Mapping La Llorona

The legend of La Llorona is perhaps one of the oldest and well-known Hispanic myths told in Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. The story of La Llorona transverses countries and continents in the southwestern hemisphere, and while her story is thousands of years old, La Llorona only began appearing in media – mainly film – in the 1960s with her media debut in the Mexican film  La Llorona.  In most recent years, the story of La Llorona has immigrated to United States popular media under the guise of horror films, supernatural television shows, and ghost hunting adventures. Though it is clear her story made it to the United States through her appearance in American media, the how associated with her immigration remains open for discussion.Furthermore, what does the American adaptation of a native legend do to the telling of the story?

Before delving into the deeper questions of cultural appropriation, let's begin with the basics: the story of La Llorona.

As legends do, La Llorona's story has many different versions. Often they differ in the gender of the children as well as whether or not the children were twins. In some versions, Dona Maria is simply a negligent mother who spends her evenings out on the town while her husband is away tending to business. Instead, of discovering an affair, she arrives home and finds her children have been kidnapped – guilt drives her to commit suicide. In yet another version, she is simply washing clothing in the river when her children are swept away by the strong current. She attempts to save them and cannot, so she kills herself.

Despite the differences in ending, one thing is clear: La Llorona's curse is her guilt. Whether it is guilt for murdering her children in a fit of rage or guilt for not being able to save her children, she roams the Earth searching for her children so she can be absolved of her guilt.

As with many legends, La Llorona's story has a historical background. Some argue it extends as far back as the Aztec civilization to the goddess Coatlicue. In Aztec myth, Coatlicue is the mother of the god of war. While he is away in battle, she roams the streets weeping for her son's return.

There is also a significant connection between the Spanish conquest of North America and La Llorona. When Cortes and his men arrived, they took a young native woman as a slave. While her "Christian" name changes in various tellings of the story, she is most often referred to as Dona Maria. Serving first as Cortes' concubine, she quickly became a trusted ally and translator. With her help, Cortes and his men were able to destroy the Aztec empire. Here, she earns the name La Malinche, the traitor. After the conquest, Cortes and Dona Maria were married and had two children. Like La Llorona, Dona Maria is often portrayed as the jilted lover, as Cortes refuses to take her back to Spain and takes only the children.

In San Antonio, 1986, a woman named  Juana Marie Leija  attempted to drown all seven of her children in the Buffalo Bayou. Two of the children drowned while the other five were pulled from the water by rescuers. Police officials discovered Leija was fleeing an abusive marriage as she claimed she had no choice but to drown her children because it was the only way they could be free. Yet, what struck investigators as odd was that, when asked why exactly she tried to drown her children, she claimed she was La Llorona.

Similarly, in Houston, Texas, 2001,  Andrea Yates  drown her five children in the bathtub of the family's home. When questioned, Yates confessed to killing her children claiming she heard voices telling her that drowning them was the only way to save their souls.

Their crimes are not one of kind. In a study tracking child abandonment from birth, Ed Walraven concludes by claiming, “this deeply-rooted concern [child abandonment] is at the very heart of La Llorona” (215). Walraven believes that the story of La Llorona as well as the dramatized telling of abandoned children stories are first and foremost a warning for children to stay away from dangerous places, but also as a “moral lesson of what happens to those mothers who fail in their societal charge, and who are thus doomed to a hellish life” (215). In other words, the fear of abandonment in both mother and child is psychologically not a new phenomenon, however, he notes that the cases in which infants are abandoned and die as a result are still relatively rare.

Though nearly a decade apart, both Leija and Yate's crimes take place in Texas. As Texas and Mexico share a border, it is not surprising that the story of La Llorona is present in the area. However, it begs the question, where else is the story of La Llorona prevalent in the United States?

The best way to track La Llorona is through "sightings" – instances in which people claim to have seen La Llorona in the United States. Of course, each story varies wildly. Some claim only to have heard her weeping, others to have seen her walking the streets. While she traditionally appeared primarily by bodies of water, U.S. sightings place her on the busy streets of Chicago or roaming the halls of juvenile detention centers.

A simple comparison of the U.S. Immigrant Population by Metropolitan Statistical Area (2014 - 2018) and the map of La Llorona sightings shows a significant correlation between concentrations of immigrant populations and La Llorona sightings.

It's no surprise, then, that La Llorona's story is featured in border crossing narratives and immigrant memoirs such as Reyna Grande's fiction novel Across a Hundred Mountains as well as her memoir "The Distance Between Us." In the novel, La Llorona is mentioned only briefly – a fever dream of her father telling her a story, the story of the weeping woman, who "in a moment of desperation, took her children to the river and drown them."

"'But you don't like the tale of La Llorona,' she says.

He laughs, and laughs, and laughs. Suddenly, he throws a bucket of water on top of Juana. Cold lemon water that stings her eyes, and she screams" (Grande 104).

Juana, a young girl fighting to take care of her family, has lost her father to the United States. In the beginning of the novel, Juana falls asleep during a flood, letting go of her baby sister who then drowns. In a way Juana views herself as La Llorona – in a moment of weakness she drown her sister and now she is destined to walk the Earth, trying to find a way to put her broken family back together. Yet in her fever dream, her father is La Llorona – so disgusted with her for letting her sister die that he wants to kill her himself.

Similarly, in her memoir "The Distance Between Us," Grande opens by reminiscing about the stories her grandmothers used to tell her about La Llorona. Her father's mother told her that La Llorona would come and take her if she did not listen to her parents. Her mother's mother promised that God and La Virgin would protect her.

"Neither of my Grandmothers told us there is something more powerful than La Llorona – a power that takes away parents – not children.

It is called the United States.”

The idea of the United States as the parent-snatching counterpart to La Llorona and her child-snatching is reflected in Across a Hundred Mountains as well. Juana loses her father as he travels to the United States. Many people Juana knows have lost their fathers' to the United States. Yet, despite knowing the risks, Juana continues her search for her father, weeping and looking for her lost family – just like La Llorona.

If the United States functions as a counterpart to La Llorona, it is no surprise that her story has been adapted and misinterpreted in American mainstream culture. Unlike the United States who takes pride in parent-snatching (i.e. deporting, detaining, arresting undocumented peoples), according to her story La Llorona does not see herself as a source of immense power, able to decide whether a child lives or dies. She does not take pleasure in killing children, but instead takes them thinking or at least hoping they are her own.

Surveying the last twenty-years of American-La-Llorona-media paints a different picture of La Llorona – perhaps a more Americanized version. Nearly two years ago, The Conjuring Franchise released a movie featuring La Llorona and marketed it as a horror film: The Curse of La Llorona.

The general theme of American media depictions of La Llorona seems to be horror. No matter the movie, the TV show, the podcast, La Llorona is a murderous mother and a source of fear.

In the 1980s, Pamela Jones interviewed struggling undocumented families in Oregon to help them create a nutrition plan based on cultural and individual needs. During this time, she conducted a personal experiment by asking each family if they had heard the story of La Llorona. All had in fact heard one version or another. Jones claims that “the legend was told as a valued memory, often related to childhood experience” (195). Jones interviewed nineteen subjects of similar situation – living in poverty, undocumented, raising children – yet no two stories of La Llorona were the same. Though the stories differ in many ways, Jones concludes two things. First, that La Llorona is rarely seen as a “bad” woman. Despite the changing story, “the emerging pattern is one of identification with the llorona and sympathy for her distress” (210). Second, as stated by Jones, “the llorona is an endlessly changing legend, modified by storytellers to address themes central to their own psycho-social development and lifestyles” (197). For Jones, the changing narrative of La Llorona in native peoples is not a sign of untruthfulness, but rather a signifier of La Llorona’s ability to adapt to new social environments.

Yet, it seems that the Americanized La Llorona, though perhaps adapting to the elitist, woman-hating culture of America, loses what Jones refers to as "identification with the llorona" (210). Instead, La Llorona serves only as a catalyst for fear, horror, and capital gain for American audiences. Her image loses its reverence and rather than being respected and feared as she is by Mexican audiences, she is simply a monster – a force to be overthrown and destroyed.

It is no surprise that critics such as Domino Perez argue against adaptations of La Llorona purely for the sake of cultural appropriation. According to Perez, adaptations of La Llorona as the scorned woman or the hysterical woman undermines both the female agency of La Llorona as well as the cultural significance of her character. In removing La Llorona from her origins, “the appropriators of La Llorona lore often assume the roles of cultural authorities, disseminating their versions or interpretations of La Llorona lore for audience uninformed with the legend” (Perez 156).

In other words, American media cannot profit off of La Llorona's story alone and thus they must add the American elements of unrequited love, jealousy, and gory horror. The cultural and monetary differences between Mexico, Latin America, and The United States are such that American people cannot relate to the conditions that might cause a mother to kill her children or the anxiety that comes with not being able to support the ones you love. In countries where families risk their lives to cross the border, to find a better job, to make more money, to live a better life, it is not so difficult to sympathize with a woman who simply wanted a better life for herself and her children – one without a cheating husband or inescapable poverty. For those who are a part of La Llorona's native heritage, her story is one of resistance – resisting control, resisting conquest, resisting defeat by man or hunger even in death.

As for America, as a nation of conquerors, we should refrain from trying to tell the stories of the conquered – stories like La Llorona.