La Llorona Origins

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, is one of the great folk figures of the Hispanic world. She is the ghost of a woman who has lost her children, and who wanders the rivers and the roads at night, wailing for them with a cry that can be heard for miles around. In Mexico, the cry is “¡Ay, mis hijos!” — “Oh, my children!” Wherever she appears — in the highlands of Mexico, in the Andes, in Central America, in the southern cone — she is recognisably the same figure, with the same cry, the same grief, and the same danger.

The story of La Llorona is told in many forms, but the most familiar is the colonial Mexican version. In the version, a beautiful young woman, often named María, falls in love with a wealthy man, often a hidalgo (a Spanish nobleman) or a criollo (a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas). The two have children together, often two boys. Then the man leaves her, often to marry a woman of his own class. María, in her grief and rage, takes the children to the river and drowns them. She is struck by remorse, wanders the river bank in search of the children, and dies. She rises from the dead as La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, and she wanders the world for ever, crying for the children she has lost and trying to take other children to replace them.

The European Roots

The story of La Llorona is not an entirely Mexican invention. It belongs to a much older European tradition of the woman in white, the mourning mother, the ghost of the woman who has lost her child. The Greek Lamia, the queen of Libya who lost her children to the jealousy of Hera and who became a child-stealing monster, is one of the great ancestors of the figure. The Irish Banshee, the bean sídhe of the old Irish tradition, is a close parallel — a female spirit who announces the death of a member of an old family with a wail.

The German Die Weiße Frau (the White Lady), who is said to haunt the castles of the German-speaking lands and who is associated with the House of Hohenzollern and the House of Hapsburg, is another important ancestor. The German Weiße Frauen tradition has been carried into Latin America by the German-speaking immigrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the southern parts of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. The Slavic tradition of the rusalka — the water-spirit who is the ghost of a young woman who has drowned and who wanders the rivers and the lakes — is a particularly close parallel, and the Rusalka of the Slavic tradition is one of the great shared figures of the European and Latin American folk tradition.

The Spanish tradition of the Llorona is also important. The Spanish ballads of the medieval and early modern period, the romancero, include several figures of the weeping woman, including the ballad of the infanticida of the city of Segovia, who is condemned to death and whose ghost is said to haunt the river.

The Colonial Mexican Retellings

The story of La Llorona in its modern Mexican form is closely tied to the colonial period and to the figure of La Malinche. The historical Malinalli Tenépatl (c. 1496–c. 1529), known as La Malinche, was the indigenous woman of the Nahua nation who served as interpreter, advisor, and consort to Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. She is one of the most contested figures in Mexican history. To some, she is the traitor who helped the Spanish conquer her own people, and her name has become a term of abuse in Mexican Spanish. To others, she is a survivor of the conquest, a person who was given to the Spanish as a slave and who did what she could to protect her people.

The folkloric La Llorona is often said to be the ghost of La Malinche, who lost her children to the violence of the conquest and who wanders the world for ever, crying for them. The story of La Llorona is, in this reading, a story of the violence of the conquest and the loss of the indigenous children. The La Malinche reading of La Llorona has been the subject of literary and cinematic work, including the Rosario Castellanos novel Oficio de tinieblas (1962).

A second major colonial Mexican retelling of the La Llorona story is tied to the city of Puebla and the floods of the Atoyac River in the 1530s and 1540s, in which the Spanish settlements along the river were repeatedly over-run. In this version, the woman is a young widow of the floods who, in her grief, killed her children and who now wanders the river bank in search of them.

The Tale as a Warning to Children

In the modern Mexican folk tradition, the tale of La Llorona is told as a warning to children. Children are warned that if they go out at night, if they stay out too late, if they go down to the river alone, the Llorona will get them. The story is told in the form of a cautionary tale, with the Llorona as the figure of the danger that waits for the child who disobeys. The form of the tale is similar to the form of the bogeyman story of the European and North American tradition, the figure of the threat that is used to keep the child in line.

The Regional Variations

The story of La Llorona takes many forms across the Latin American world. In Mexico, in addition to the standard colonial version, there are regional figures that resemble her without being identical. In Guatemala, the figure is the Siguanaba, a beautiful woman of the rivers and the crossroads who appears to the unfaithful husband as a beautiful woman and then, when he follows her, turns into a horrible creature with the head of a horse and the body of a woman. The Siguanaba is tied to the older indigenous tradition of the Maya highlands and belongs, in some readings, to the same family of the woman who punishes that La Llorona does. In El Salvador and Honduras, the Llorona of the Pacific piedmont and the culebra (serpent) legends overlap. In Peru and Bolivia, the Day of the Dead tradition has its own character, with the venerated ñatita (the skull of a relative, dressed in clothing, kept on a household altar) sitting alongside a more general tradition of weeping-women and Aya Uma (skeleton-dancer) figures, but the ñatita itself is not a variant of the Llorona — it is a separate and much older Andean custom.

In the Chilean tradition the most famous folk figure is the Trauco of Chiloé, but the Trauco is not a weeping woman: he is a small, hairy, fertility-giving spirit of the deep forest, said to impregnate women and to protect the woods, and he belongs to a different story-cycle entirely. The Chiloé archipelago has its own Llorona figure, but she is a local variant of the Mexican original. In the Argentine pampas, the Llorona wanders the rivers and the rural roads in essentially the Mexican form.

The Modern Latin American Horror Film

The story of La Llorona has been a popular subject of the modern Latin American horror film. The La Llorona (2019) of Jayro Bustamante is a Guatemalan horror film in which the figure of the Llorona is tied to the violence of the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. The Vuelven (2017) and Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017), both by Issa López, are Mexican fantasy-horror films in which the figure of the ghost-child of the Llorona tradition appears as a kind of spirit guide.

The Jayro Bustamante films of the 2010s have used the figure of the Llorona in the context of the recent Guatemalan history, especially the Mayan genocide of the early 1980s, in which the military government killed tens of thousands of indigenous people.

The Book of Life and Penny Dreadful

The figure of La Llorona has also appeared in the popular culture of the broader world. The animated film The Book of Life (2014) is a Mexican-American production set in the world of the Day of the Dead, and the figure of the Llorona is one of the characters. The TV series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) includes the figure of the Llorona as one of the supernatural beings of the series.

The figure of the Llorona has also appeared in the modern Mexican-American tradition. The La Llorona of the borderlands, said to wander the Rio Grande and to call for the children of the migrants who have died in the crossing, is a particularly poignant figure. The story of the borderlands Llorona is a story of the violence of the border, the danger of the desert, and the grief of the parents who have lost their children.

Sources and Further Reading

Pérez Domínguez, Andrea, and Anthes, Emily. La Llorona: A Mexican Folkloric Figure (research in Latin American folklore studies).
Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. W. W. Norton, 1993. (Literary, but a touchstone of Mexican-American La Llorona reception.)
Oropeza, Lorena. La Llorona: The Legend of the Weeping Woman. Tricycle Press, 2004.
Mora, Pat. The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe. Knopf, 2012.