In the Southwestern United States, as the sunlight fades and nocturnal creatures awaken from their wild dreams of the moon, a series of high wailing sobs sounds out from river banks. The choking cries stutter and fade into the soft chatter of running water before rising up again to pierce holes in the wind and throttle the trees. It’s the sound of La Llorona, half-crazed with guilt, chasing her grief downstream. And beware, o children, should she catch sight of you, for she will not hesitate to reach out with icy fingers and claw you down into the freezing heart of the black water.

In the journalistic sense of who, what, where, when and why, the tragic story of La Llorona (Spanish for “the weeping woman”) is frustratingly elusive. Obviously, given her name’s etymology, the legend is most commonly told by Hispanic communities, and has roots in ancient Mexican folklore. Predictably, regional variants and local extrapolations abound. The constant is the bereaved ghost of a guilt-stricken mother who drowned her children and, in doing so, doomed herself to an eternity of endless wandering, futilely scouring the rivers and lakes of the world for some lingering trace of her murdered offspring.

The circumstances surrounding the homocide change in each version. A typical telling goes like this: La Llorona is a peasant woman who, in deference to her lower-class roots, takes to disguising herself in a fancy gown and walking into town each night to impress wealthy men with sophisticated conversation and sultry dancing. To do this, of course, she has to abandon her children. Eventually, La Llorona is fully seduced by her bachelorette lifestyle and drowns her children out of resentment (In the declawed version of the tale, her neglected kids accidentally fall into the river). After committing the murder, La Llorona is overcome with grief and eventually starves to death as she catatonically paces up and down the riverbank. Now her ghost, the frowny-faced nutso that it is, trolls the world’s waterways waiting to indiscriminately grab any youngling unfortunate enough to enter her tear-distorted field of vision.

In the most basic sense, the story serves to prevent accidental drowning by threatening disobedient kids with vast supernatural repercussions should they wander too close to a river or wade unsupervised into a lake. On a deeper level, though, the legend uses the paranormal as a means by which to inure pre-adolescent Hispanic girls into a traditional gender-based ideology that places a premium on maternity while subtly repressing female identity.

Wednesday: La Llorona – dead woman, living patriarch

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