The Elasticity of Myth in “La Llorona”

The texts of “La Llorona” in versions sung by Chavela Vargas and Angela Anguilar follow the essay.


     In Guadalalajara a week ago, enjoying the Day of the Dead festivities which included numerous stages in the plazas with a variety of musical, dance, and theatrical productions, often featuring local amateurs, I halted my promenade at the sound of a young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, with a big voice, singing a powerful and passionate version of the classic “La Llorona.” Dressed casually, without makeup of either the glamour or skull-face variety, she captured her audience with the power of the old familiar song.
     The ranchera “La Llorona” is extremely popular in Mexico. It has been recorded many times by popular singers and continues to circulate in folk performance. Also widely known in the American Southwest, its soulful tune is as well perhaps the Spanish-language song most familiar to English speakers after “La Cucaracha” and “Cielito Lindo.” Those innocent of its language may have heard the tune in Julie Taymor’s popular film Frida and their children will remember it from the Disney studio’s Coco.
     A dramatic performance enacting La Llorona is annually presented on Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco in a production that advertises itself with the line “our nation was born from the tears of La Llorona.” [1] In Paz’s seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude La Llorona is an intermediate figure between the perfection of Mary, the immaculate mater dolorosa, and the treachery of la Malinche, Cortés’ Aztec mistress and translator. In the first identity she is the “long-suffering” Mexican mother celebrated on Mother’s Day, while in the second she is not so much wicked as chingata, “screwed.” Paz declares that all Mexicans are “hijos de la Chingada,” adding “when we shout this cry on the fifteenth of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front of, against and in spite of the ‘others.’”
     The story of La Ilorona appears in many forms and with widely varying implications. Its roots in pre-Columbian legend and its parallels around the world are extensive and significant, but not the present focus. The plot elements most commonly included may be briefly summarized. La Llorona is fundamentally the woman who has had the worst experience imaginable. Her lover, with whom she has borne children, is unfaithful to her. Often the two are racially distinguishable, with the woman an india or mestiza and the man whiter. In fury, the woman drowns her children and then, falling into despair at this act, she compounds her sin by committing suicide. She has lost salvation as well as romantic and maternal love. For her monstrous crimes, she is condemned to weep and search for her children, often snatching those who are not her own. If she is a bogeyman to the little ones, she is said also to be a siren who exacts her insatiable revenge against men by luring them to destruction through her beauty and pitiable cries.
     Even that basic narrative, which is subject to a great deal of variation in the songs, stories, poems, plays, and films of La LLorona, may generate a markedly broad range of thematic territory. A simple list of those most prominent tensions and conflicts her story evokes would have to include the following.


1. maternal love
2. male/female power relations in general
3. sexual love
4. fidelity to the church
5. racial inequality
6. national identity
7. the use of violence
8. fear of the female


     Other possibilities lurk within the same material. For instance in recent decades horror movies such as American Michael Chaves' The Curse of La Llorona have reduced La Llorona to a monster ultimately destroyed by the hero. [2] While the popular cinema represented one group of reactions to the story, scholarly journals produced another, often featuring feminist revisions. [3]
     Yet surely the context in which the story most belongs is neither the movie theater nor the university library, but within the family, either as a cautionary figure with which to frighten (and thrill) the young or in songs, either on recordings or performed by amateurs influenced by those same recordings. An examination of two versions of the song, one by senior diva Chavela Vargas, originally from Costa Rica, a longtime street singer and reputed lover of Frida Kahlo and the second by Angela Anguilar, a teenager born in Los Angeles, will suggest the elasticity of the La Llorona myth and a remarkable thematic elasticity born of underdetermination.
     As in most original texts bearing mythic material, “La Llorona” in both Vargas’ and Anguilar’s versions proceeds with oblique references rather than a linear narrative. Vargas opens by intensifying the complaint of betrayal by adding the issue of racial identity to that of gender. In a turn reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, [4] she says she is called “el negro,” while she herself adds “negro pero cariñoso,” thus projecting a suspicious or hostile social set [5] and asserting her own value. (The word “pero,” of course, acknowledges that a swarthy complexion is regarded as a deficiency.) With the liquid sounds of her name ringing in the background like the continuous soft wail of suffering humanity, La Llorona is pitched on the restless seas of love, her position imperiled by the envy of others and her vulnerable position as a woman and as a person (in some sense) of color.
     She lingers luxuriously, the listener may think, even seductively, on her appeal in the second verse in which a parallel self-description; she is “picante pero sabroso” “como el chile verde.” Here the woman draws on the archaic association of females with the vegetative earth, identifying herself with a favored New World food. The definitions of picante range from a simple “tasty,” through “hot spicy,” to “racy” and “naughty,” adding a note of adventure and danger, deepened as before, by the plangent word “Llorona,” breaking repeatedly on the shore of every verse.
     Verse three delivers on that promise of danger with an opening cri de coeur from the depths “ay de mí,” succeeded by the liquid sounds of the river water washing over a sinking object “llorona, llorona, llorona,” and then the chilling request, “lévame al río.” No longer offering herself as an exotic love object, she is consumed with sorrow and either seeking her drowned children in the river or wishing to end her own days there. On the other hand, though, she may, like the Sirens, a number of medieval faeries, or the faux-folk Lorelei be luring some man to his doom in the waters of dissolution.
     The speaker has turned suddenly from seduction to pathetic appeal. Her spectral cold intensifies her despair and devastation as she pitiably requests the favor of a blanket as though just a bit of warmth could relieve her. ”Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona,/ porque me muero de frío.” Having by her acts exiled herself from romantic, parental, and divine love, she can do little but wail.
     This touching plea is then reinforced by the central image of the song. The singer cannot say why, but the very flowers of the cemetery seem to be weeping with her as they sway in the breeze. The entire world is mourning.


No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando


     Following this poignant example of the pathetic fallacy which enwraps everything in the singer’s grief, Vargas then decrescendos with the repetition of the verses about the river and the rebozo. In the whole of the song the listener has heard nothing about any of the events of the story: the unfaithfulness of the lover, the death of the children, and the suicide of the mother. The emotion itself is foregrounded, naked of circumstance, yet traces remain, for those competent in the myth, of each of the themes inherent in the plot.
     A generation of two later Anguilar’s recording of “La Llorona” provides evidence of the song’s perennial popularity, and its words are largely, though not wholly, the same as Vargas’s. Her youthful voice, like that of the child I heard in the Guadalajara plaza, suggests that the harrowing experience of La Llorona is part of the prudential instruction that women must understand as they attain maturity. While Vargas’s version is, except for the repeated “llorona,” spoken by La Llorona herself, Anguilar’s assumes the voice of the man, admiring the lady as she leaves church. His appreciation for her beauty, amounting almost to the glory of the Virgin, is, with delicate taste, attributed to her huipil (the use of the indigenous term for the garment emphasizes the woman’s identity as an Indio). The association with the divine is reinforced by his confidence that “la virgen te creí,” (“the Virgin believes you”) and the need for the Virgin’s sympathy – the horrific murders of her children – is only heightened in drama for being unstated.
     With the heartfelt exclamation “ay de mí” Anguilar then evokes the weeping flowers, in her lyrics, not said to be in the churchyard, but rather “campo lirio” (“a field of lilies”) again recalling the Song of Songs. [6] In the tones of a Troubadour declaring the laws of love, the next verse equates love and suffering, paradoxically suggesting by the use of the term “martirio” (“martyrdom”) that her passion and pain have a penitential or redemptive quality.
     The description of the flowers which seem to weep as they are blown in the wind of fate and the request to go to the river and to be covered by a rebozo follow in very nearly the same words as in the earlier version of the song. Yet in a curious oscillation, since the persona had been the man from the start of Anguilar’s rendition, it seems now unclear who is suffering the cold and seeking as a last resort the waters of dissolution. The rebozo is, after all, a woman’s garment. Is the man villain or victim? Is the woman a traitor or the one betrayed? The formal dance of the figuration makes all of these possibilities available without insisting on any.
     More broadly, the performed versions support all the potential themes, and their signification is the more exact and precise for its economy. The mention of a few concrete specifics, when delivered with the power and depth of Vargas, Anguilar, or the anonymous young heiress of tradition I heard in Guadalajara, is sufficient to trigger access to profound emotion with psychological, religious, and political reverberations spreading ever outward.
     The glimpse of a woman’s garment, the swaying of flowers in a breeze, such details are here not atoms in the random drift of quotidian life, but rather the entry points into a mythic and visionary system built to order and interpret experience. On this framework are displayed and tested such axes of struggle as that between lovers or between an individual and the state. The story of La Llorona reflects the capacity for violence in humankind. But the most enduringly memorable sound of all is the sobbing of La Llorona, a lament at once for self, for family, for community, a complaint in the end at the all-but-impossible demands of simply being alive. We all weep together.



1. Though the phrase is quoted a good many times on the internet, I was unable to locate its source prior to the History Today article titled “The Wailing Woman” by Amy Fuller dated October 31, 2017.

2. This describes the treatment in the American film The Terror of La Llorona by Eric Elias Flores, released in 2019. Other film versions include Peón’s 1933 Mexican version La LLorona, the 1961 Mexican film The Curse of the Crying Woman by Rafael Baledón, and a Guatemalan La Llorona in 2019 by Jayro Bustamante.

3. One sample of such work is Jacqueline Doyle, “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1996), pp. 53-70.

4. “I am black, but comely.” Song of Songs I:5. In the thicket of Jewish and Christian commentary on this passage, the color is sometimes thought to suggest that the bride is Pharoah’s daughter or, alternatively and in contrast, that she has rustic origins. Symbolically the darkness has been associated with sin or physicality and with Israel’s condition in the wilderness.

5. Similar to Catullus 5 with the censure expected from the “senum severiorum” or Troubadour songs with their hostile and gossipy “jealous ones.”

6. Song of Songs, 2, 1–2. The plant in the second verse, is rendered as “lily” in many translations, including the King James, though the identification of the plant, which here seems to be red, has been disputed. Due to a close association with Mary, the white lily, the Lilium candidum has since the Middle Ages been popularly known as the Madonna lily.



Chavela Vargas 1961

Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso
Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso

Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso
Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío

No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío


Angela Anguilar 2018

Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.
Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.

Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.
Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.

El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.
El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.

No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.
No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.

Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.
Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.

Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.
Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.

Wharton’s Undine

     “Undine.” The reader is given pause at the very first word of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. The name of the leading lady seems unlikely indeed for the child of vulgar Kansas parents, though throughout the nineteenth century the legendary Undine had been the subject of numerous paintings and poems, particularly popular among the pre-Raphaelites. [1]
     Despite links to ancient water nymphs such as naiads and nereids and the Latin name from unda (wave), the figure of Undine is not ancient, but is original with Paracelsus. He posited “spiritual” beings associated with each of the four elements invisible to the ordinary observer. Water is the realm of the undine who can acquire a soul only by attracting a human lover. Thus she is associated with promiscuous self-interested sexual activity and sometimes conflated with malicious seductresses such as sirens.
     Wharton identifies her character Undine Spragg, as “a variation on the eternal feminine.” The obvious application of this universally distributed negative archetype of woman to Undine arises from her willingness to use her extraordinary beauty cynically in pursuit of her own selfish ends, thus ruining her husband Ralph, battering her next husband, and failing to satisfy Elmer who was her first and last.
     Undine is entirely unredeemed by the book’s end. When reminded of his one-time step-father in France Paul bursts into uncontrollable sobs, and Elmer consoles him by saying, “Is it because your mother hadn’t time for you? Well, she’s like that, you know, and you and I just have to lump it.” Though his arms are “firm and friendly,” Elmer cannot help thinking in terms of money. He thoughtlessly refers to the Marquis’ poverty which had allowed him to buy the family tapestries and then comforts the crying child by assuring him “you’ll be the richest boy in America.”
     In comfort and security, Undine remains unsatisfied. “She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, as though there were other things she might want if she knew about them.” By the novel’s last lines, the vague discontent has coalesced about the wish to be the wife of an ambassador. She is a classic addict, who always lusts for more.
     If the nouveaux riches of her day seemed conscienceless and impossibly vulgar, one can only imagine what she would make of today’s America, led by Donald Trump, an utterly tasteless and ignorant buffoon whose idea of beauty is a golden toilet when it is not his own face. In the novel the descent from a version of higher culture to the mass commodified version is signified by the explanation of Undine’s out-of-the-way name – it is the brand of hair product marketed by her father, the foundation of the family fortune. The reader imagines her seeking through marriage to rid herself of her surname, so abrupt and unmusical.
     Thus Undine is, like many modern versions of myths, bathetic, an epigone, ironic in its suggestions of true art, beauty, and intellectual pursuits. Virtually all the characters are narrowly self-interested, without real values. The artist Popple is no less commercially focused than the Wall Street speculators; Mrs. Heeny is a mere appendage of her wealthy clients. Even de Chelles, the genuine aristocrat possessing the attitudes of his class by birthright, who is tender with his unfortunate stepson, seems hidebound, as much out of step with humane considerations as the others if less venal. And he, too, is broken by the modern age, forced at last to sell his Louis XV tapestries.
     The closest approach to an exception is Ralph Marvell, who regularly tries to act with integrity, but who is, in spite of America’s youth, as much an etiolated representative of an order whose time has passed as the marquis. His utter unfitness for work, complicated by vague aesthetic tendencies, may seem attractive enough, especially because he has such a generous heart, but his suicide indicates his crippling neuroses. It is as though wholesome decency has itself rotted.
     Still, Undine is in some respects, no less charged with powerful energy than the sirens who sang to Odysseus. Her sexual allure is all but irresistible. The men she selects she gets, no less than if she had been Circe. The results of her machinations are as severe as if they had been divine visitations: Ralph’s suicide and Paul’s depression foremost. Wharton seems to insist on the seriousness of her characters’ affairs in spite of their short and narrow sight. Aphrodite, or Kama, or whoever among the myriad goddesses is indeed manifested in Undine Spragg of Apex, Kansas.
     Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country strikes me as Gustave Flaubert in the process of becoming Henry James, though Wharton lacked the stylistic mastery of either. While Flaubert set about to transform, as though alchemically, the banality of Emma Bovary into the pure gold of fine art, and James in the end anticipated Proust in his detailing the velleities of highly self-conscious characters, Wharton renders Undine Spragg as simultaneously powerful and unconscious, mired in her commonness. While she shares Emma Bovary’s ambitious restlessness as well as her shallow selfishness -- Flaubert described his characters as “completely commonplace” mediocrities -- he then rendered this consideration irrelevant by his ascent to an ideal of form and the perfection of le mot juste. [2] Lacking that lofty refuge Wharton‘s novel retains its satiric focus on the monstrous development of American capitalism, a process which, despite being slowed by the New Deal and the civil rights struggle, has since continued apace.
     Yet Wharton was anything but a radical. A true reactionary in her harking back to an imagined earlier era, she resembles Trollope in her implied belief in the righteousness of an order of nobility whose time has passed. She sees not only the faults of the new and tasteless ruling class; she sees as well the faults of Mrs. Astor’s New York 400 and the European nobility. In the morass of competing egotisms she suggests that life is livable with a certain unthinking observation of the rules ornamented with a sheen of art. It may be a makeshift strategy, but it represents one way of coping with the predicament of retaining some humanity in a society governed by cash in which water spirits have become gold-diggers.


1. Artists who represented her include Eduard Steinbrück, John William Waterhouse, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Arthur Rackham. Poets who used the Undine story include Aloysius Bertrand, Henry Van Dyke, Antoinette de Coursey Patterson, and Kenneth Slessor.

2. Letter to Louise Colet, September 19, 1852.