La Llorona is your Monster Of The Week. On Monday we look at the origins of this weepy, slutty, murderous ghost story.

For as much as they’re fun narrative diversions patently intended to elicit campfire pant pee, ghost stories are also tools for shaping children’s behavior and thought patterns through fear. Granted, it seems kind of ridiculous to portray a story like that of La Llorona as a Machiavellian device designed to threaten children into, well, not accidentally drowning, but the deeper ramifications of the story do reveal the manipulative inner-workings of societal value systems and the way that even the most trifling narratives run thick with cultural DNA.

I’ve been thinking: claiming La Llorona enforces a patriarchal cultural structure, and then just leaving the statement to dangle there so that modern feminism can do the work of disassembling the sentiment into the darkest, most insidious meaning possible, is unfair. Honestly, the story doesn’t enforce a patriarchal cultural structure so much as it acknowledges that the governing cultural ideology favors males, and then proceeds on without doing anything to overturn or subvert the paradigm. After all, the story – like many kid’s tales – isn’t meant as a socio-political call to action, begging children to rise up and overturn the status quo; it’s meant as a little creepy encouragement, urging kids to become the best people they can within the confines of a pre-existing, and inevitably flawed, value system. (Remember, La Llorona isn’t punished for going clubbing and being a sexy, independent woman; she’s condemned to ghosthood for murdering her children.)

The story’s Mexican roots and popularity among Hispanic residents of the United States suggest the story’s about more than just sentencing women to a homebound, maternal existence. Traditionally, Hispanic cultures (Generalizing. Don’t let’s get huffy.) place an extremely high value on family and the strength of a tight-knit family unit. Look: A different version of the La Llorona tale portrays La Llorona’s husband as a sleazy philanderer who eventually moves in with another woman, and only visits La Llorona so that he can see his children. Resentment of the kiddies ensues and La Llorona gives them the ol’ heave-ho into old man river. Now, consider the cultural context: the story is less about repressing a woman into blind subservience than it is about empowering a woman to overcome obstacles – even familial ones – and marshal the strength to keep what family she has together at all costs. If anything, the tale takes a back-handed swat at the patriarchy by portraying men as horny, drunken gadabouts who may have the cultural cache to run society, but who don’t have the wherewithal or personal fortitude to effectively foster and maintain a loving family, a duty that the progenitors of the La Llorona legend viewed as the ultimate social prerogative.

Friday: Weeping ghosts and cultural context

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