Xoloitzcuintle

The fullest account of the dog’s task is in the appendix to Book 3 of Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, compiled from the testimony of Nahua elders. The dead person, Sahagún writes, was made to take along “a little dog with reddish hair”, a loose cotton thread around its neck, because the dead swam across a river of the underworld, Chicunaoapa in his spelling, on the back of a dog. Dogs lived on the bank of that river. When a dead man arrived, the dog that knew its master swam across and carried him over, and “for this reason the natives used to keep and raise little dogs”. Only a reddish dog would serve: the black dog said “I have washed myself”, the white dog “I have stained myself black”, and neither could carry the dead across. The dog was then killed and burned with its master.

Sahagún’s dog is reddish-haired, not the hairless breed. Valadez Azúa draws the same line: in pre-Hispanic Mexico dogs in general were considered the companions of the dead on their way, and “in the popular imagination” the xoloitzcuintle is the breed that has been given that task. INAH, describing a Día de Muertos parade organised by the Museo Regional de Colima, writes that various historical sources say this dog accompanied souls toward Mictlan by helping them across the river where their journey through the underworld began.

The breed is ancient. Ceramic dogs found in Colima in the early twentieth century show, Valadez Azúa says, that hairless dogs appeared about two thousand years ago in a strip of western Mexico from Nayarit to Guerrero. The oldest bones are from the seventh century AD, from funerary contexts, where hairless dogs appear with other breeds as guardians of sacred places. From the west they spread south as far as South America, and to the centre, to Tula and Teotihuacan, reaching the Maya area about a thousand years ago.