The Legend of La Llorona

From Chilango.com

Welcome to 2019's 'Month of Horror' where each post in the month of October we look at something horror related. This week, and the first post of 2019's 'Month of Horror', we will be looking at one of the most enduring legends in Mexican, Latin American,and Chicano folklore: that of La Llorona. 'The Weeping Woman' has remained a prominent feature of folklore for several centuries - sometimes as a tale to scare naughty children, other times as a metaphor for class and gender. She has also made several appearances outside folklore, mostly in Chicano and Mexican film, and most recently in the 2019 horror movie The Curse of La Llorona - one of the movies in the wider The Conjuring cinematic universe.

Who is La Llorona?

As usual with folklore, there are different versions of the La Llorona tale, but many of them share the same characteristics. Once in a rural village a poor but very beautiful called Maria met a nobleman. This nobleman became enchanted with her, and they soon married - to the delight of Maria's family and the chagrin of the nobleman's family. They settled down and had two children - a boy and the girl - but the nobleman's family was not content with their son's new life. He was kept away often, and as Maria grew older it was clear that he was falling out of love with her. One day the nobleman came to the village with a younger woman of his class standing, and announced that he was leaving the family.Sent into a fit of rage Maria took her children to the river and drowned them. However, as soon as she finished the act she snapped out of her rage, and with horror realised what she had done. Unable to find the bodies of her children, now washed away down the river, in despair she drowned herself. Upon reaching the gates of Heaven she was turned away as the souls of her children were missing, so she was tasked with finding them. Now she wanders the mortal world weeping for the lost souls of her children earning her the name of La Llorona - The Weeping Woman.

La Llorona is now seen around waterways weeping for her missing children, the cries of 'Mis hijos' (My children) being heard. Children have to be wary if they hear her cries; in either grief or rage La Llorona will try and drown them to claim their souls in the place of her children. Similar to the tales of the Irish banshee it is sometimes believed that hearing her wails is a sign that you will soon die. Also, in some versions of the tale La Llorona will drown men, especially white men (a point we will get to), in revenge for the man who left her and drove her insane. 

Origins

As La Llorona exists in folklore and oral tales dating back centuries we do not know her true origins. The tale certainly dates from the post-Spanish Conquest era, especially as one of the interpretations of her is that she is La Malinche, although some historians like Camilla Townsend disagree with this interpretation. La Malinche holds a very important part of Mexican identity. She was an indigenous slave given to Hernan Cortes in 1519, officially 'hacer las tortillas', but in reality she was raped and had to fight for survival. As she was a smart young woman who knew many languages and political systems she became Cortes' translator, and at times tactician, as a way to survive. She later gave birth to Cortes' first son, Martin, but Cortes later abandoned her and married a Spanish woman. Quite importantly, when she was, most likely forcibly, baptised she was given the Christian name Maria. Over the centuries La Malinche's legacy and image has constantly changed - from independence in the 1820s until the 1970s, and even then only in feminist circles, La Malinche has been seen as a traitor and a whore. Recent scholarship, such as the brilliant Camilla Townsend, has pushed back against this but some scholars, like Gloria Duarte, have created a link between her and La Llorona. Many scholars have also discussed how La Llorona resembles many other legends from across the world - banshees in Ireland, the White Lady in fifteenth-century Germany, Lilith from Jewish folklore, and Lamia and Medea from Greek mythology. It is likely that local legends and folklore combined with European folklore. Townsend has discussed how post-Conquest indigenous elite combined their own history with European tropes to explain how their own parents and grandparents were conquered - the myth of Cortes being seen as a god resurrected the god Queztalcoatl and combined his story with Christ or warrior saints. 

Different Meanings

A depiction of La Malinche

La Llorona has meant different things to different people. Of course, we have her being linked to La Malinche. In some versions of the tale she was called Maria, the Christian name of La Malinche. Townsend has refuted the idea that La Llorona came from the legacy of La Malinche stating that Malinche never lost her children as Llorona did. However, it has been seen that she is not weeping for her children in particular, but instead the lost indigenous peoples of Mexico - post-independence Mexico tried to link itself to the Aztec past despite being ruled by white creoles. La Llorona could have emerged from a paternalistic, and colonialist, retelling of La Malinche's story. Another key part of La Llorona's meaning is the warnings about transgressing class and racial boundaries. Although the ethnicity of Maria and the nobleman is never stated looking at the history of class in Mexico we can realise that the nobleman was likely descended from white creoles, whereas Maria would likely have been either indigenous or mixed-race, most probably mestizo. La Llorona becomes a cautionary tale by a patriarchal and racist society about transgressing class and race.

La Llorona's story changed in the nineteenth century based on who was telling the story. Men, like Juan de Dios Peza, portrays La Llorona as the wailing and malevolent spirit punished by Heaven. However, women told the story in a very different way. When feminist scholar Y.H. Harris translated the tale into English in 1888 she combined her own beliefs with women's version of the tale, so La Llorona became a tale of male betrayal. It is the actions of the negligent and womanising gentleman who drove her into killing herself, and some versions also have her accidentally killing her children. Expanding on this Domino Renee Perez has discussed La Llorona as being a way for Chicano communities to connect with Mexican culture, and how that is exploited in mainstream media. In the pilot for Supernatural the protagonists fight a voluptuous and renamed La Llorona to avoid accusations of racism, but at the same time literally whitewashes her story. Even the reunification with her children turns into punishment instead of redemption. Finally, we have what La Llorona means for children. By the late-twentieth century she became a bogeyman used to scare children from being naughty - Patricia Marina Trujillo describes how her uncle George told her the story,and her mother and grandmother used the tale to stop her from being disobedient. The story terrified her so much that she had nightmares of 'la diabla' which her brother and cousins preyed on by pretending to be her to scare the young Patricia.

From The Curse of La Llorona

La Llorona remains an ever changing part of Latin American and Chicano culture, with her legend being mixed in feminism, colonialism, racism, and childhood pranks depending on the storyteller. So far, in English media we have only seen a version of her that is destructive and vengeful giving rise to questions of cultural understanding. Maybe if we allow Chicano voices to tell the story we might see new stories of her appearing?

The sources I have used are as follows:

Domino Renee Perez, 'The Politics of Taking: La Llorona in the Cultural Mainstream', The Journal of Popular Culture, 45:1, (2012), 153-172

-Rene Trevino, 'Absolving La Llorona: Yda H. Addis's "The Wailing Woman"', Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 36:1, (2019), 123-130

-Y.H. Addis, 'The Wailing Woman: "La Llorona", A Legend of Mexico', Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 36:1, (2019), 131-136

-Gloria Duarte, 'La Llorona's Ancestry: Crossing Cultural Boundaries', in Kenneth Untiedt, (ed.), Folklore: In All of Us, In All we Do, (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2006), pp. 107-113

-Patricia Marina Trujillo, 'Becoming La Llorona', Chicana/Latina Studies, 6:1, (2006), 96-104

-Camilla Townsend, Malintzin's Choices, (Albuquerque, NM: New Mexico Press, 2006)

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