always stay with Papá and Chenta until another baby comes, but there is no other place to put Mina at this time. I suppose that they can leave Mina in their room while the new baby still fits in the cradle. After that, I do not know. We already have four girls in one room and three boys in another. It does not seem right to put Mina in with the boys, even if she is only a year old.”
Petra turned from the stove and wiped her hands on her apron. With a huge smile on her face and a wink she said, “Well, now that we are talking about babies…guess what?”
“What?” exclaimed both Rosa and Luisa at the same time.
“No!” gasped Luisa.
“Yes,” affirmed Petra.
With squeals, the sisters threw their arms around each other in a three-way hug.
