La Llorona is the infamous wailing woman from Mexican folklore.
Catchphrase: “You heard my cries, now I will hear yours.”
Sonya Fe. “Retold Story of La Llorona #4 (Shunned by her Pueblo)” (2000) Mixed media, chalk, ink, gesso, watercolor on paper.
What is it about humans and telling stories about entities that want to take your children away? I think these stories speak more deeply to what is wrong with your kind than what is wrong with monster kind. But, to each their own. Let’s dig into one my favs!
Whether on the side of the road, near a river, or deep in the woods, there are many stories of ghostly weeping women who attack wayward strangers, but La Llorona has become one of the most famous ones. She has been a terrifying bedtime story for children dating back to at least the 1500s.
Worldwide, she is most commonly associated with the relationship between indigenous women and Spanish conquistadors. La Llorona is often connected to Dona Marina or La Malinche, an indigenous woman who served as an interpreter to Hernan Cortes and bore his son. In these stories, she represents a betrayal of her Aztec heritage, of her blood, to the Spanish. However, La Malinche was a slave from a child, given to the Spanish by her family, and eventually chosen to be a consort to Cortés, calling into question how much of her life was in her own control and how much of her story was told accurately.
La Llorona, in her human life, was a beautiful, indigenous woman who fell in love with a wealthy man. Some stories refer to her as Maria. They were from completely different and conflicting worlds but fell in love despite all of those barriers. They made a home together and had two children. They were happy for years except the man’s parents would never accept their union or their family. His parents wanted him to marry another woman who was from his own world and social status. Eventually, he succumbed to their pressure and abandoned her and his children, abruptly leaving them with no means to support themselves. On the streets, starving, driven by grief and desperation, she drowned her children and herself. In the afterlife, she was cursed to roam the Earth, searching for her drowned children, weeping, never to find them again.
The version of her ghost story told in the United States is often used to deter children from playing near dangerous waters, connecting her to stories around the boogeyman El Cucuy who is also a monster I’ve written about here. She is sometimes linked to the nunašiš, a mythological creature from Chumash mythology. This creature has the cry of a newborn baby. Children are warned to stay away from the water or La Llorona may come and take them away. Obviously, the true fear is the parents’ fear of losing a child to the unforgiving watery depths.
Detail from “Carved tree in Arteaga, Coahuila, with La Llorona (Weeping Lady) image.” Photo by Gabriel Perez Salazar.
For me, the true fear is how society creates inescapable prisons for its denizens. For the young couple in this story, their love and the family they created was something that needed to be torn down based on their societal structure and rules that came with it. Humans must stay in the boxes the authorities have drawn for you or be punished. Often as a man, like the father in this story, there is a way out of a “transgression”, a second chance. For the woman, they are usually forever trapped in one way or another. If you fall from grace, especially as a poor woman, no one will be there to catch you and carry you through that hard time. Worse, there will be those around you to push you down further until you crack. Finally, when you do suffer a mental breakdown under that pressure, you will be turned into a damned creature to suffer through all eternity. True stories… everywhere.
I’m not here to say what Maria did to her children was justified and right in anyway. It was terrible and villainous. I only argue that there were many ways to prevent this tragedy which would have involved a society that supported this young family and its mother and intervened when they were falling and struggling.
Dating back further, La Llorona’s human story connects to Medea from Greek mythology. In the myth, Jason and the Argonauts, Medea helps Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. They marry and she later kills their children and his new bride. There is a great comic retelling of Euripides’ Medea by Tori McKenna that can be found in the Graphic Canon #1. This story is much more a vengeful woman scorned story. Medea is striking out against a man who holds all the power in the relationship. She goes after the only way she knows how to hurt him, destroying his legacy by killing his children. She’s also not in her right mind when she commits this heinous act.
Many of these similar La Llorona stories do begin with a man who has decided to leave his first family or wife behind for a new one. La Llorona’s story is one of power imbalance and mental illness just as many of the myths and tales similar to hers are. Maria, the human mother of these two young children had the weight of the world on her shoulders when her lover and father of her children abandoned them for another woman and life. She had few resources and was broken-hearted. What she did to her children was truly terrifying and awful, which is why she was cursed because of it. However, what the man did in this story was also horrifying and devastating. He abandoned his children to a life of poverty and starvation. He was as much their killer as Maria, but he was not cursed for all eternity to haunt the waters and steal children away from their happy lives. For a woman to feel so helpless and hopeless that infanticide and suicide are what she chooses, we must critique society and how it failed to intervene on behalf of this young mother.
There are many stories of weeping and wailing women in different mythologies. Often, these women were done wrong by a man and did something violent about it that ended their mortal life. They were then damned in one way or another in the afterlife. However, this damnation or curse often transforms them into a supernatural entity that has the power to terrorize or kill other humans. That is no different for La Llorona. She was given power in her afterlife but no agency in how to use it.
La Llorona must roam the woods near rivers, wailing and weeping, fruitlessly searching for her drowned children who she is never reunited with once dead. When she comes upon other children, she must collect them, and they disappear with her. Many think the children who come into contact with La Llorona are dead, but La Llorona does not kill them. Rather, she takes them with her, holding them in a supernatural stasis in her dark, hidey hole. The children become frozen in that age, her eternal companions, bound to her until the curse is broken.
A curse that I am proud to say, I helped Shel break in one of our many adventures documented in the graphic novel, Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: La Llorona in the Machine.
Here are a few panels of La Llorona’s story for you to enjoy!
When you become a Founding Member of Monster of the Week, you will receive the hardcover La Llorona in the Machine mailed to you as a welcome gift. Feel free to manage your subscription and read the whole story today!
Or you can check out the graphic novel over at Wicked Tree Press’ website.
As a Mexican, I approve this post.
Great post!!! I love being able to learn about these myths more in depth. I’ve heard about this one but only knew the basics. Super interesting!