La Llorona is a legend from Mexico that has spread throughout Latin America and the United States. Every region “has its own legend and special version about La Llorona. She goes out at night through all parts uttering heartbreaking cries.”1 In most versions, she was the poor indigenous wife (or lover) of a Spanish conquistador and the mother of his children, but he left her for a richer woman. In her grief, she drowned their children to spite him. She is therefore cursed to haunt the earth, searching for her lost children and weeping. Children are warned to stay away from rivers and water after dark, as she either steals the children away or kills them as she did to her own.
There is evidence that La Llorona is a holdover from a pre-colonization Aztec myth. Spanish colonizers noted in the 1500s the legend of a woman who “appears dressed in white, bearing on her shoulder a little cradle, as though she were carrying a child; and she can be heard sobbing and shrieking. This apparition was considered a bad omen.”2 In 1585, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun wrote of “a demon whom [the Aztecs] gave the name Cioacoatl [sic]. She appeared clad as a lady of the palace [in white]. She terrified, she frightened, and cried aloud at night.”3
In 1965, folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes studied ghost stories of the inmates of Las Palmas School for Girls, a residential facility of the Department of Correction of the County of Los Angeles, California. The fourteen teenage girls interviewed were of diverse ethnic backgrounds, and twenty eight of the thirty one ghost stories shared with researchers involved malevolent female ghosts, nine of which are identified as La Llorona by name, and many others sharing a similar story or warning.4 In these retellings, La Llorona sometimes targets men as revenge on her husband instead of children. Other accounts have claimed La Llorona to be the ghost of La Malinche (Dona Marina)5, the indigenous woman who translated and had children with conquistador Hernán Cortés and is often viewed as a traitor to her people for collaborating with the Spanish colonizers.
The legend of La Llorona has been the subject of poetry, songs, television, and movies. In his 1849 poem “La Llorona ,” Manuel Elogio Carpio Hernández, wrote:
PALE with terror I heard it told / When I was a boy, an innocent boy / That a man gave death / In my town to his wife Rosalía / And since then in the shadowy night / The frightened people heard / Sad moans of the pained woman, / Moans like she was in agony. / For a time her lamenting stops / But then she breaks into large sobs, / And she traverses the streets alone. / She fills everyone with mortal terror, / And close to the river in the thick darkness / She goes crying, enveloped in her cloak.6
Others believed La Llorona to be the product of European folklore interacting with indigenous Mexican religion, as she has many similarities to “European ghosts known as ‘White Ladies’ as possible prototypes for the narratives of La Llorona’s human life. He also points out the legend’s resemblance to the myth of Medea and to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.”7 La Llorona is also the subject of episodes of Supernatural and Grimm,8 and featured in movies like Disney’s Coco and The Legend of La Llorona.
