Feast Day of Saint John the Baptist
In the Catholic calendar, Saint John’s day falls on June 24th. It is celebrated in Mexico and other Catholic countries with a variety of traditions that are centered around water. In Mexico, this is particularly apropos since the date is near the beginning of the rainy summer season when the rains really begin to fall regularly.
Some of the traditions and superstitions in Mexico and Latin America I’ve heard connected with the feast of San Juan include the belief that watering plants or trees with spring water just before dawn will produce exceptionally good harvests, and that bathing in waters of streams or rivers on the day of San Juan is particularly beneficial to one’s health and well-being. In other parts, water is thrown off balconies onto unsuspecting passersby below, or bonfires are lit, supposedly symbolic of another cleansing custom.
One unusual phenomenon that I’ve observed in Mexico on or around Saint John’s day is the timely emergence of the Saint John ant (hormiga de San Juan, also known here as the Chicatana). This is a large, leaf-cutter ant with a bulbous, reddish-brown body. The strange thing is that this ant seems to make its appearance en masse only at this time of year which coincides with the arrival of the rains and Saint John’s day (well, duh, I guess that’s where its name came from, right?). Sometimes their timing is a little off and you’ll see one or two on June 22nd, or as late as June 26th or so, but the bulk of them truly seem to crawl out of their holes in the ground and unfurl their somewhat awkward looking wings right on time, June 24th, year after year.
Indigenous peoples of the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca use the Chicatana ant in cooking, making what is said to be a tasty hot sauce from these hefty ants toasted with chile peppers, salt and garlic to be enjoyed with fresh, hand-made tortillas (see http://www.mcallear.com/articles/as%C3%AD-358-mcallen-veracruz.html and http://lacomunidad.elpais.com/un-minuto-por-la-ecologia/tags/chicatanas — this last reference is in Spanish)
