La Llorona

Before the name La Llorona existed there was already a voice weeping at night over Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún recorded it as the sixth of the omens that heralded the conquest, in Book XII of his General History: «by night there was heard in the air the voice of a woman saying: Oh my children, we are lost!; and sometimes she said: Oh my children, where shall I take you!».

One thing is usually told wrong, and it changes who said what. In that passage of Book XII the voice has no name: Sahagún identifies her with no one. The one who names her is Book VIII, reviewing the reign of Moteccuzoma: «the devil called Cihuacóatl went weeping at night through the streets of Mexico, and all heard her saying: Oh my children, woe is me, for I now leave you!». They are two different passages of the same work, and joining them (recognising Cihuacóatl, the Serpent Woman, in the anonymous omen) is the work of later commentators. The first to do so in print for a modern public was Thomas A. Janvier, who in 1910 cited Orozco y Berra to argue that «La Llorona is a stray from Aztec mythology».

The story told today is colonial and mestizo: an indigenous or mestiza woman bears children by a Spaniard who then abandons her to marry another; driven mad, she kills her children, almost always by drowning them in a river or a canal, and dies soon after, condemned to seek them without rest. It circulated by word of mouth for centuries. The first serious collection in book form was made by Janvier himself, who heard the story in Monterrey around 1885 and published in 1910 the version current in Mexico City, where he describes her with «a white petticoat and the white reboso with which her head is covered». The variant that dates it to 1550 and gives it proper names (doña Luisa de Olveros and don Nuño de Montesclaros) is a much later literary addition: no document of the period supports it.

She appears at night and always beside water: on a riverbank, at the edge of a canal, under a bridge, at the washing place or in the irrigation ditch that crosses the village. She is dressed in white, in a long robe that tradition compares to a shroud, her black hair hanging loose over her face. Her face is almost never seen, and whoever insists on looking finds, depending on the version, a skull, a face without features, or that of a drowned woman.

The first thing to arrive is the weeping, and the weeping deceives. It sounds far off when she is near and near when she is far, so that whoever follows it walks the wrong way and ends up in the water. With the weeping comes the cry that gives her name: «¡Ay, mis hijos!» (Alas, my children!). To hear it is taken as a death announced, one's own or the household's; to see her is worse. In many districts it is also said that she takes children who walk alone by the river at night, and men who go out drunk and follow her believing her a living woman: both are found drowned, or alive and out of their wits.

La Llorona works, first of all, as a household warning. She is the argument used to forbid children to go near the water after dark and to reproach the man who comes home late and drunk; in both directions the punishment comes from the same place, the river. That is why she has no cult, no offerings, no date of her own in the calendar: what she has is a set of precautions — do not answer the weeping, do not go looking for it, cross yourself and do not look back.

As a figure she condenses two distinct griefs. The pre-Hispanic one is Cihuacoatl weeping for children she is about to lose, which Sahagún turned into an omen of the fall of Tenochtitlan. The colonial one is the Indigenous woman abandoned by the Spaniard, whose mixed-race offspring are left fatherless. Hence the paradox that sustains the legend: she weeps for children she killed herself, yet the whole story speaks of a loss she did not choose. That explains why she is still alive in Mexico, Guatemala, the rest of Central America and the American Southwest, and why each generation retells her changing the river, the neighbourhood and the century, but never the weeping.