Tag Archives: Latin American

La Sihuanaba

Text:

“It’s called La Sihuanaba — it’s like this beautiful woman that sits by the river, and she would oftentimes come and lure men that were either drunk or cheating on their wives. And then she would turn into this monster. She was basically punished by God to be this ugly creature because she was too vain. I don’t know if it’s kind of similar to, um, the one where the king looks at himself in the river too much and he’s too vain. But yeah, so she basically just lures men in and kills them if they’re not well-behaved. And then she also got punished with a son who is very treacherous.”

Context:

La Sihanaba is a widely circulated supernatural legend across Central America, particularly El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The informant’s family is Salvadoran, and the moral tales that he reflected on were often very vivid for his mother.  La Sihuanaba belongs to a cluster of feminine supernatural figures in Latin American folklore, most notably La Llorona, the “Weeping Woman,” a ghost who wanders waterways and targets children.

Analysis:

The recurring figure of a powerful, marginal woman who tests the moral fitness of those she encounters is recognizable across world folklore as the archetype of the Crone — a figure who sits at the crossroads of wisdom, danger, and social judgment. La Siihuanaba activates this archetype while complicating it in instructive ways. Unlike many Crone figures whose threat is purely spiteful or generalized, her targeting is morally precise: she punishes sobriety violations and marital infidelity, making her less a monster than a supernatural enforcer of communal norms. What gives her lasting narrative power is the irony embedded in her origin: she was herself condemned by God for vanity, and is punished to seek out and condemn that very excess in others. She is a flawed injuster, shaped by her own transgression. This reflexive quality — the punished becoming the punisher— invites an interpretive richness that sustains stories across generations.

La Siguanaba

Age: 23

“A Salvadorian folklore story I know is La Siguanaba. It originated from the Náhuat people. “Sihuehuet” means beautiful woman in Spanish. Its Salvadorian. The gods cursed her for neglecting her son. She was turned into a spirit who lures unfaithful men. She’s also beautiful, that’s how she lures and kills them. When they get close she shows her face, which is, a , mix of a horse or a skull- or a mix of the two, and drives them crazy. It’s basically about temptation. I had this as a research topic in high school. I wanted to learn about the indigenous tribes from where my family is from.”

context: My informant, is a 23 year old male born in America, whose parents were born in El Salvador. Both parents fled to America to escape the Salvadorian civil war. His mother is from a town called El Mozote, which was where one of the largest massacres caused by the US government took place in 1981.

analysis:

Looking at this from a functionalist perspective, the legend is meant to enforce societal norms. Neglecting your child and being unfaithful could lead to divine punishment and temptation could lead to supernatural consequences. I also believe that La Siguanaba follows a common Latin American folklore trope of a supernatural or ghost woman sent out to punish people, like with La Llorona. the informant’s retelling of the story is a way for him to reinforce his own Salvadoran cultural identity. I also believe that many violent Legends (or just legends centered around death) may have emerged due to the Mozote massacre and other horrendous imperialist acts that have been forced upon Salvadorians. Historical trauma can shape how some legends and folk tales in general are viewed, even if those stories predate such events. the passage of time can effect how those stories are remembered or emphasized.

Cuban New Year Traditions: Grapes, Water, and Roasted Pig

“So my dad’s thing, his folklore I guess, is that on New Year’s you eat 12 grapes, one for each month of the coming year. Each grape is basically a wish, a month of good luck. And then you fill up pots and pans with water and you throw the water out to get rid of all the bad luck from the year before. And you bang the pots together to scare away any bad energy, bad mojo. That’s his Cuban heritage, that’s where all of that comes from.

And then more generally, for any big holiday, it’s just about getting the whole extended family together. Like everyone comes. And the food is a huge part of it. The main thing you’re always going to have is roasted pig, and then black beans, rice, and fried plantains. It’s not a gathering without those. The food is really the center of everything, honestly. That’s just how those family holidays work.”

Context: This is from my friend whose father is Cuban. The informant was relaxed and a little giggly about it, clearly fond of these memories. It’s about the specific rituals their family does on New Year’s Eve, and then more broadly the way big family holidays just always look a certain way, same food every time, same people crowded around the same table. Someone in the room kept kicking them partway through, which did not help.

Analysis: The way he describes it shows that he is not quite sure what category it belongs in. But that slight distance actually makes it more interesting, because it shows how folk traditions get transmitted within families without ever being formally taught. Nobody sat this person down and explained the symbolism of the grapes or the water. They just grew up watching it happen, and now they know it.

The grape-eating and pot rituals are recognizable from Cuban and broader Latin American New Year’s tradition, but what stands out here is less the rituals themselves and more the fact that they’ve survived the distance of immigration intact, still tied to a specific identity, still understood as distinctly Cuban even several generations in. Throwing water out to expel bad luck, banging pots to scare off evil, these are physical, almost theatrical acts, and that probably has something to do with why they stick. They’re hard to forget once you’ve seen them.

The food side of things is doing something a little different. Roasted pig, black beans, rice, plantains showing up at every single holiday isn’t really about any one occasion. It’s more like a recurring proof of belonging. The meal is the same because the family is the same, and making it together, eating it together, is how that continuity gets felt rather than just assumed.

This entry was posted in Calendar Custom, Festival, Food, Family Folklore and tagged Cuban heritage, New Year’s, grapes, luck, roasted pig, family gathering, Latin American tradition on 0420.

Las Posadas

“They have Las Posadas during Christmas which is like a…., not a parade, but it’s kind of like a parade, it’s like a procession. And basically they have actors play the virgin Mary, Joseph, and then they reenact the whole birth of Christ and stuff like that. It’s like about nine days before Christmas and lasts until Christmas eve. It’s like a whole set of holidays.”

Background: The informant has not attended the Las Posadas procession herself as it primarily takes place in Mexico and other Latin American countries. She says at some point her and her family were planning on going but unfortunately were not able to. 

Analysis: Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism, is the dominant religion in Latin America because of Spaniard colonization so Los Posadas is celebrated throughout Latin America. Latin American immigrants have since brought this tradition to the United States and it’s now also practiced by Latin American people in the United States. It’s common to find people who practice Christianity, mainly Catholicism as it is the most dominant branch of Christianity, recreating the events that lead to the birth of baby Jesus. The importance of the event can also be seen in the use of nativity sets that many Christian households have and display during Christmas time to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Arizona
Performance Date: 4/2/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context:

MV is a 2nd generation Mexican-American from New Mexico. Half of her family is of Japanese-Mexican descent and much of her extended family lives in Mexico. I received this story from her in a video conference call from our respective homes. She learned this story from her grandmother, who told it to her as a child. She grew up in near the Rio Grande in Albuquerque New Mexico, a river which also goes through Mexico.

Text:

MV: So the story goes that um.. there was this woman. She doesn’t really have a name, but… she was like a really beautiful woman and she lived in this little town and she fell in love with this man and she loved him so much and they got married, and she was like really obsessed with him, she really wanted to like… marry him… and just have him. So they ended up getting married and they had a few kids, a boy and a girl. She really loved the kids and they were really beautiful too because she was the most beautiful woman in the village.

One day, like, she was noticing that he was, like, was coming home really late, and was really sus, and wasn’t telling her where he was going or if he was at work or what was going on. And so, she found out that he was having an affair, and this, like, shattered her entire world… she went crazy!

So, she goes into the Rio Grande, and she takes her kids, and she’s so sad about what happened and she can’t stop crying (which is why she’s called La Llorona, hehe) So she’s bawling and bawling and she drowns her kids! In the river, cuz she’s just so sad, crazy, and like, I don’t know she was really into this guy… She drown herself in the river too, with her kids, after that. And pretty much, the legend after that is like, when you hear the wind going through the bosque (forest) near the Rio Grande, like that howling is her crying… that’s La Llorona!

JS: What do you think the story means?

MV: I think it’s just, like, a heartbreak. She had her heart broken really badly and she didn’t know how to handle that.

Thoughts:

The legend of La Llorona appears across a wide swath of Mexican and Central American folklore. In her historic-geographic study of the legend, Ana Maria Carbonell finds this destructive motherly figure to date as far back as the early days of colonization in the Americas. La Llorona is often seen as a figure to be feared, a deranged mother bent on murdering her kids, but Carbonell reads her against the patriarchal system which backgrounds her, and which causes her to place her self-worth or ontological justification within the (patriarchal) institution of marriage which, when shattered, has disastrous and deadly effects. This narrative shows the loss of the children not as a result of psychological derangement, but of hierarchical relations which compel la Llorona to destructive acts of love. Water is here a figure for destruction as well as birth. This figure of la Llorona, instead of a passive subject of the patriarchal gaze, has some subjective agency and is able to act out against a patriarchal order which subjugates her and which she fears for her children to enter. Note that the informant explained la Llorona’s actions in terms of the violence that was afflicted upon her and her inability to cope with it, not because of some internal fault, but because of external oppressions.

Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlique in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS, vol. 24, no. 2, Religion, Myth, and Ritual. Summer 1999