Tag Archives: la llorona

La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

La Llorona

Personal Background:

Stephanie is a junior at the University of Southern California studying biology. She has grown up with a lot of Mexican influence, and has even spent some time in Mexico with her parents and grandparents. She is living in Los Angeles at the moment and is very happy with some of the Mexican influence L.A. has.

Legend

When Stephanie was growing up, she heard a lot of stories about La Llorona from her grandparents and friends. The story her grandparents told her is the one that is heard the most.

It begins with a woman whose husband has died. She ends up going crazy and drowns her children in a river. She ended up killing herself as well. Every night she wanders the streets looking for her children, and children in general.

In some other versions Stephanie has heard, La Llorona drowns her children in a bathtub for no reason. The ending is still the same with La Lloorna wandering the streets at night looking for children.
These stories were originally told to Stephanie when she was little as a way to keep her from staying out late at night. It was a scare tactic used by her parents, older siblings, as well as grandparents. She said they would say, “You better come inside or La Llorona is going to get you!” She would then come inside when she heard this. She has other friends who grew up in a very Hispanic culture who went through very similar events when they were younger. Stephanie is not sure if she still believes in La Llorona, but just in case there is possibility she does exist, she tries not to wander places alone at night.

Analysis:

This is a legend because of the possibility that it may or may not be true. Women have killed their children in the past. It is a legend that has become a ghost story. Parents use it as a way to scare their young kids into not staying out late.

To me, this is this is the type of story that people will continue to tell their kids in the future. It seems to work on little kids now, and if it was something that would have worked for me, I would want to use it in the future.

See other versions “La Llorona.” La Estrella de PanamáAug 10 2011. ProQuest. Web. 2 May 2014 .

La Llorona: Kid Killer

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student/Library Worker
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant is a 18-year-old freshman studying biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California. She grew up in Shafter, CA but is now living on campus at USC. She grew up in a family of Mexican descent. I asked her if she had any urban legends she would like to share and she told me her version of La Llorona.

La Llorona was a story used to scare her and the younger members of her family to not go out at night when they were still children. La Llorona means the crying lady. The story behind it is that there was a lady in Mexico, a housewife, with two children and a husband. The husband worked a lot at an unspecified job. My informant had heard versions of the story where the lady was crazy and versions where the lady was just extremely jealous of the attention her kids received from her husband but leaned towards the lady being very jealous of the attention her children received. When either her insanity or her jealousy overwhelmed her, she drowned her children either in the bath or in a river. After she realized what she had done, she killed herself in the same manner. Her ghost/spirit now wanders around wailing for her children and attempting to find other children who happen to be outside. When I asked why she needed to be avoided, the informant said that La Llorona would kill the kids she did find while she was wandering, even though the story was being told in Shafter, CA and was removed geographically from the story’s origin.

This story was first told to her when she was around 6 or 7 years old, when she was old enough to understand the story. Though she did not seem entirely convinced that the tale was true now that she is 18 years old, she was very much scare by it when she was a young child. Though she does not regularly tell the entire legend, she does make references to the story and understand what people are referring to when they mention it. The story places an emphasis on the struggle between loving your children and having to share the love from your husband with them. This type of jealousy is taboo as mothers are “supposed” to give up everything for their children, including the affections of their husbands if need be. Though the children this is meant to scare probably do not immediately pick out this theme, it is certainly understood by the mothers telling the story.

La Llorona is the subject of many authored works, including a 2007 movie called The Cry (directed by Bernadine Santistevan). There is a lot of variation between different versions of La Llorona, but the general idea of a woman drowning children and stealing children that are not their own is pretty consistent throughout the different versions, including both the version I collected from my informant and the version presented in The Cry. 

“La Llorona”

Nationality: Caucasian, Mexican
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Temple City, California
Performance Date: April 14th, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Who was La Llorona? She drowned her kids. Her husband cheated on her, and then she drowned her kids to get back at him. And then he was mad at her, but that didn’t affect her so much as the overwhelming sadness that hit her. Over time she got so sad…

Because she was so sad and realized it was because she couldn’t live without her children, she killed herself too… but her spirit is unhappy so now she comes back and steals other people’s children to make up for losing her own.

 

How did you come across this folklore: “All of my elders told me; parents, grandparents, uncles used to tell this to all the kids.”

Other information: “This is used as a threat from your elders; IF you’re a bad kid, La Llorona will come and get you… like if you’re misbehaving in the supermarket or make a scene/throw a tantrum outside… or if you don’t listen to your parents, she’ll just come and take you in the middle of the night… We all believed the story… you just innately believe your parents, and don’t think they’re gonna lie to you, you know? And you definitely don’t think your grandma’s gonna lie to you… But just the thought of being taken away from your parents induced the right amount of fear to make it a very real threat.”

Even though it’s not always so believable, particularly outside of childhood or in these specific contexts of being threatened, La Llorona is still real. And the analogous stories (possibly oikotypes) elsewhere in the world show that this kind of theme is important to other groups of people, too, whether it’s used as a threat to make children behave, or to scare newcomers, etc.

La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Japanese

Primary informant: “La Llorona, I think is just really a part of every, like, Latin American household, I guess. Um, and specifically, I didn’t hear it from my dad because he doesn’t really believe in that shit, but from, like, my aunts and my grandma, whatever. And, um, it’s basically, this lady who… it’s like, okay, myth, legend, I’m not sure which one, but it’s like this lady who had kids, um, I don’t know what happened to the husband, if it was out of wedlock, or he died or whatever– the guy’s not there and, um, she ends up having a lover and the lover doesn’t want kids or whatever, so she takes her kids and she drowns them, in the river, and he ends up not getting with her anyway. So she just- um, like, got, I don’t know, got really sad or whatever and just, like, walks around. They say- people say that they see her walking around, like, rivers or, like, places with children and she’s always, like, they can, like, hear her, like, crying or something and just being really sad and all of that.”

Secondary informant: “La Llorona, she’s forever cursed to stay on Earth and she—for eternity, to find the remains of her children. And that’s why she’s constantly near rivers, because she’s trying to find the remains of her children and she can’t ascend into the afterlife until she does. So that’s why she’s stuck here, that’s why she’s hanging around here and shit.”

Tertiary Informant: “The one that I’m more familiar with, her husband was cheating on her. And so to get revenge on him, she drowns her children.”

Primary Informant: “The variations of that…”

Tertiary Informant: “But in whatever… ends up, he never ends up with her…”

Primary informant: “And she eventually ends up drowning her kids.”

Secondary Informant: “She’s forever alone.”

Laughs

Primary Informant: “Yeah, forever alone.”

 

Both informants who shared information about La Llorona are of Mexican descent and heard this story from their families. This story was shared in the primary informant’s apartment. We spent the afternoon sharing stories and combining the information we all had about each legend. These stories are important to the informants because they have been passed on from the older generations in their families. Because they value their older relatives, they value and enjoy the stories they’ve been told.

 

La Llorona

Nationality: Korean
Age: 23
Occupation: Marketing
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 20, 2013
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: Korean, English

“La Llorona is a tragic story about a mother that went crazy because of love. La Llorona used to be a beautiful woman who married the man she loved. They later had children and she was very happy, until it began to be apparent that her husband was no longer interested in her. He would be gone for long periods of time and only come back like once in a while to see the children. This drove her crazy and made her start to feel resentment toward her children. Then, one day she ran into her husband with her boys on the street. He was with some other woman, who looked beautiful and ric. Once again, he only talked to the children again and completely ignored her, walking past her as if she didn’t exist with the other lady. She went into a fit of rage and murdered her children by throwing them into a nearby river. Then she realized what she had just done and so she went after them and drowned in the river herself. After her death, she floated up to heaven, but wasn’t allowed in. The angels asked her where her children were and told her she could not enter without her children. So she was destined to come back down to earth, not alive nor dead, searching for her children. People say you can still hear her cries as she walks all over the earth, looking for her kids.”

My informant read this story during Dia de Los Muertos in her school. She was very shocked by it then, especially as she was a child. Because part of the legend that has become attached to it is that as La Llorona stalks the earth, she snatches children who are out in the dark and drowns them like she did her children, my informant became very afraid of the dark, especially to go outside at night. Her friends would tell her of people they knew who had actually seen La Llorona at night floating along a river and vanishing. Because of this, this legend was something that terrified her at night and gave her nightmares, although now it just seems like a legend to scare children into behaving.

This story is quite terrifying, and as it seems to target children especially, I can definitely see how my informant would have been shocked after reading this story. I would have reacted in much the same way if I had read the story as a child. In the story it seems as though she greatly regretted murdering her children, being forced to haunt the earth because she did not have her children with her when she went to heaven, may have turned her hostile once again to children. Although frightening stories like this may scare children into obeying, I personally do not think such scare tactics should be used. I can still remember frightening stories I was told as a child that would basically immobilize me because I would become so scared.