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Did you know that “Immigrants are eating our pets!” is a common contemporary (urban) legend that has been around since at least the mid 1800s? When I studied and then taught Intro to Folklore, one of my favorite topics was legends. Folklorists define legends as narratives set in the real world that are told as true and, crucially, invite questions of belief.
Legends are often a way for a group to talk about and debate a fear: of new technology, of the changing role of women, of disease, of commercialization, or of immigrants. Legends are studied not to learn more about the target of the legend (in this case Haitian Americans), but because they reveal interesting, though sometimes distressing, information about the group within which the legends circulates.
As mentioned at the beginning, one of the other fascinating aspects of legends is that they cycle. So a legend about a plague victim from 1665 can be extraordinarily similar to one from the 1980s about an AIDs patient (Goldstein 2024). Similarly, over the last 150 years, the immigrants eating pets legend was adapted to German, Asian, and now Haitian immigrants. If you want to learn more, check out Merrill Kaplan’s (Director, Center for Folklore Studies at Ohio State University) guest column in the Columbus Dispatch
Katrina Wynn
Old Town
