La Llorona: The Woman Who Weeps by the River

Along the rivers of Mexico, the American Southwest, and much of Central and northern South America, mothers have long used one story to keep children from wandering too close to the water at night: the tale of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman. She is a ghost, dressed in white, doomed to roam near bodies of water, mourning the children she herself drowned. Whoever hears her cry, the legend warns, will suffer misfortune, failure, or even death.

The most widespread version of her story tells of a beautiful woman named Maria. After drowning her own two children — in some tellings to be free to pursue a lover who did not want them, in others after being betrayed by her husband — she threw herself into the river in despair. Her soul was left trapped between worlds, unable to pass on, condemned to search forever for the children she killed. In some versions, she can only cross into the afterlife if she finds and brings her children with her, and so she lures other children who wander alone after dark.

Other retellings give her a different motive: a woman betrayed by her husband who, after killing her children and herself, waits by lonely roads at night to seduce men, punishing them for the infidelities of others before killing them in turn. Across every version, the ending is the same warning: to see her, or to hear her wail, is to be marked for coming misfortune.

La Llorona's tale is sometimes tangled together with the historical figure of La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as Hernán Cortés's interpreter and bore his son. La Malinche occupies a strange dual place in Mexican memory — honored as a mother of the modern Mexican people, yet condemned as a symbol of betrayal for her role in aiding the Spanish conquest. That double burden of motherhood and treachery echoes in La Llorona's own story of children lost and a woman cast out.

Scholars trace the legend's roots deep into the pre-Columbian world, long before Spanish ships arrived. Ghostly women weeping by rivers appear across Mesoamerican mythologies under many names: Auicanime among the Purépecha, goddess of hunger and of women who died in childbirth; Xonaxi Queculla among the Zapotecs, a death deity who seduced men before revealing herself as a skeleton and dragging their spirits to the underworld; and Xtabay among the Lacandon Maya, a beautiful spirit with a hollow tree for a back who lured men to madness and death.