Editor’s Page – May 2026

Chisme

El chisme crece cuando camina. Gossip grows as it walks.

My grandma used to tell a story about a bridge in Germany. The bridge itself is real: the Göltzsch Viaduct in Saxony, a vast sweep of brick arches built in the 1850s to carry trains across a deep valley. At the time it was the largest brick bridge in the world, and when it rose above the countryside it must have looked intimidating.

According to my grandma’s story, the engineers couldn’t keep the bridge from collapsing. The calculations failed, the foundations shifted, and nothing seemed to work. Then someone spread the rumor that the engineers had to rely on black magic to make the bridge stand. The rumor grew quickly into the fiendish notion that a child would be taken and entombed in the bridge to give it strength.

Once the rumor began traveling through the villages nearby, fear followed close behind. Mothers kept their children close. Strangers were watched carefully. Reportedly, one poor schoolteacher was even mistaken for the man sent to gather the children and barely escaped with his life.

Of course, no child was ever sealed into the bridge. The viaduct still stands, but the rumor lived for a long time and caused real harm to real people.

Here in Mexico in the late 19th century, as railroads and bridges pushed across the rural countryside, similar rumors spread that foreign engineers were kidnapping children to bury them in bridge foundations or use their blood to strengthen the rails. These rumors sparked real fear. As in Germany, parents hid their children, and strangers were looked upon with suspicion. Railroad crews were sometimes confronted, threatened, or driven out by angry crowds. Though the rumors were false, they created a climate of suspicion and panic that put innocent people at risk and occasionally tipped into mob violence.

Gossip has always moved this way. It grows as it spreads. Mexico even has a saying that captures the phenomenon perfectly: pueblo chico, infierno grande – small town, big hell. Anyone who has lived in a close-knit place understands the meaning. Information moves quickly through small communities. But so do guesses, suspicions, and misunderstandings. A comment can become a story before the day is done. And once a story begins walking, it can be surprisingly difficult to persuade it to sit down.

None of us sets out to spread false information. Most of the time we are simply passing along something we heard, something that seemed urgent, or something that others were already repeating. An innocent person can suddenly become suspicious. A misunderstanding can grow into fear. Reputations can be damaged, and communities can become unsettled, all because a story sounded convincing enough to repeat.

Today, gossip no longer needs to walk it travels instantly. A photo, a message, a voice clip can circle a community in minutes, carrying certainty without question. With social media and now AI, even what we see and hear can be misleading, stitched together just convincingly enough to feel true. And once it begins to spread, it moves with a speed and reach that earlier generations could never have imagined. We’ve all seen how quickly confusion can take hold, how easily fear can grow from fragments. The old saying still holds, but with greater urgency now: if gossip grows as it walks, imagine what it can do when it flies.