6) La IIorona

La IIorona is a mother that drowned her two children in a river, and she then committed suicide. Legend has it that she goes throughout Mexico looking and calling for her children; she always appears and wanders up and down the river.

Apparently “historically,” La Malinche gave birth to two sons by Cortes; The king and queen of Spain, fearing the Cortes is betraying them and building his own empire here in America, demanded for his return and used a beautiful Spanish lady to seduce him to come back. Cortes finally agreed and told  La Malinche that he is going to take their two sons, go back to Spain and leave her behind. La Malinche, realizing that she has helped the enemies destroy her people, she grew very desperate and prayed to her god to help her. The god told her that if she lets Cortes take her babies away, one of them will return and destroy her people.

Thus, the night before Cortes’ departure, La Malinche grabs her babies and escapes; however, Cortes soon discovers this and orders his soldiers to go hunt them down. They discovered them near a river. La Malinche stabs her babies in the heart and then the two falls into the river and dies. People later discovered La Malinche dead near/in the river.

Since then, rumor has it that she comes back as a woman in white dress, wailing all night long for her children.

(*For more information, see the film The Cry.)

My friend Miriam told me this story after I asked her to tell me some folklores of her culture. She is half hispanic so this is the story she told me. She could not remember a lot of the details really well, so I had to look up some of the informations myself. She knows this story just from growing up, her parents used to tell it to her, so that she’d be too afraid to go out at night alone.

I have heard of the story of La IIorona before and I have learnt about the history of Cortes and La Malinche but I never knew that there is a relationship in between the two, so honestly that was really interesting to learn.