La llorona

## **History**

In the early seventeenth century, a really beautiful-looking native woman was deeply in love with a Spanish man from the colony, who also fell in love with her and even wanted to marry them. She accepted and they began to live together, but due to the machismo of the time, the woman could not accompany him, as he had many meetings and duties, as he was a prominent diplomat of the time. However, they both enjoyed each other's company in the time they could be together. The couple had three children in ten years, but the woman still felt dissatisfied with an aspect that did not even make her sleep some nights, which was the fact that the in-laws did not accept the relationship because she was of a different class than her husband, this it was not something well seen at the time and was even considered a serious fault for the most conservative parents. Because of this, the woman was filled with hatred against the family with each passing day, and keeping in mind that problem that was troubling

her. What neither of them knew was that a monster was being born that, along with the fact that she was very jealous of her husband and comments from outsiders that he was thinking of leaving her at any moment, would unleash true misery. One evening, blinded by these negative feelings, she decided to take her children out of the house and run to a river that was relatively close. There he held fast to the youngest of them and drowned him until he died, as did the other two.

In the middle of the murder, and after the woman unloaded all the hatred she had built up from killing her children, for a moment her mind was able to clear and she realized what she had done. He had just killed his three children by drowning them in a river and it was neither a dream nor a nightmare as one would have it be. These were the facts, she had just ended the lives of three young innocent children that she herself had cared for as they were in her womb. Because of this, the woman began to scream desperately while crying, something that continued for a considerable time. However, since the water flow took the children away and the disturbing situation that occurred, it caused a kind of amnesia; so she got up quickly and started looking for the three children, believing that she had lost them, while crying desperately for no apparent reason (according to her).

## **Other Versions**

* In a children's version of the Weeping Woman story, the little story is quite different, except that it's a little shorter and it's about a ghost woman who aims to scare those irresponsible who haven't done their duty.
* There is another variation of the legend in which the woman commits suicide some time after killing her children. Then the body was found by a villager who couldn't relate to any family members (remember she was a native woman who lived surrounded by other classes) and buried her. But because of his need to find his children, the soul was left to wander.
* On the other hand, it is possible to find another version in which the purpose of the weeping woman is to frighten unfaithful men or parents who are irresponsible when taking care of their children.

This incredible legend of the weeping woman arose, it is said, in many towns in Mexico, because for several nights the people were frightened by the screams and cries of a desperate woman. However, one night the residents plucked up the courage to go out to find out where it was coming from.

## Origin

The presence of ghostly beings that cry in the rivers for various reasons is a recurring feature of the mythology of the Mesoamerican peoples. This is how features of these spectra can be found in various pre-Columbian cultures, which eventually, with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, assumed common features due to the expansion of Hispanic rule over the continent. The legend is a story that has mythical references in the pre-Hispanic universe, but that establishes its drama and its imaginary and distressing procession in the colonial order.2 To explain the origin of the legend of La Llorona, three main aspects have been proposed: a literalist approach, that is, the events really occurred: a woman killed her own children and from there, the story was told over and over again time until turning the woman into a ghost and the story into a legend; an euhemerist approach, that is, where a myth is superimposed on a real story with specific referents (this is the case, for example, in which the myth of the goddess Cihuacóatl is superimposed on the story of Malinche); and finally, a parabolic approach, which has an apologetic and symbolic reading, with a hidden meaning, in which history emerges as a way of giving voice to silenced sectors, in this case, the indigenous people during the Conquest and colonization.