Juan Malo
Juan Malo ('Bad John', also recorded as Juan Måla and Pedro Malas) is the trickster of CHamoru folklore: a poor young man of Spanish-era Guam who, often with his faithful karabao (water buffalo), outwits the Spanish governor and other colonial authorities in a long cycle of comic tales. In one famous story his karabao wallows in the governor's lily pond and Juan parlays the embarrassment into a job minding the governor's pigs, which he promptly eats, before escaping by walking his karabao backward so that its tracks appear to lead toward the house rather than away. Folklorists read the cycle, first set down at length by Mavis Warner Van Peenen in 1945, as covert resistance to colonial rule, and the trickster's name lives on in Guam's long-running CHamoru-language newspaper comic strip Juan Malimanga.
Domains
- trickery and cunning
Powers
- to outwit governors and officials with cunning schemes
Sources
- Mavis Warner Van Peenen, Chamorro Legends on the Island of Guam (1945; repr. Mangilao: Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam, 2008)
- Christopher R. Fee and Jeffrey B. Webb, eds., American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore, s.v. "Water Buffalo, a Guamanian American Legend" (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2016)
- "CHamoru/Chamorro Comic Strip: Juan Malimanga," Guampedia: The Encyclopedia of Guam, https://www.guampedia.com/comic-strip-juan-malimanga/