La Llorona Summary

Folk Tales: La Llorona

At night under a full moon partially covered by clouds, a woman dressed in white with a veil appears by the river bank lamenting for her lost children. Anyone who hears her cry “AY….. MIS HIJOS” (OH MY CHILDREN”) gets frightened, terrorized and panics; chills run through your spine. It is said that, a person can turn hysterical if her face is seen. She is La Llorona (the weeping woman).

In Europe, they have their own weeper by the waterside. She is named be’an sighe, in English its “banshee”. The “banshee” is an omen of death. A small woman dressed in green. The tale of the weeping or vengeful woman occurs in many cultures around the world. In Germany they have “Die Weisse Frau”, in Ireland “shrieking banshees” and “Kuchisake-onna” over in Japan. All these legends have something in common with La Llorona. They wail at the presence of death, have lost a child, or have been wronged by their significant other. The Llorona is a tale from North America and can be found

in the Southwestern United States, which include Texas and Arizona but is most common in the valley of Mexico and Southeast parts of Mexico, all near Lake Texcoco and Veracruz where Cortez arrived.
For centuries folk narratives have been passed down from one generation to the next.

Usually these stories have been told to our mothers by our abuelitas who were once told by their mother. And eventually were passed down to us. Narratives have been an essential tool used as cautionary tales. One narrative that is used for the most part by Mexicans and Mexican Americans is the story of La Llorona. This story has several versions for different purposes. One of the ways this narrative is used by parents has been to inhibit children from being out late. It heeds warning to kids not to be out after dark because if they are caught out late something bad will happen to them. La Llorona is also used on young girls as a way to control their sexuality. It is also an example of the consequences a woman will endure if she doesn’t follow her “duties” that society has cast upon her as a woman. For men La Llorona is a reminder to be cautious about who they are with and the actions he

takes.
The story of La Llorona begins in Mesoamerica during the sixteen century. Before the Spanish arrival, the Aztec goddess Cihuacóatl is described as being in a white dress with a veil and heard crying out about “sus hijos” (the Aztecs) ( Jobes 27) near the lake of Texcoco. The reason Cihuacóatl was so worried was because she had a premonition that the Aztec empire would fall in the hands of the Spaniards. She paced back and forth near the lake wondering where she was going to take the Aztec people to be safe and avoid death both physically and spiritually with the arrival (Sobek 47). Cihuacóatl’s premonition became a reality and the Aztec empire fell. Some blame a young Aztec woman by the name of Malintzin, whose name later changed to La Malinche for the betraying her people (the Aztecs) by aiding the Spaniards in their conquest of Mesoamerica.
There’s a story of a woman in Mesoamerica whose story parallels with that of Malintzin’s. This narrative is the most common heard. It starts off with this beautiful woman who falls in love with a man and bores his children out of wedlock. Sometime later, he leaves her for another woman causing her to go mad and drown their children in the river. When she realized what she had done, she went after the children as their bodies moved down stream but it was too late. She drowns as well. When she reached the gates of heaven she was denied entry and condemned to remain in limbo. Some say you can hear her ghost crying out at night by the river searching for her children. For this reason the towns’ people gave her the name La Llorona (the weeping woman).