Original Source
Vidal, Soledad. "La Llorona." The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience. ABC-CLIO, 2011. Web. 12
Sept. 2011.
La Llorona
La llorona, the weeping or wailing woman of Hispanic folklore and legend, is one of the most complex female symbols in contemporary Mexican American literature and mythology. Some describe la llorona as a female ghost, a woman with razor-sharp fingernails dressed in white or black with a face resembling death. Others believe her to be a young and beautiful woman who, when approached by traveling young men, transforms herself into a hag. The figure of la llorona has been characterized in various and complex ways. The most widely known version describes la llorona as a woman who killed her children and tossed their bodies into a river. Constantly weeping, la llorona roams along rivers and ditches searching for her offspring. Legend has it that if she cannot find them, she will take any other child.
Multiple versions of the folktale exist and have been passed down from generation to generation in Mexican towns and barrios. Storytellers also describe la llorona as a tortured soul, a mestiza, a woman who married a man with three children, of whom she was very jealous. One day she took the children to the river and drowned them. When she died, God forbade her entry into Heaven until she returned to him the souls of the murdered children.
La llorona appears in mythology as the archetypal evil/good woman, a mother who, acting as a goddess, murdered her children in a sacrificial attempt to save Mexico from rapacious Spain. A spin-off of this particular version claims that la llorona of the New World was actually La Malinche, the consort of Hernán Cortés. Malinche, who is said to have fallen in love with Cortés, represents a woman torn between her love for a Spaniard and the cruel acts that Cortés and his people perpetrated on Mexico by pillaging Aztecan culture. When Malinche gave birth to Cortés's children, legend has it that she was disliked both by local and Spanish women who teased her children as half-bloods. When Cortés resolved to take Malinche's children to Spain with the intent to sell them as slaves, Malinche prayed to the Aztec gods for guidance, who ordered her to kill them. Malinche, alias the first llorona, killed her children in order to spare them, and all of Mexico, from Spanish control.
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