La Llorona

La Llorona is the weeping woman of Mexican and Latin American folklore, a ghost who wanders crying for the children she drowned. Writers have traced her to pre-Hispanic figures, and films and plays have retold her.

In Legends of the City of Mexico (1910), Thomas A. Janvier set this story apart from the other legends he gathered, which he said had Spanish-Mexican roots. He called La Llorona entirely Mexican, a survival from ancient times, and the most widespread of all Mexican folk tales. He faulted the writer Orozco y Berra for failing to note its link to an Aztec goddess. Wikipedia makes a similar case: spirits that cry beside rivers turn up again and again in the myths of Mesoamerican peoples, and those figures came to share features after the Spanish conquest. It describes the legend as rooted in pre-Hispanic myth, with its drama set in the colonial world.

The core of the story, as Manohla Dargis summed it up in The New York Times in 2020, is a ghost condemned to roam, weeping over the children she had drowned. Dargis wrote that the details and meaning change from one telling to the next, and compared her to Medea. She has also served to frighten children. The Los Angeles Times in 1995 quoted Anamarie Garcia, a CSUN theatre professor. She said that when she was a girl, adults told her to go to sleep and keep quiet or La Llorona would take her. Since there was always a river close to home, she said, the children were terrified.

The story has been retold on stage and screen. Garcia directed the debut staging of a new play, Unconquered Spirits, by the playwright Lopez. The Morelia International Film Festival calls the film La llorona the first Mexican horror film. Near its end, the festival says, a scene makes doña Marina, the interpreter and lover of Hernán Cortés, the first Llorona, and her tale of being abandoned and betrayed stands for the abuses of the conquerors.