La Llorona, Omen of Death

Author: Traditional Mexican American

Time Period: 1851 CE–1900 CE

Country or Culture: North America

Genre: Folktale

PLOT SUMMARY

María is a beautiful young girl from a small rural village. She takes great pride in her beauty, determining that she will not settle for any men of the village but will instead marry a handsome man from an upper-class family. One day, she meets a handsome young ranchero from a prominent, wealthy family. The young ranchero notices María’s beauty and courts her. Though she is interested, she feigns disinterest to encourage his desire, turning away when she sees him, refusing his many attempts to give her gifts, and ignoring him when he serenades her with his guitar. The ranchero falls for María’s deception and becomes obsessed with her.

When María realizes her ploy has been successful, she relents to the ranchero and allows him to court her. Eventually they marry, and María gives birth to two children. Before long, the ranchero seems to lose interest in María and returns to his wandering ways, traveling the plains and capturing wild horses. The ranchero disappears for months at a time and only returns to visit his children. Rumors around the village tell María that her husband has even considered marrying a wealthy woman of his own class and leaving María behind.

One night when María is walking with her children on a shadowy path near a river, her husband rides by in a carriage, with an elegant female passenger next to him. He stops and speaks to his children but ignores María. After being spurned, María becomes furious and directs her anger at her children, seizing them and throwing them into the river. Realizing what she has done, María chases after her children as they float downstream, moaning in pain with her arms outstretched; but she is unable to catch up with them, and the children die. The next morning, the villagers find María dead by the river. They dress her in white funerary garments and bury her body near the spot where she was found.

That night, the villagers hear moaning coming from the banks of the river, and some of the villagers see María’s ghostly image walking along the river calling for her children. Night after night, the villagers hear and see the ghost of María, wandering near the river dressed in her white funerary garments and calling out, “Where are my children?” After some time, the villagers no longer call her María and begin calling her la Llorona (the “weeping woman”). From that time on, the people of the village warn their children against going out unattended at night, lest la Llorona steal them, thinking that they are her children.

SIGNIFICANCE

The folktale of la Llorona is known primarily from versions told among the Mexican American population of California and the American Southwest. Similar versions of the myth exist elsewhere in Mexico and throughout Central and South America. La Llorona can be considered an example of a broad category of folktales and myths that are used culturally to threaten children into avoiding “bad behavior.” Children in communities where la Llorona was a popular folktale were often warned that la Llorona steals children who are out after dark or who misbehave in other ways. Folktales of this type reinforce parental discipline by providing an additional, supernatural incentive to avoid violating parental rules.

In addition, the story of la Llorona transmits a moral lesson to women by displaying how María’s pride in her beauty and obsession with her lover causes her to doom her soul to unrest when she turns her frustration on her children. In the male-dominant culture of post-Columbian Mexico and Central America, excessive pride in one’s appearance was especially frowned upon in women, who, it was believed, should remain modest. This story, like many local customs in this culture, promotes these qualities among women and warns of hardships and suffering that will befall women who become too proud or vain.

Some scholars have noted connections between the pre-Columbian Aztec goddesses Coatlicue and Cihuacóatl and later representations of women in Mexican culture, including the folktale of la Llorona. In the colonial era, stories of both Cihuacóatl and la Llorona were common and portray both women as dangerous and destructive figures. This depiction deviates from the traditional Aztec portrayals of the serpent woman Cihuacóatl as the patroness of midwives and a goddess of fertility. Historians believe that the patriarchal Spanish culture absorbed and adjusted the female figures of Aztec mythology to produce characters that fit the male-dominated mold of Spanish Catholic culture. In this way, stories in which Coatlicue appears to the Aztecs crying for the loss of her child became a story of a vain woman who destroys her own children and then threatens others because of her grief.

Despite the somewhat misogynistic depiction of women in Mexican folktales, some modern writers have resurrected la Llorona as a feminist symbol. La Llorona has been utilized in essays and novels as a symbol of the female struggle against male domination, both in the colonial era and in the modern struggle against domestic violence and spousal abuse. In reframing the myth of la Llorona from a feminist perspective, the ranchero becomes the symbolic villain, as he callously discards the mother of his children to pursue his own desires. While the ranchero’s behavior would once have been seen as typical of any man, the feminist embrace of la Llorona indicates the way that gender norms and values have changed in the modern world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” Melus 24.2 (1999): 53–74. Print.

Castro, Raphael. Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals, and Religious Practices of Mexican Americans. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000. Print.

Romero, Rolando, and Amanda Nolacea Harris, eds. Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche. Houston: Arte Público, 2005. Print.