Victor Hugo Sosa, Mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, a town of Indigenous Chontal people in the Tehuantepec isthmus of Mexico, has entered into holy matrimony with a female reptile in a traditional rite to bring good fortune to his people.

The Mayor of the small southern Mexico town took as his betrothed a reptile named Alicia Adriana, re-enacting an ancestral ritual as onlookers clapped and danced.

The reptile is a caiman, an alligator-like marsh dweller endemic to Mexico and Central America.

Sosa swore to be true to what local calls “the princess girl.”

During the ritual he said: “I accept responsibility because we love each other. That is what is important. You can’t have a marriage without love… I yield to marriage with the princess girl.

Marriage between a man and a female caiman has happened here for 230 years to commemorate the day when two Indigenous groups came to peace — with a marriage.

Tradition has it that frictions were overcome when a Chontal king, embodied these days by the mayor, wedded a princess girl of the Huave Indigenous group, represented by the female alligator.

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The Huave live along coastal Oaxaca state, not far from this inland town.

Jaime Zarate, chronicler of San Pedro Huamelula explained that the wedding allows the sides to “link with what is the emblem of Mother Earth, asking the all-powerful for rain, the germination of the seed, all those things that are peace and harmony for the Chontal man.

The reptile, before the wedding ceremony,  is taken house to house so that inhabitants can take her in their arms and dance.

The alligator wears a green skirt, a colorful hand-embroidered tunic and a headdress of ribbons and sequins with its snout bound shut to avoid any pre-marital mishaps.

Later, she is put in a white bride’s costume and taken to town hall for the blessed event.

Joel Vasquez, a local fisherman, as part of the ritual, tosses his net and intones the town’s hopes that the marriage may bring “good fishing, so that there is prosperity, equilibrium and ways to live in peace.”

The mayor theb dances with his bride to the sounds of traditional music after the wedding

“We are happy because we celebrate the union of two cultures. People are content,” Sosa said told Agence France-Presse.

After the dance also, the king plants a kiss on the snout of the “princess girl.”