Tex-Eco ABC's Animals, Borders, and Cryptids in Texas Folklore
Paper to be presented in person at Texas Folklore Society 107th annual meeting in San Marcos, TX, on April 2026. Click for introduction.
Folktale retellings often color past tales with present challenges. The Anthropocene is one such challenge. National Geographic uses the Anthropocene to describe Earth’s recent history as human activity catastrophically impacts the planet’s climate and shared ecosystems. Ecocriticism wrestles with literature’s relationship to the environment, making it a useful tool to consider how writers use literature to call attention to the Anthropocene. A comparison between past and recent retellings of borderland folktales contextualizes humanity’s current relationship to the environment, and more specifically, how humanity may perceive nonhuman animals as they navigate the destruction of their very habitats. David Bowle’s folktale retellings that feature animals recast once thought natural, traditional animal archetypes into fantastic, monstrous cryptids that agitate 21st century relationships to nonhuman animals. An ecocritical analysis may help trace the interplay between past and present animal archetypes to ultimately stress how humanity’s current relationship to nonhuman animals is less distant but consequently uncannier.
Many animal archetypes of South Texas are embedded within their folklore and legends. David Bowles’ Borderlore: Folktales and Legends of South Texas includes rattlesnakes, panthers, and birds. Similarly, the Texas Folklore Society has catalogued folklore about these same nonhuman animal archetypes thanks to folklorists like J. Frank Dobie, John K. Strecker, Meredith Hale, and Mody C. Boatright. Although folklorists listed here are not credited as primary sources of the oral traditions, their effort to transmit these tales for posterity in the published volumes of The Texas Folklore Society provide background to Bowles’ texts. The challenges brought up in early folktales address a different time, but the animal archetypes in both early and new folktale legends convey similar themes such as motherly instinct, cryptid encounters, and existential threats. The following surveys each theme and considers images of the rattlesnake, panther, and bird.
Works Cited:
Bowles, David. Border Lore: Folktales and Legends of South Texas. Lamar University Press, 2016. National Geographic. National Geographic Encyclopedic Entry, 2023, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/.