เครื่องรางโอโฮ เด เวนาโด (ตากวาง)Ojo de venadoojo de venado

Wikipedia's account of the Mercado de Sonora in Mexico City puts it in one line among the market's magical stock: crosses of ocote wood for good luck, chains of garlic to ward off evil, and a seed called "deer's eye" to protect against the "evil eye".

México Desconocido traces the seed's career as a good-luck amulet to Xichú, a municipality in the northeast of Guanajuato, and notes that Mucuna also grew in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí and Veracruz, so other regions may have reached the same use independently. Newborns get one against mal de ojo; adults take one up for a hard stretch; drivers hang one where they can see it.

The object has a public opponent. The priest Eduardo Hayen Cuarón condemned it as "un amuleto y por tanto una práctica esotérica, maligna y 'obra de Satanás'" — an amulet, and therefore an esoteric practice, malign, and the work of Satan. Inference — a charm that draws a priest's condemnation by name is a charm being carried by people who also go to Mass, which is where most of this atlas's Latin American material sits. Both statements are reported here; neither is settled here.

The seed reached national pop culture too: the band Caifanes put it on their 1988 debut album.

Gathered from the vine, dried, drilled or bound, and finished with red thread. No consecration is published in the sources this project read. Wearers say a seed that cracks or splits has taken a hit meant for the person carrying it — the same account Turkish sellers give of a broken nazar bead — and it is replaced rather than repaired.

Sold across central and southern Mexico in markets, at church doors and online as of 2026, and hung in cars as often as worn. No dated price was read for this record, so none is printed.