“La Llorona” is a Latino folk legend and ghost story, variants of which exist throughout Mexico, the Southwestern United States, and Central and South America. The oldest version of the legend dates to 1550 in Mexico City. The basic legend is about a man of privileged status (usually a rich Spanish hidalgo) who seduces a beautiful woman of less privileged background (usually a poor Indian). They live together, either as lovers or in a secret marriage, and have children, usually two or three but sometimes one. They are happy for some time, but the man decides to leave, most often to marry a woman of his status (like a Spanish doña). He leaves sometimes because of pressure from his family, sometimes because sea lo que sea (it is what it is). The children die, on rare occasions accidentally but more frequently by their mother’s hand. She kills her own children either because the man threatened to take them or because the woman has been driven crazy by grief, envy, or rage. Most often, the mother drowns the children. She becomes La Llorona, a ghost or revenant, who must haunt the earth crying for her children. Because drowning is the most common death, La Llorona is usually said to haunt waterways, and she even has a creek in Texas assumed to be a translation of her name, Woman Hollering Creek.
There are a few basic narrative elements common in almost all variations. One of these common elements is a social or cultural difference between the two lovers, with the man belonging to one or more privileged groups—race, class, national origin, and so on (for this reason, the woman is almost always described as beautiful, as she must have some draw for the more privileged man). Other common features include a child or children born of the man and woman’s union, betrayal (again, this is usually the man leaving, but in some variations he stays but is abusive), the death of the child or children, and the conversion of the woman into a ghost because of madness, whereupon she can be found wandering around and weeping. An exception to these elements is a rare Southwest variation recorded by Bess Hawes. Her variation does not include the element of the initial romantic union. In Hawes’s version, the indigenous children are extremely beautiful, not their mother, and the conquistadors begin to steal the beautiful children for their Spanish wives. To prevent this fate, La Llorona kills her children and then goes mad from grief, dies, and her ghost searches for them, mistaking any children that come close as her own. Although this version is missing the lover’s betrayal element, the story still adheres to the major thematic concerns of cultural difference, vulnerability, and threat.
The story of “La Llorona” does not always include La Llorona’s backstory and sometimes centers mainly on claimed encounters with the revenant. In all versions, La Llorona is either vengeful or tragic as a ghost. In the vengeful versions, she usually preys on men, holding them responsible for her fate. In the tragic versions, she most often targets children, sometimes because she believes them to be her own and other times because she misses her children so much she wants to steal others for companionship or, in more religious versions, because she is not allowed in heaven until she recovers her lost children.
As a ghost, La Llorona’s description varies considerably, though she is usually menacing up close and intriguing or seductive from far away. She wears either a white or black dress, and she either has no face or has a horse head, a skull face, a monstrous face, or a beautiful one. She haunts waterways or city streets (this is the fate of Luisa in an early version from Mexico City, who stabs her children and is tried and garroted). She preys on all children, all men, or only targets bad ones. On occasion, La Llorona, as her name suggests, is merely heard and not seen, and sometimes her screams draw men or children in a siren-like fashion. As a ghost story, “La Llorona” has a cautionary or obedience function like Baba Yaga or a bogeyman.
Like most folklore, the origins of “La Llorona” are of considerable debate. Some scholars, like Thomas A. Janvier and more recently Luis Leal, claim an indigenous Mexican origin, preconquest, as either a manifestation of a particular goddess, usually Cihuacóatl, or as a combination of several goddesses from different peoples: Cihuacóatl, Xtabay, Quilaztli, and Coatlicue. After conquest, the motifs and traits associated with these goddesses (wearing white, associated with children or the death of children, crying or wailing) merged with the new concerns of a subjected people into the “La Llorona” tradition. In this way, the story of historical figure Doña Marina (Cortés’s translator and later mistress) began to merge with “La Llorona.” (In these versions, Doña Marina kills her son rather than letting him be taken to Spain and then kills herself, becoming the ghost that searches for him.) Other scholars, like Bacil Kirtley, find that although preconquest myths offer suitable prototypes, the narrative is too closely aligned with European tales like Die Weisse Frau (The White Lady) to not be genetically related. For Kirtley, too, the “betrayal” element is distinctly European and would not make sense outside the European social system. Still others suggest that “La Llorona” is a hybridization of English tradition and Mexican tradition.
Regardless of the origin, the postcolonial life of “La Llorona” has been as vast and diverse as her potential ancestries and her story variations: in poetry, corridos (ballads), novels, theater, television, and even a cartoon titled La Leyenda de la Llorona (2011). At the peak of the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, La Llorona served as a particularly potent symbol of indigenismo and the issues of Indian culture.
Meredith Wallis
See also Casos, Historias, and Tallas; Murrieta, Joaquín; White Lady of Durand Lake; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Hawes, Bess Lomax. 1968. “La Llorona in Juvenile Hall.” Western Folklore 27 (3): 153–170.
Janvier, Thomas. 1910. Legends of the City of Mexico. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Leal, Luis. 2005. “The Malinche-Llorona Dichotomy: The Evolution of a Myth.” In Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche, edited by Rolando Romero and Amanda Nolacea Harris, 134–138. Houston: Arte Público Press.
Limon, Jose E. 1990. “La Llorona, The Third Legend of Greater Mexico: Cultural Symbols, Women, and the Political Unconscious.” In Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, edited by Adelaida R. Del Castillo, 399–432. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press.
Perez, Domino Renee. 2008. There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.