The Burning of El Cucuy
10/26/25

He was the first to ignite our community

Rudolfo Anaya,

maestro of memory,

who took the fear that haunted children

and taught it to speak in fire.

He gave us permission

to write brown and bold,

to speak in our own cadence,

to call ghosts by name

and still dream.

So tonight,

In the South Valley,

we gather,

brown hands,

corn hearts,

We are people of the sun

People of the soil

our breath turning to smoke at dusk,

near the end of October,

when the veil thins

and the air tastes of endings.

El Cucuy in Albuquerque,

a monster made from wood, wire, and worry,

stuffed with people’s fears,

stitched with grief and glitter,

painted with satire and sorrow.

He is shapeless, formless,

a shadow once used to silence children.

Now, he stands as a confession tower,

our community’s collective mirror.

We write what we can’t carry,

losses, angers, inherited shames,

Some write the names

of fathers fallen to police violence

Some scribble ICE in all caps,

Injustice and inhumanity

On scraps of paper,

To burn in the fire

like prayers too proud for our mouths.

These fears go inside him,

into the belly of the Boogeyman,

and when fire finds him,

combustion enacts release.

arte,

poetry and presence,

Musica and medicina

children sketching their monsters

and watching them rise forty feet high.

This is Burque’s South Valley.

Authenticity and community

This is local, school-driven,

deliberately non-commercial,

deliberately ours.

This is old medicine, remade.

Rodolfo Anaya lit the first flame,

but the children keep it alive,

their visions monumental,

their imaginations turned to blaze.

Each ember,

a syllable of survival.

Each spark,

a sigh of release.

This is cultural literacy in action,

Chicano, Mexicano, Mestizo,

folk figure flipped from threat to cure

We are brown people of the sun,

Burning in the night

to see ourselves clearer.

When the veil is thin,

when our world and the spirit world

touch hands through smoke,

we can talk to the ancestors,

and if we listen,

we hear them whisper in the wind:

This is collective purification,

The crowd carries the medicine .

We bear the heat together

so no one holds it alone.

We burn the fear,

not the future.

We burn to remember

we are still here

Alive.

El Cucuy,

your skeleton crackles in cold air,

your forked tongue flickers

like a prayer unfinished.

You are

our community’s confessional pyre.

We name the fear,

witness the burn,

and let the smoke carry it,

toward stars,

toward ancestors,

toward grace.

To Redemption

This fire is medicine.

This is how we heal.

This is who we are.

Thank you, Mr. Anaya,

for giving the South Valley a flame

that heals

That burns

That transforms.