Field Notes from the Flea Market: Stories Hidden in Sunlight, Clay, and Cinnamon

You may be wondering why on earth I am doing field notes from the flea market. What does this have to do with storytelling and folklore in the RGV? The answer is simple: Everything.

Folklore isn’t just bedtime stories. It isn’t just handmade pottery or dances in Market Square, although it is all those things, too. But folklore is also the way a place smells at 10 a.m. on a warm Saturday, the way a vendor arranges statues on a folding table, the way a stranger casually tells you why you should buy this bracelet for protection and not that one.

As Sims and Stephens in Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions  remind us, 

“folklore is not just about time-honored traditions or quaint customs; it is a philosophical approach to understanding people and expressive culture” (xv).

Folklore is the texture of daily life. It is how people knit meaning into ordinary gestures. It is what we do without thinking, what we pass down without calling it a lesson. Sims and Stephens expand this beautifully: “folklore touches on every dimension of human experience and artistic expression how people learn, share knowledge and form their identity.” (3) 

That’s everything.
That’s the RGV.
That’s a flea market.

Because as they also write: “the term folklore refers to the knowledge we have about our world and ourselves that we don’t learn in school or textbooks – we learn folklore from each other.” And according to folklorist William Wilson, folklore ultimately “refers to what it means to be human.” 

That’s why the 77 Flea Market is absolutely field-notes-worthy. Because if you want to understand a community’s expressive culture, you look at the places where people gather, trade, gossip, flirt, argue with their kids, negotiate prices, bless each other, side-eye each other, feed each other, and teach each other without ever calling it teaching.

The Three Categories of Folklore (Alive and Well at the Flea Market)

Sims and Stephens identify three broad categories:

1. Verbal folklore – the stories, sayings, jokes, warnings, prayers
2. Material folklore – the objects people make, use, exchange, value
3. Customary folklore – habitual actions, rituals, ways of doing things

The flea market is a living ecosystem of all three. And so, notebook in hand, I wandered the 77 Flea Market taking in the sensory overload of an RGV Saturday morning. 

Altars for Sale: The Material and the Mystical

The first thing that hits you is color. The second is the smell of grilled meats, elote, and incense.  Every aisle is a small cosmology. I passed stalls packed with religious memorabilia: crucifixes, rosaries, saints with soft painted faces; and right beside them, statues of Santa Muerte, Mexico’s folk saint of death, protection, and radical acceptance. A few stalls down: Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent deity with deep Nahua and Maya roots. Next to him, a stern-faced eagle warrior, one of the iconic Aztec knightly orders. And right beside those, statues of Buddha and Ganesha.

In one four-foot section you’d see Catholicism, Mesoamerican cosmology, Hindu devotion, and New Age spirituality hanging out together like it’s no big deal. A pan-spiritual neighborhood block party. If you ever want proof that the Valley holds multitudes, go to the flea market.

The Bird Situation

Then there were the pet stalls, a whole symphony of wings and color. Dozens of bird cages lined up in tidy rows, filled with parakeets, lovebirds, and the occasional parrot giving you the side-eye of a creature who knows more than it lets on. The sound was… a lot. A bright, chaotic chorus that you feel in your chest before your ears catch up.

My outer anthropologist took notes; my inner newcomer whispered, a little shyly, “wow, this is different.” Not bad, just different. This kind of bustling animal trade is part of many borderland markets, shaped by long-standing cultural practices and community needs.

Jewelry That Wards, Heals, and Protects

I wandered through rows of jewelry, each piece a small ethnographic clue. The mal de ojo bracelets were everywhere; bright red strings, glass eyes staring back at you. They’re for protection from “los celos,” the jealousy that people can send your way intentionally or unintentionally. Then la mano de Fátima, also called the Hamsa, popular in Islamic and Jewish folk traditions but deeply embraced across Latin America for healing, warding, and harmony. A kind of all-purpose spiritual seatbelt.

But the imagery I saw most, and that I keep encountering across the Valley, was the corazón (the heart). Not just the cutesy Valentine’s heart, but anatomical hearts, burning hearts, pierced hearts, crowned hearts. I’ve seen them on murals, in gallery paintings, on book covers, business logos, T-shirts, and now, everywhere at the flea market. The sacred heart tradition is Catholic, yes, but its deeper roots are Indigenous, tied to pre-Hispanic understandings of the heart as the seat of vitality and essence. The heart was where the universe, body, and spirit met. In the Valley, the heart is a symbol that transcends.

I’m beginning to believe that the RGV has a circulatory system all its own.

Molcajetes, Sombreros, Sandals, and Clay

Several stalls sold molcajetes, those volcanic-stone mortars whose lineage traces back thousands of years to Mesoamerican kitchens and rituals. They’re practical tools, yes, but also ceremonial ones, used historically in offerings and food-based rituals that honored earth, ancestors, and sustenance.

There were sombreros, sun-faded and wide-brimmed, and handmade leather huaraches, sandals crafted in the same style Indigenous communities have made for centuries. And then the ollas...terracotta and clay vessels with rounded bellies and graceful handles. This is where I first heard the phrase “olla season,” the spring and summer months when gardeners sink porous clay ollas into soil to water plants slowly, using ancient irrigation techniques still alive all over Mexico. But the real magic came from the vendor who leaned in and casually taught me how to make café de olla.

 

Café de Olla: The Ritual I Didn’t Know I Needed

The vendor explained the basics: a traditional clay pot, coarse coffee, cinnamon sticks, piloncillo (unrefined sugar), maybe orange peel if you’re feeling indulgent. The clay, he said, changes the flavor. It holds memory. So the next Sunday, I tried it.

The morning was quiet, my daughter still asleep, the house soft with early sun. I set the clay pot on the stove, listening as the flame warmed it; this tiny ancient heartbeat echoing in my kitchen.The cinnamon cracked open its smell. The steam slipped out of the little holes in the olla, rising in slow coils like it had all the time in the world.

When I poured that first cup, the aroma was earthy, sweet, smoky; something older than the kitchen it was in. I took one sip and felt it in my chest. Like drinking a story someone’s great-grandmother started telling generations ago and I had finally been invited into. For a moment, I felt genuinely connected to something ancient, something that doesn’t need academic terminology to justify itself. That moment alone made the flea market field-notes-worthy.

The Flea Market Is Folklore

Because folklore is people. Folklore is practice. Folklore is how a community expresses itself without ever naming what it is doing. And the 77 Flea Market is one of the beating hearts of the RGV’s expressive culture. Where else can you find saints, serpents, sandals, birds, bracelets, molcajetes, and the recipe that quietly rearranged your Sunday morning?

Field notes don’t always come from libraries or formal interviews. Sometimes they come from a vendor handing you a clay pot and saying,

Here—this is how we do it.

Follow my Instagram account: @folklore_rgv 

Works Cited

Sims, Martha C., and Martine Stephens. 2011. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. 2nd ed. Logan: Utah State University Press.