Tag Archives: la llorona

Mexican Legend of La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA/ Brownsville, TX
Performance Date: 24 April 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Subject: The Legend of La Llorona.

Collection:

“Interviewee: There’s two versions of this that I learned, and it always- it always ended up with the children in the river… So, basically, the one of them that I learned was that her- so, La Llorona was like really annoyed with her two kids, they kept on crying and she didn’t know how to deal with them so she drowned them in the river, right like She was just like annoyed and she like- she just lost her temper and like drowned them, essentially.

Um and then the other one was like her husband like left her, and um like she was left with the kids and every time like he visited like, or visited- not visited but like that he- that he saw her on the street, he was like with another woman or whatever. I know, classic story. Man leaves woman for another woman. And every time, he would like ignore her, and like just care about the children and ignore her. So, she felt like resentment for the children, so she drowned them in the river.

And for both of these stories, when she realized what she had done, she like searched and, uh, it was too late obviously, she threw them in the river… um… she threw them in the river and when she realized what had happened, it’d been too late, and she just like went around, for the rest of her life looking for her boys… Woah! I think they were boys. Yeah! That’s interesting. I think they were two boys. Um, looking for her kids. ‘Mis niños. Mis niños’. Yeah, that’s like the classis thing that they would say…

Interviewer: In what context would you hear them?

Interviewee: Always like in Spanish class… my parents didn’t really like, well I guess they did… I think there was a movie about it too. Um, and yeah, like in school and like other people would tell their version of the story. I don’t know where I first heard it… but the most recent one was always in high school. Like Spanish class, high school.”

Background Info: Z. Cantú is a twenty-year-old college student majoring in Theater at the University of Southern California. She is from Brownsville, Texas and is bilingual in Spanish and English. Both of her parents immigrated to the United States as teens where they met and started a family. She has grown up with a melding of American and Mexican traditions.

Context: This account was given to me by my roommate in a conversation late at night. I asked her to recount it for my records a week later.

Analysis: In Z. Cantú’s accounts of La Llorona, multiplicity and variation are explicitly visible since she gives the two most common legends associated with the figure that she has heard in her lifetime.

In the first account provided, La Llorona is depicted to be cold and murderous, the opposite of how mothers are typically portrayed in cultural models and how they are expected to behave. In the second, La Llorona’s motivations are more human; however, she is still subverting the traditional model of the mother in which the woman is caring and warm. The portrayl of La Llorona aligns more with the archetype of woman as a witch, as opposed to matron. This connotates her character with the histories of witches and unfeeling women, which then compounds upon the content of the legend, strengthening the three categories of women as slut, mother, and witch.

Furthermore, this legend supports traditional societal structures and morals by addressing the story primarily to children. At an early age, young girls are being exposed to good and bad models of womanhood. Their age compatibility to the children being killed would then augment fear and hatred of the woman’s behavior. It also can be used by adults to control their children by evoking the authority and fear of La Llorona. This reinforces family structures and perhaps even sends the message to children to be appreciative for their parents, as opposed to the unfeeling murderess.

La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican/American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: USA
Performance Date: 4/25/18
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Interviewer: You said you had a ghost story?

Informant: Yeah… so La Llorona is supposed to be this woman somewhere in Mexico who was married and had two kids. Her husband either cheated on her or did something similar to anger her. She was super angry at her husband, and, trying to figure out a way to get back at him, she started to think. One night she took her two children to the river, thinking she would play with them. When she got there, though, she thought of a way to get revenge on her husband – by taking their children. Since she had nowhere to go, she decided she would take the kids, to try to harm her husband in return. But, since she had nowhere to go, she instead took her kids and drowned them in the water. At first, she felt good about this, you know, her rage justified it, but after cooling off, she realized that she had killed her beloved children. Obviously, she was distraught, so she went back to the same river and drowns herself in it.

When she reaches the gates of Heaven, she’s stopped and asked by St.Peter about the location of her children. She doesn’t want to say she killed them, so she says she doesn’t know, and so St.Peter sends her back to Earth to look for her children. Until then, she’s trapped between reality and the afterlife, she’s a ghost.

Now, she patrols the streets of towns late at night looking for her kids, the ones she killed, crying out “Mis hijos, mis hijos” while weeping, which is how she got her name “La Llorona”, which translates to something like “the weeping woman”. If she finds kids out late at night, she’ll mistake them for her own kids at first. But, if they’re not her own children, she kills them to try to take the place of her own.

Context: My informant is a nineteen year old college student. Though he was raised in the United States, he was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and his first language is Spanish. This legend was told  in a college dorm room, with the informant sitting across from me.

Background: My informant can’t remember where he heard La Llorona from – maybe his parents, maybe his friends, it’s a very common story in Latin America. He thinks La Llorona is used to keep kids and people in general from going out late at night. This is not, however, just to keep people from staying out late. According to him, la Llorona is used to keep people from staying out past 3 AM. This is because, in Latin America, three is a number associated with God. In the afternoon, 3 PM is considered lucky, but 3 AM, at night, is considered odd and unnatural. Even he  doesn’t feel comfortable going out that late, and told me a brief story of a friend of his who noticed a weird fog and distant cries when she was out at 3 AM.

Analysis: This account of La Llorona demonstrates not only how the legend helps keep people inside and orderly at night, but also a connection to the deep Catholic roots many communities within Mexico maintain. Though not part of the story, many people choose to mark 3 AM as the time when La Llorona begins to stalk the streets, a number commonly associated with God and the Holy Trinity. Interestingly, the use of the number three also reflects a common trend in many other pieces of folklore – namely, a propensity for things to crop up in threes or occur at times with threes in them. Personally, I’ve noticed weird things happening really late at night, whether they’re odd weather or sounds. I’m not sure whether or not I myself believe in la Llorona or similar ghostly apparitions, but I’m still inclined to spend my late nights inside rather than out.

La LLorona

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 10 April 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context:

Sophia Lopez is a Senior studying Screenwriting at USC. I was sitting with friends when she approached the table and began speaking to one of my friends that she knew. When I asked her if I could record folklore, she needed no definition–she launched straight into the story of La Llorona.

Transcript:

Sophia: My name’s Sophia. Andddd. Okay, so when I was little, I didn’t ever like to go to bed on time, like I was really kind of like a cool kid, and my Nanny would like, she would get really frustrated with me because I, um, wouldn’t ever be in bed on time, and, uh, my family’s Mexican, so they tell a lot of Mexican folklore, well they did when I was little. And so anyways there’s this woman called La Llorona, you know about her?

Owen: We learned about her in class.

Sophia: Yeah, okay, so basically, when I was little, and a bad kid, they told me a story about this woman La Llorona who her husband. Well, there are two versions. One her husband left her and she killed all her kids by drowning them in the river, and that was one version they said. But the other version is that there’s a terrible mudslide and all of her like eight children died and so at night…you know the La Llorona, like it translates to the Weeping Woman, so at night she wanders the streets looking for kids who are out past their bedtime because she wants to take them as their own and either like out of habit she’ll drown them in the river too, or she’ll take them with her to Hell. So that was my, once they told me that I really wanted to go to sleep on time. She can’t see kids who are already asleep.

Interpretation:

When we spoke about La Llorona in our USC Forms of Folklore class, several versions were given from the class. Fittingly, Sophia had two versions handy. The most common trend I have noticed in this legend is that its purpose is to keep children inside the house at night or to get them to go to bed.

La Llorona

Nationality: United States
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Huntsville, AL. Currently residing in Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 04/12/2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Main Piece:

 

The following was recorded from the Participant. They are marked as AF. I am marked as DG.

 

AF: Um, well La Llorona is just this folktale, um, about this woman who…was jilted basically…uh and then, uh, well actually no she wasn’t jilted, her husband died… or something like that, uh, so she…hmm. Well ok, she was murdered. Ok, there are different versions of the story basically. So, um, in some of them she was jilted and killed herself and in some of them she was murdered and stuff like that, and basically she came back and was this, like, spirit who wandered amongst the streets at night… And if you’re, like, a lost kid at night, she’ll steal you away and maybe eat you…I don’t know…but definitely steal you away. Oh, and like an important thing is La Llorona cries, she’s this crying spirit, and you’ll hear her. Um, and yeah. I think maybe she, like, killed her kids.

 

DG: Who told you this?

 

AF: Oh, uh, my grandma actually, because I was asking her about folk stuff a couple years ago. She told me this story, um, yeah.

 

 

Context:

 

The conversation was recorded while sitting in the lobby of a dorm at the University of Southern California. The story itself was told to the interviewee by his grandmother, as they sat in their living room. He was asking her about folklore in order to feel more in touch with his roots.

 

Background:

 

The student is from Huntsville Alabama, but took a gap year in New York City, NY, before attending the University of Southern California as a School of Cinematic Arts major. They are a sophomore, and come from an Italian Hispanic background.

 

Analysis:

 

I had heard about this folklore story in one of my classes, so it was interesting to hear it from someone. This was true especially so since although I did learn one version, it was already easily jumbled up for me too, and I had learned it fairly recently. This shows how easy it can be for folklore to become changed, as the teller may forget, have pieces jumbled, or slightly change them. This also alludes to how the audience will keep the teller in check, if the teller goes too far from the version they know. This is what helps folklore remain folklore. In my case, I was a passive listener, so the folklore remained jumbled in the retelling for this archive post.

 

La Llorona, Mexico

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/24/18
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

This story was collected from a friend, who was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico and is 20 years old. She told me her version about La Llorona, a widespread legend in the American Southwest, South America, and Central America. A lot of versions of the story exist in different regions, and this is the one her nanny used to tell her when she was growing up. Most versions have themes of maternal love, marriage, and death and suicide.

 

According to my friend’s version, La Llorona is about a woman whose husband left her, which made her lose her mind and kill her three children. When she came into her senses and realized what she had done, she couldn’t live with it so she committed suicide. She couldn’t go to heaven for having killed herself, so she stayed on Earth. She is supposed to go around looking for her children and taking all of the children she can find thinking they are hers.

 

My friend says it didn’t have much of an impact on her since she didn’t really believe in ghosts or anything of the sort, but it did make her scared to leave her house at night when she first heard it since she was so young. She also believes that was its intended purpose; something a parent would say to their child to scare them into behaving more safely, since Mexico has some dangerous areas.

 

I think it’s very interesting that her version has some religious undertones in its incorporation of heaven, since the one that I heard growing up didn’t, which speaks to how religious Mexico is as a country. Also, some other versions portray the woman as “bad,” condemning her behavior saying she intentionally killed her children as a form of revenge yet this version seems to portray her as more of a victim of a terrible situation. This is surprising to me, for Mexico is a sexist country in a lot of ways.

 

For more versions of this legend, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona