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)

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

Paleo Profiles: Gojirasaurus

A hypothetical reconstruction of Gojirasaurus. From © Nobu Tamura, spinops.blogspot.com, 01/01/2008

This week, as of writing, the new trailer for Godzilla: King of Monsters was released so I thought it would be interesting to look at a dinosaur named after the 'King of Dinosaurs'. The Gojirasaurus was one of the first truly large carnivorous dinosaurs, but it may not actually be a real dinosaur at all. 

Discovery and Fossils

A common occurrence in palaeontology is that fossils are often found but are left years, sometimes decades, before being examined. The same happened with Gojirasaurus. This dinosaur was originally named by Adrian Hunt in 1994 as he looked at some fossils from the Triassic naming the animal 'Revueltoraptor lucasi'. However, as this name was coined in his dissertation based on flimsy remains this classification was deemed a nomen nudum. A nomen nudum is used to describe a scientific name given to an organism that hasn't been formally published, and therefore, reviewed by other experts. In 1997 Kenneth Carpenter formally described the bones giving them the name Gojirasaurus quayi - 'Gojira lizard from Quay'. As you can tell Gojirasaurus got its name from the iconic movie dinosaur Godzilla - as a side-note Gojira means 'Gorilla whale' referencing the monster's original design of gorilla-whale hybrid. Gojira is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for gorilla, gorira, and whale, kujira. 

Gojirasaurus is only known from a few poorly preserved bones. Bones only preserve in optimal conditions, including soil acidity and the type of soil, so not all fossils are known from well-preserved remains. With Gojirasaurus we only have a handful of bones and they are not well-preserved to boot. What we know of Gojirasaurus comes from a mix of disarticulated bones, a tooth, four dorsal vertebrae, a pubis, a tibia, a scapula (shoulder bone), ribs, and a chevron (tail bone). It was enough to formally name the animal, and create a holotype and reconstructions. In 2007 a small group of palaeontologists, (Sterling Nesbitt, Randall Irmis and William Parker), decided to look at early carnivorous dinosaur remains and found issues with the Gojirasaurus bones. Here we need to bring in the pseudosuchians; this is a clade closely related to the dinosaurs which consists of modern crocodilians and their extinct relatives. During the Triassic the pseudosuchians were an incredibly diverse group, far more diverse than the dinosaurs. Steve Brusatte's research has shown that for the 30 million years that the two groups co-existed during the Triassic the pseudosuchians overshadowed the dinosaurs. It has been said that several pseudosuchians resembled dinosaurs, like Effagia, but it is more accurate to say that the dinosaurs resembled the pseudosuchians! Analysis of Gojirasaurus' bones found not all of them came from a dinosaur - the vertebrae were found to likely be from a pseudosuchian called Shuvosaurus. Even with well-preserved bones it can be difficult to classify dinosaurs never mind poorly preserved remains. Furthermore, the tibia resembled that of a different dinosaur called Coelophysis. These similarities had long before been used to classify the Gojirasaurus as a coelophysid. The paper was reluctant to classify Gojirasaurus as Coelophysis as the tibia was so much more robust compared to that of Coelophysis. Hence, Gojirasaurus has been declared a dubious genus. For the rest of this post we'll treat Gojirasaurus as a separate genus for the sake of simplicity, but we'll bring in Coelophysis biology to better understand the dubious dinosaur.

Biology

The size of Gojirasaurus, from prehistoric-wildlife.com

One thing that can be certain about Gojirasaurus is that it was a large predator. One thing unifying palaeontologists is that Carpenter's description of the dinosaur's size is correct - it was between 5.5 to 6 metres long. In comparison the Coelophysis bauri, the most common coelophysid from North America and a possible contemporary, was only 3 metres long. It was fitting it got the name Gojira - it was a true giant during the Triassic. During the Late Triassic the dinosaurs started getting big - ancestors to the sauropods (including Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus) like the Plateosaurus could grow to 9 metres (30 foot) in length. Why the dinosaurs came to replace the pseudosuchians we don't have a clear idea yet, but their increase in size could be due to the dinosaurs evolving to fill a vacuum left by them. Gojirasaurus, like all coelophysids, were theropods - a bipedal group of dinosaurs which would include Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, and modern birds. Theropods would become a diverse group evolving to fill many environmental niches, but at this early stage most had fairly similar adaptations. This included diet and Gojirasaurus had serrated teeth indicating that it was a carnivore. Coelophysids were uniformly lightly built with long, slender tails; fairly long arms; and a long neck. It is fairly likely that Gojirasaurus was also built this way, especially if it turns out to be a species of Coelophysis.

Although now inaccurate the body of Coelophysis from Walking with Dinosaurs would resemble what Gojirasaurus looked like

Now we're getting into more hypothetical territory. In the past palaeontologists just expected to find bones but over the last twenty years, mostly thanks to the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, palaeontologists have been increasingly on the look out for other features. Gojirasaurus may have had a crest - later coelophysids, like Jurassic Park's Dilophosaurus, had crests and some species of Coelophysis had very small crests. We cannot be certain if Gojirasaurus had a crest - especially as we are still unsure if Gojirasaurus is a valid genus. These crests would be used for display so were likely very brightly coloured to attract a mate, or intimidate a rival. There is a chance that Gojirasaurus, and Coelophysis, were feathered; albeit these 'feathers' would be far more basic compared to the feathers of modern birds. It could even be considered more like fluff than 'true' feathers. Increasingly palaeontologists have highlighted how more and more species of dinosaurs were in fact feathered, however, Gojirasaurus was a very early dinosaur. Feathers and feathering have, so-far, only been found on dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, not the Triassic. Feathers had to come from somewhere, but when did somewhere start? As Gojirasaurus lived at the end of the Triassic it likely had a very basic proto-feathering. 

When and Where

A map of Pangea with modern continents 

Gojirasaurus lived 210 million years ago, Coelophysis from 221 to 196 million years ago, during the first period of the Mesozoic era called the Triassic. Dinosaurs appeared sometime between 243 and 233 million years ago making Gojirasaurus one of the first dinosaurs. The fossils were found in the Cooper Canyon Formation in New Mexico - the southern US (especially New Mexico and Texas) is particularly good for Triassic fossils. The New Mexico of the Triassic was very different from the New Mexico of today. Instead of the deserts we would instead find well-watered forests full of conifers occasionally subject to flooding - at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico around 1,000 almost Coelophysis were caught in a flash flood leaving their remains perfectly preserved. The world of the Triassic that Gojirasaurus called home was very different to our world. There was just one continent, a supercontinent, called Pangea and one giant ocean, Panthalassa. Steve Brusatte has described the climate as living in a 'sauna'. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused higher temperatures, something we're experiencing now thanks to human caused climate change, which was exacerbated by the planet's geography. Air currents moved unimpeded from equator to pole as there was just one continent making the poles extremely warm - the poles had the same temperature as modern London or San Francisco. Intense monsoons, called megamonsoons, were created thanks to a scorching land which were so large that they could provincialise the environment. Vast stretches of desert (which had temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius) were divided from hot and humid equatorial regions. New Mexico lay on the equator creating the hot and humid environment that Gojirasaurus existed in.

Gojirasaurus' New Mexico

What would become north Mexico and the southern US would create a vibrant habitat for Late Triassic animals. As we only have these scatty remains of Gojirasaurus it is possible that it was a rare animal - very large carnivores are generally rarer compared to smaller ones due to increased competition. With its large size Gojirasaurus would have been near the top of the food chain, although it would have had to fight to be at the top. The Postosuchus, a large crocodilian cousin which you might recognise from Walking with Dinosaurs, could potentially rival Gojirasaurus as the animal at the top of the food chain. The warm climate created a perfect environment for diverse plants to evolve which in turn allows a diverse range of herbivores to prey upon. Herbivorous early dinosaurs and other reptiles were potential food for the Gojirasaurus although some could fight back. The Desmatosuchus was a very large and armoured reptile with spikes on its side which would leave it protected from predators. We know very little on how social dinosaurs were so we don't know if Gojirasaurus was a pack hunter - it was once believed that Coelophysis flocked together but we now know that they were actually victims of a flash flood. Judging how birds and many reptiles, including crocodiles, care for their young we can imagine that so did Gojirasaurus and other coelophysids. 

Thank you for reading. The sources I have used are as follows:

-Gregory S. Paul, The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, Second Edition, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)

-Steve Brusatte, The Rise and the Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World, (London: Macmillan, 2018)

-'Gojirasaurus', Prehistoric-Wildlife.com, (Accessed 13/12/2018)

-Kenneth Carpenter, 'A Giant Coelophysoid (Ceratosauria) Theropod from the Upper Triassic of New Mexico, USA', Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen, 205:2, (1997), 189-208

-Sterling J. Nesbitt , Randall B. Irmis & William G. Parker, 'A critical re‐evaluation of the Late Triassic dinosaur taxa of North America', Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 5:2, (2010), 209-243

-Robert Sullivan and Spencer Lucas, 'Eucoelophysis baldwini, a New Theropod Dinosaur from the Upper Triassic of New Mexico, and the Status of the Original Types of Coelophysis', Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 19:1, (1999), 81-90

-'Coelophysis', Prehistoric-Wildlife.com, (Accessed 13/12/2018)

Thank you for reading. If you felt I should add something, disagree with what I have written, or just fancy having your say please leave a comment. For other Paleo Profiles we have a list, and for future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.