San
Felipe, Baja, Mexico is considered to be a border town.
It lives under the aegis of Mexicali. Border towns often
attract personalities who leave deep impressions on local
history. These
impressions frequently derive from gossip and rumor. If
they manage to sustain an appeal to the active imagination,
they find legs as legends. And if the appeal crosses the
generational divide, they ultimately become smelted into
mythology.
Gossip is truth filtered through a probability
curve. People are willing to believe something about their
neighbors as long as the rumor is probable or even possible
in their minds.
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Legends are one step beyond
the probable. They are rumors lost to memory and experience,
transcribed to history. When a legend becomes groomed
by the symbols of the collective unconscious, a myth is
born and the seed of truth from which it sprang no longer
has any importance.
San Felipe is young to legends
and myths. It is still at the gossip and rumor stage.
But slowly, stories with some elements of legend are appearing.
And what smacks of mythology has been processed through
the fables of the indigenous natives first encountered
by the Jesuit missionaries.
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