La Llorona

Few ghost stories are told as widely as La Llorona’s. In the version most children in Mexico and the US Southwest hear, a beautiful woman abandoned by her lover drowns her children in a river in a moment of despair, then dies in grief and is condemned to wander the waterways forever, dressed in white and crying “¡Ay, mis hijos!” – “Oh, my children!” Hear her wail and misfortune follows; follow her, and you may never come back. Parents have long used her to keep children away from irrigation ditches, rivers and the dark.

Folklorists trace her along several roots. Book 12 of the Florentine Codex – compiled in the mid-16th century by the friar Bernardino de Sahagún from the testimony of Nahua elders – lists among the omens that preceded the Spanish conquest a woman heard weeping through the night in Tenochtitlan, crying for her children. Scholars such as Américo Paredes connected her with the Mexica goddess Cihuacóatl and the cihuateteo, spirits of women who died in childbirth. Others, like Bacil Kirtley, stressed European “white lady” traditions. Library of Congress folklorist Stephen Winick has pointed to a Spanish tale, “El Pozo de La Llorona,” published in 1866, as a missing link on the Iberian side.

The detailed origin story with names and a plot is largely a 19th-century literary creation. Manuel Carpio’s poem “La Llorona” appeared in 1849, and in 1880 Vicente Riva Palacio and Juan de Dios Peza’s Tradiciones y leyendas mexicanas gave her a name, Luisa, and a faithless aristocratic lover, Don Nuño de Montes-Claros. English-language retellings, starting with Yda Addis’s in 1888, carried that version north. Some modern tellings tie her to La Malinche, Hernán Cortés’s Nahua interpreter, making her a symbol of the conquest itself – an interpretation, not part of the earliest sources.

She is not one ghost but many local ones. In Guatemala she searches for a son; in Costa Rica one version makes her the daughter of a Huetar chief whose baby was thrown from a waterfall; in Colombia’s Antioquia she is sometimes called María Pardo; in Ecuador and Venezuela she has her own regional details. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California almost every river town has a stretch of bank, a bridge or an acequia where she is said to walk – San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe and Tucson among them.

Today La Llorona is as much a cultural icon as a ghost. The Mexican folk song that bears her name, popularised by Andrés Henestrosa in 1941 and sung by Chavela Vargas, Lila Downs and many others, is a love song rather than a horror story. Every autumn since 1993 the trajinera boatmen of Xochimilco, in Mexico City, have staged a night-time spectacle of her legend on the canals at Cuemanco.

A woman in white, often with long black hair hiding her face, seen walking by rivers, canals, lakes and arroyos at night; a high, drawn-out wail of “¡Ay, mis hijos!”; in some places the sound is said to seem faint when she is close and loud when she is far away. Reports come from countless families, usually second-hand, and are part of oral tradition rather than documented incidents.

Wherever there is water: the canals of Xochimilco and the old lake beds of Mexico City, rivers and ditches across Mexico and Central America, and riverbanks in the US Southwest such as the San Antonio River, the Rio Grande and the Santa Fe River. She is most often heard late at night, and in many regions around Día de Muertos.

The folk song “La Llorona” (recorded by Chavela Vargas, Joan Baez, Lila Downs and Rosalía, among many others); films from Ramón Peón’s 1933 La Llorona and René Cardona’s 1960 version to The Curse of La Llorona (2019) and Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona (2019); the annual night-time spectacle on the canals of Xochimilco; and countless children’s books and Chicano literary retellings, including Rudolfo Anaya’s.