The own and the other in narratives about witchcraft of the northeast of Mexico

The stories about witchcraft in northeastern of Mexico always present how some situations that seem daily and normal end up covering up their true reality that is negative and harmful, that is, people, things or situations that seem good, in reality they are evil situations. The cover-up mentioned above occurs in an irruption of the alien in the own, where the alien is that which does not belong to the daily reality of the speaker and that is therefore considered as threatening and dangerous. The own usually appears as the daily, the usual and ordinary in the lives of these people. This paper shows the linguistic expressions with which the own, the alien and that inversion of the reality of the speakers of the southeast of the Mexican state of Coahuila are referred to in a series of 21 oral narratives on witchcraft. These references use differences between fright, fear, terror and horror to discursively express this process. When the borders between the own and the alien are blurred, the linguistic expressions return to these narratives in horror stories and raise the notion, from witchcraft, of an upside down world.