The Weeping Woman

The legend of La Llorona

Part One

Don’t go near the water, don’t go out at night, say mothers who live near the Rio Grande. They are protecting their children from a different threat than accidentally falling in; they’re talking about being snatched up or sucked in by La Llorona. She is the threatened punishment, the Hispanic boogeywoman, of naughty, disobedient children. But she is more, much more. She comes in the dark, on the wind, seeking that which is forever lost to her, crying for her lost children, or seeking vengeance upon the innocent. Sometimes she appears as a skeleton, more often as a beautiful woman, and sometimes she deceives her victims by appearing as someone familiar to them.

The legend of La Llorona (pronounced “Lah yoh ROH nah”), the Weeping Woman, has been a part of Hispanic legend for at least 500 years. The tall, thin, beautiful spirit with long black hair and a white gown roams the rivers and creeks, wailing into the night, searching for children to drag to a watery grave.

There are many versions of the story, but in almost all of them she is the spirit is of a mother who drowned her own children and now spends eternity searching for them. In the most common version, the beautiful Maria married a wealthy man. However, after she bore him two sons, he returned to a life of womanizing and alcohol, often leaving her for months at a time. When he did return home, it was only to visit his children. Naturally, Maria nursed a growing resentment toward them. One evening, as she was strolling with them near the river, her husband came by in a carriage with an elegant lady beside him. He stopped and spoke to his children, but ignored Maria, and then left. Devastated, Maria went into a terrible rage, turning against her children. She seized them and threw them into the river. As they disappeared downstream, she realized what she had done and ran down the bank to save them, but it was too late.

Maria broke down into inconsolable grief, mourning them day and night, calling out “Mis ninos, mis ninos!”, refusing to eat, wandering the riverside, soiling her white gown. She grew thinner and appeared taller until she looked like a walking skeleton, until she finally died on the banks of the river. Not long after, her restless spirit began to walk the banks of the river whenever darkness fell. Her weeping and wailing became a curse of the night and people began to be afraid to go out after dark. Some claimed to see her drifting between the trees along the shoreline or floating on the current with her long white gown spread out upon the waters. On many a dark night people would see her walking along the riverbank and crying for her children. And so they no longer spoke of her as Maria, but rather as La Llorona, the weeping woman.

In another version she finally threw herself into the river at the very spot where she had murdered her children. In her madness the spirit has completely forgotten what her children looked like, so she calls out for all children. Whenever she finds a child alone in the dark, near the water, she drags it screaming to a watery grave.

In a third variant of the tale, Maria is seduced by a wealthy man, who abandons her once she becomes pregnant. She discards the newborn by throwing it into a river and dies shortly afterward. When she appears at the Heavenly Gates, St. Peter tells her that since she lived a mostly blameless life, she will be allowed to enter Paradise – but only if she brings the soul of her child with her. She is condemned, therefore, to wander the Earth searching for it.

A fourth version: She is married and the mother of twin boys. As the priest is baptizing them, a company of soldiers marches past. One of the children keeps his eyes on the priest, while the other turns his head to watch the soldiers. The mother takes this as an omen — one of her sons is destined to be a priest, the other a soldier. In Spanish Mexico, soldiers were a symbol of oppression to the common people, not of benevolence. As she cannot, later, remember which of the boys turned to look at the soldiers, she drowns both, with the same result as the other stories.

The legend has become part of Hispanic culture throughout Central America, and the large numbers of sightings – and the shocking but not infrequent reports of actual women who murder their children – have blurred the boundaries between myth and reality. Here is another version: A young man is walking along Austin’s East 6th Street when he sees a very attractive prostitute dressed in bright red, sobbing her heart out. He approaches and asks what is wrong. Without replying, she turns toward him. Instead of the beautiful face he expects, he sees the face of a donkey – and her open jaws lunge for his throat. The “donkey woman” is another common Hispanic folktale. Only in Austin, however, is she known as la Llorona.

Part Two

The Song

The haunting tale of the Weeping Woman is matched and embodied in the tradition-al song of the same name. Joan Baez and Lila Downs among many others have recorded it, but to me the most emotionally resonant version is by Chavela Vargas, who sings a portion of it to Frida Kahlo in the film Frida: Ironically in the film, the aged Vargas, playing a ghost, sings to the actress Salma Hayek as Frida, who decades earlier, had been Vargas’ lover. Here is the full version of Vargas in concert.

Having travelled up and down the spine of Mexico and beyond for generations, the song has acquired literally dozens of verses, most of them dealing with lost love, and all expressing grief and suffering. But its point of view shifts continually between the various actors in the drama, and this tells us much about the complexity of this otherworldly figure.

Most commonly, we hear the voice of the wandering mother who addresses La Llorona – or is she addressing herself? She may be crying or she may be hiding her tears:

Ay de mi Llorona,

Llorona de ayer y de hoy

Ayer era maravilla Llorona

Y ahora ni sombra soy

Ah me, Llorona,

Llorona of yesterday and today.

Yesterday I was a marvel, Llorona,

Today, I am less than a shadow of that.

No creas que porque canto, llorona,

tengo el corazón alegre.

También de dolor se canta, llorona,

cuando llorar no se puede.

Don’t think that because I am singing, Llorona,

that my heart is joyful.

Grief can also be sung, Llorona,

when weeping is impossible.

In this tradition, it is impossible to be overly melodramatic:

Ay de mi llorona, llorona, llorona,

de un campo lirio;

El que no sabe de amores, llorona,

no sabe lo que es martirio.

Alas, Llorona, Llorona,

Llorona of a Lily of the Valley.

He who does not know of love, Llorona,

does not know martyrdom.

In other verses we hear a male voice:

Cada vez que cae la tarde, Llorona

Me pongo a pensar y digo

De qué me sirve la cama, Llorona

Si él no duerme conmigo?

With each afternoon, Llorona,

I think and say,

What good is this bed, Llorona,

if she does not sleep with me?

Other verses are, quite simply, prayers that are indistinguishable from supplications to the Maria of Sorrows, La Virgen Purissima, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is the patron saint of all Mexico:

Ay de mi, Llorona, Llorona,

Llorona llévame al río.

Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona

Porque me muero de frío

Alas, Llorona, Llorona,

Llorona, take me to the river.

Wrap me in your rebozo Llorona,

for I am freezing to death.

Such prayers can express (to our Norteamericano sensibility) a surprisingly full range of emotion:

Si por que te quiero quieres, Llorona,

quieres que te quiera más.

Si ya te he dado la vida, Llorona,

qué más quieres, quieres más?

Because I love you, Llorona,

you want me to love you even more.
If I have already given you my life, Llorona,

what more do you want, do you want even more?

But the most famous verse of all, in the voice of La Llorona herself, tells us that we are in the presence of a goddess, perhaps the Great Mother herself:

Todos me dicen el negro, Llorona

Negro pero cariñoso

Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona

Picante pero sabroso

Everyone calls me the dark one, Llorona

Dark but loving.

I am like the green chile, Llorona,

Spicy, but tasty.

The Goddess

It is possible that the original source of the legend was an Aztec goddess who wept by the waterside to draw young men to her. She would then seize them and leap into the water, drowning them in the process. But in other indigenous tales, this goddess – Cihuacoatl – appears just before the Spanish invaded Mexico, weeping for her lost children. This has been interpreted as an omen of the fall of the Aztec empire. She takes the form of a beautiful lady draped in white garments. Through-out the night she cries out in misery, Oh hijos mios…ya ha llegado vuestra destruccion. Donde os llevare? (Oh my children…your destruction has arrived. Where can I take you?)

Mexican popular culture sometimes identifies La Llorona with La Malinche, the historical, native woman who was interpreter and mistress to Hernan Cortés. After she bore him a son, he abandoned her and married a Spanish noblewoman. But Spain could not have conquered Mexico without her help, and thus she is implicated in both the demise of Native American culture and the creation of an entirely new race. As such, she weeps for all of Mexico’s children, both the privileged who have forgotten their ancestors and those who die crossing toward El Norte.

Indeed, she weeps for all the world’s children. The image of the woman weeping by the water occurs so commonly across Celtic and Mediterranean Europe that we must consider her to be an archetype.

The Irish and Scots call her Be’an Sighe, which has been Anglicized to “Banshee,” an omen of death. She appears as a small woman dressed entirely in green, who is washing winding sheets (the old name for a shroud) in a watercourse and weeping. Asked who has died and needs winding sheets, she either says “You!” or gives the name of someone who will die in the next few days. She may appear as a dark shadow, or as a beautiful woman dressed in white, with long, red hair.

In Greek folklore, the woman who weeps by the waterside is Medea, grieving for the children she bore to Jason and then slaughtered because of his plans to abandon them. Greek myth, sadly, is filled with such tales. It expresses the most fundamental myth of Western society, the killing of the children under patriarchy, and it is one of the primary themes of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence. But only Medea kills her children out of spite, simply to hurt the man who has hurt her.

This narrative brings us beyond historical interpretations to the psychological. We may interpret each character in a myth or folk tale as we do a dream. Each is a part of the dreamer. In the context of patriarchal repression of the feminine, Medea / Llorona kills or marginalizes her children – parts of herself – of her own natural, indigenous soul. She may do so out of a twisted need to fit into her culture’s restricted definition of who she can be.

Or her actions may well be her rage at the patriarchy directed in the only direction it can go: within. From this perspective, all acts of self-destruction, suicide, child abuse and genital mutilation (always perpetrated by other women, not men) repre-sent the core of power relations in our demythologized world: Since I have been brutalized, I will hurt you because I have the privilege to do so, because I can, because you cannot retaliate, and therefore your only alternative is to hurt those over whom you can exert privilege.

And within the most extreme aspects of that context – slavery – one may well choose to kill the children to save them from an even worse fate. In 1856 Margaret Garner, an enslaved African American woman, killed her own daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery. Steven Weisenburger tells the true story in his book, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South, but we are more familiar with Toni Morrison’s fictional, ironically titled novel, Beloved. Is it possible to love another so much as to kill them to prevent further pain? Does the Weeping Woman also preside over assisted suicide?

Domino Renée Perez is a professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin and author of There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. To her, the legend of La Llorona is as dynamic as it is old:

She is alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, a person, legend, ghost, goddess, seductress, moral tale, metaphor, story and symbol…As her story has evolved, storytellers and artists both inside and outside her community continue to adapt her story to new contexts.

Some feminist scholars reinterpret the narrative as resistance to patriarchy. Perez suggests that by focusing on their agency to both create and end life, women can revise and transform the tale into one of empowerment instead of despair.

And there is always another alternative to the common pattern of passing one’s suffering on to those who cannot defend themselves. It is the way of grief.

In recent years, the Weeping Woman has emerged from the oral tradition into popular art, children’s and scholarly books, punk music, TV commercials and at least five feature films, including a version released in 2020 that takes place in Guatemala after its Civil War. Reviewing it, Isaac Feldberg notes its contemporary significance:

La Llorona’s deepest horrors flow from real history, from the atrocities inflicted by powerful men and the institutions established to ensure they get away with it…By shifting guilt from the devastated woman to the man responsible, (the writers) not only update the folklore with considerable skill but could be seen as affording it a measure of corrective justice …repurposing the visual language of psychological horror with its quietly fluid camerawork and phantasmic depths to suggest not only individuals but an entire nation haunted by its traumatic history…La Llorona sees its apparitions as the only avatar of justice for those struggling beneath the long arm of the colonial-capitalist state, the supernatural intervening to heal a broken world…an ultimately hopeful suggestion that, while the only forces that can stand against the corruption of our world are spirits existing around and outside of it, there is no escaping these spirits, no reprieve, no mercy.

Ultimately, La Llorona weeps for this beautiful Earth that we are destroying. She, like Medea, murdered her children to spite their father. Now, in the reversal of ironies, it would seem that the patriarchs, in their last grasp to retain power, are willing to destroy us all to spite their mother, to stop her wailing.

In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz writes:

A study of the great myths…reveals that every culture…stems from the conviction that man the intruder has broken or violated the order of the universe. He has inflicted a wound on the compact flesh of the world, and chaos, which is the ancient and so to speak, natural condition of life, can emerge again from this aperture. The return of “ancient Original Disorder” is a menace that has obsessed every consciousness in every period of history.

While some bumper stickers say, “Honk if you’ve seen La Llorona,” others say, “She’s back and she’s pissed”.