La Llorona

• 1. The Sixth Omen

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  La Llorona, the Weeping Woman of Hispanic American folklore, turns up in the Florentine Codex, a text about the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519. It says: "The sixth omen was that many times a woman would be heard going along weeping and shouting. She cried out loudly at night, saying, 'Oh my children, we are about to go forever.'"

  In the stories told today, she is a vengeful ghost who roams near bodies of water, mourning the children her Spaniard husband drowned. His crime came after she discovered he had been unfaithful to her. Whoever hears her crying is said to suffer misfortune, to die, or to become extremely unsuccessful in life.

  Her legend is especially well known in Mexico and the southwestern United States. It is traditionally told across Mexico, Central America and northern South America. Yet a ghost with this much reach raises hard questions. Who was she before the Spaniards arrived, if she was anyone at all? Why does each country give her a different name, face and crime? And why have writers, singers and painters kept calling her back?

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• 2. Goddesses Who Weep

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  In Xochimilco and the Lacandon jungle, several researchers place the roots of the Weeping Woman. They point to a crowd of pre-Hispanic beings: Auicanime among the Purépechas, Xonaxi Queculla among the Zapotecs, Cihuacóatl among the Nahuas, and the Xtabay among the Lacandon Maya. All of them are tied to the underworld, hunger, death, sin and lust.

  The Xtabay, also spelled Xtabal, is an evil spirit in the form of a beautiful woman whose back has the shape of a hollow tree. She draws men into her embrace, drives them mad and kills them. Xonaxi Queculla, the Zapotec goddess of death, the underworld and lust, sometimes appears with emaciated arms. She makes men fall in love with her, then turns into a skeleton and carries their spirits to the underworld.

  Auicanime was the Purépecha goddess of hunger, and her name can be translated as the Thirsty One or the Needy One. She also presided over women who died in their first childbirth. According to belief, those women became warriors called mocihuaquetzaque, which made them divine and worthy of worship and offerings. Goddesses of this kind, linked to sexual life, also produced other female ghosts who punish men, such as the Siguanaba, the Cegua and the Sucia.

  Among the Mexica, the legend grew out of many hybrid oral narratives. One tradition links her to Tenpecutli, a very beautiful goddess who grieved for having drowned her children in a river. If someone looked into her eyes, she could change her face into an animal's, like the nahuales. Another figure is Mictlancíhuatl, goddess of the underworld, who seduced and ruined men.

  It has also been proposed that La Llorona blends three Mexica goddesses. They are Cihuacóatl, the mother goddess and serpent woman; Teoyaominqui, the watcher of the dead; and Quilaztli, goddess of childbirth and twins. Together they were pictured as a woman dressed in white, crying for her lost children. Hearing her was an ill omen.

  Cihuacóatl carried many titles. She was Coatlicue the earth goddess, Quilaztli of fertility and childbirth, Yaocíhuatl the warrior woman, and Tonantzin the mother. She was mother of Huitzilopochtli, the greatest Mexica god. She was also patron of the cihuateteo, spirits of women who died in childbirth. At night these spirits cried out and roared in the air. On certain calendar days they descended to frighten people at crossroads, and they were fatal to children.

  One cihuateteo was called Chocacíhuatl, a name built from the Nahuatl words choka, meaning to cry, and cihuatl, meaning woman. She was the first of all mothers who died in childbirth, and she lamented the death of her son and the loss of her own life. Stripped skulls, separated from their bodies, floated in the air around her, hunting any traveler caught by the darkness. Seeing them was a sure omen of misfortune or even death. The Nahua feared her above most beings, even before the Spaniards came.

  A tale called The Hungry Woman, tied to Aztec creation stories, features a wailing woman who constantly cries for food. It has been compared to La Llorona's signature nocturnal wailing for her children.

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• 3. Omen to Colonial Ghost

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  Around 1550, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún wrote down the legend of Chocacíhuatl in his monumental Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, a work spanning 1540 to 1585. He identified this figure with the goddess Cihuacóatl. In book one, chapter six, he reports that "she appeared many times as a lady dressed with garments such as are used in the palace". He adds that she wore white, and that she arranged her hair with little crossed horns over the forehead. Sahagún attributes the legend to the Mexica people.

  The Codex Aubin names Cihuacóatl as one of two deities who accompanied the Mexica on their pilgrimage in search of Aztlán. In the dual Mesoamerican view, she gives life and death alike. She is both a nurturing and a destructive mother, able to create and destroy her own children.

  Before the Spanish conquerors arrived, a series of omens foretold the fall of the Mexica Empire to men coming from the east. In one, Cihuacóatl appeared over the waters of Lake Texcoco in a flowing white gown, her long black hair loose. She wandered among the lakes and temples of the Anáhuac, crying out, "Oh my children, where shall I take you so that you may escape such a dreadful fate?" Her cry terrified the people of Tenochtitlan.

  After the Conquest, residents of Mexico City reported a ghostly woman in white wandering the streets and uttering sad wails. She crossed the Main Plaza, the former site of the destroyed temple of Huitzilopochtli, and looked toward the east. Then she continued to Lake Texcoco and vanished among the shadows.

  The Viceroyal period is when the legend took the shape most tellers know. To the pre-Hispanic antecedents the Spanish added their own contribution, and La Llorona became one of the first signs of mestizaje. So many origins and versions point to syncretism. Oral tradition moves in loops, so the native legend may have passed to the Spaniards, who added their own elements. Then it may have passed back to Indigenous peoples, who added theirs again. It may also have happened in the opposite order.

  Spanish folklore already knew the white lady, a ghost in white common to several Central European countries. These spirits are often tied to rivers, springs or wells, and could be dangerous or helpful. Spain had kin of its own: the Basque lamias, the Cantabrian anjanas, the Asturian xanas and the Galician mouras. In Catalonia and Mallorca, white ladies were omens of death on stormy nights. They appeared as enormously tall women in white tunics, with a light in hand and white eyes. The legend said such a lady had killed her children over an unrequited love.

  In New Spain, fear of heresy meant La Llorona could not be openly identified with pre-Hispanic goddesses. Her description shifted to suit the colonists, yet she kept her white clothing, long black hair, the wrenching cry of "¡Ay mis hijos!" and her bond with water. Seeing her still guaranteed death or madness for anyone who tried to find the source of the moan. Colonists pictured a woman in a flowing white dress, her face behind a vaporous veil that hid the terrifying face of anguish. She crossed cobbled alleyways and plazas, uttering a shattering cry of despair and defeat.

  La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as Hernán Cortés's interpreter and bore his son, became tangled with this ghost in colonial Mexico. She was a key figure in the Conquest, and the unfavorable view of her and Cortés belongs to what is called the Black legend. Many versions of a tragic love story seem to flow from it. In them, an Indigenous, mestiza or criollo woman is betrayed by her Spanish lover. She kills her child to punish him, or in some tellings her father, because the child is proof of dishonor. In a way she also punishes herself for her weakness.

  Some researchers insist the two women are opposites. Malinche did not kill her children. As Cortés's sexual slave, she created the ties between Indigenous people and Spaniards that were the basis of colonial domination. La Llorona destroys that basis by killing her mestizo children.

  Still, the stories persist. In one, Malinche returns from the afterlife in remorse for betraying the Indigenous peoples. In another, Cortés returned to Spain and took their son Martín Cortés, and she could not stop him. A third, symbolic version has her weeping for the mestizo children of the Mexican people, either in repentance or in mourning for their later fate. Local legend says her spirit wanders around the Plaza de la Conchita in Coyoacán and the nearby Casa Colorada, where she is said to have lived.

  The legend reached print in the 19th century in a sonnet by the Mexican poet Manuel Carpio. His poem never mentions infanticide. His ghost is a woman named Rosalia, murdered by her husband.

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• 4. Cousins Across Continents

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  Among the Bribri and Cabécar peoples of Talamanca, on the border between Costa Rica and Panama, spirits called itsö are passed down through the oral tradition known as the Suwoh. They dwell in tangled mountains, abysses, rains, strong winds and waterfalls. They have the appearance of a woman and the body of a bird, living in caves and riverbeds. They wail when a child is about to die, or lead children astray when they wander from their parents. In Bribri, itsö means both weeping woman and tulevieja. In both countries, a woman who kills a child born of an unwanted pregnancy is condemned to wander as a ghost.

  Colombia and Venezuela have their own divinities tied to rivers and nature. The Madremonte of Colombia appears on stormy nights, uttering roars and infernal screams that shake the mountain. María Lionza of Venezuela is protector of fish and nature, and many of her origin myths involve water. Both are guardians rather than killers.

  In Peruvian Amazonian mythology, the Ayaymama is a mother who abandons her two children in a river. She believes she is dying of an illness and wants to spare them the same fate. The children turn into birds that make a mournful sound. Among the Guaraní of Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, the story is tied to the urutaú, a nocturnal bird also called güemí-cué, whose call sounds like a weeping woman. These legends do not share a common origin with La Llorona, but were linked to her once Hispanic dominion was established.

  Pucullén, in the folklore of the Mapuches of Chile, takes her name from the Mapudungun külleñu, meaning tears. She weeps eternally because her child was taken from her arms young, or died in them. She dresses in white, or in black in some versions. Only the dying, machis or calcus, children and sharp-sensed animals can see her. Dogs howl when she is near, so rubbing your eyes with dog tears is said to let you see her, though a weak heart will find her terrifying.

  Pucullén acts as a psychopomp, a guide of the dead. Her steps and cries mark the path from the earthly dwelling to the beyond. Her abundant tears form a crystal-clear pool that marks the exact spot in the cemetery where the grave must be dug. She weeps for all the relatives, so they may soon be consoled, and she keeps a displeased spirit from returning to torment them.

  Europe has weeping female phantoms too. Scholars compare La Llorona to Eve and Lilith of Hebrew mythology. Author Ben Radford, in Mysterious New Mexico, found common elements in the German folktale "Die Weiße Frau", dating from 1486. The Greek demigoddess Lamia is another echo. Hera learned of her husband Zeus's affair and killed all the children Lamia had borne him. Lamia, in jealous grief, then killed other women's children. Medea offers a variant. Abandoned by Jason, whom she had helped to win the Golden Fleece, she murdered her children as revenge.

  In Spain, a Jesuit academic from Cadiz named José Maria León y Domínguez published Elvira, La Llorona. Its heroine, Elvira, suffers a devastating life that slowly turns her into the spectral figure. In Eastern Europe, the Rusalka of Slavic mythology is a water spirit born when a woman drowns by suicide or murder, especially after an unwanted pregnancy. She must remain in this world for a period of time.

  The Bible tells of Rachel, who weeps for her children, the people of Israel, because they have perished. In Celtic mythology, the banshee announces a death with moans heard over long distances. Catalan folklore offers the Ploranera, described as a surly old woman who howls and shrieks instead of speaking, said to live in the peaks of the Morunys.

  In Japan, ghosts who return to take revenge are called onryō, usually women in white kimonos with long black hair and pale skin. The Kuchisake-onna, a yōkai with a slit mouth, appears at night to slash the faces of young men. The Philippines has a mermaid who howls at sea over children murdered by a fisherman; her cry means someone has drowned. It also has the White Woman, who lives in fog and traps young women each year in the mist. In Malay and Indonesian mythology, the Pontianak is the vampiric ghost of a woman who died in childbirth. She announces herself with a sound like a crying baby and takes revenge by stealing children from new mothers.

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• 5. Faces and Fatal Cries

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  Most accounts of La Llorona describe a woman in white with long dark hair, combing it as she cries. Her face may be pale as a skull. In some versions she wears a long white robe under a black hooded one. In some versions from Guatemala, and in one from Aguascalientes, Mexico, she has a horse's face, like the Siguanaba or Cegua.

  Costa Rica and Panama give her monstrous cousins. The Tulevieja is a dirty and horrid old woman in rags with bird legs. The Tepesa, popular in the Panamanian provinces of Los Santos, Veraguas and Chiriquí, has long tangled hair and a face covered with holes. Both are women who killed their children and are condemned to wander as horrifying specters.

  In Colombia, her white robe covers her to the heels. Her long curly hair is black, though it may also be silver, brown or golden, and crickets, fireflies and butterflies perch in it. Her face is a terrifying skull with two incandescent spheres spinning in the eye sockets. With large, bony, bloodied hands she rocks a dead baby, shedding tears of blood over its blue shroud. The child keeps an angelic expression, and its eyes seem to accuse the mother who took its life. In Antioquia she is called María Pardo. In the Pasto region she is Tarumama, a monstrous old woman with mule hooves, punished for abandoning a child born out of wedlock to hide her shame.

  Venezuela has La Sayona, who appears to partying, unfaithful men and shows enormous fangs. During the colonial period, some women disguised themselves as the Sayona so they could meet their lovers unnoticed.

  Argentina and Chile tell of the Widow, a tall thin woman in black who appears on isolated roads and bridges. Her face, and sometimes her feet, cannot be seen, so she seems to float. In the city, she smiles at men and sometimes walks with them without harm, avoiding women. In the countryside, she is a gaunt woman in white on stilts who steals travelers' belongings. In Catamarca she has disheveled hair, very white sensual feet, and breathes fire. Like La Llorona, she threw her child into a river. Like the Cegua and the Sayona, she can turn her face into a skull and climb onto the horses of unfaithful men, killing them with an icy embrace.

  Folkloric accounts agree that the terror comes less from her looks than from her chilling wail, and there is often no direct contact. Versions in which seeing her means death are the least common. In El Salvador, she enters a rural town along the main street and lets out her first scream. Then she searches for the road to the cemetery, or enters the church and disappears. Those who hear her feel chills through their whole bodies. If you turn your back, she suddenly appears beside you. Anyone who looks at her and follows her will wander for all eternity.

  One Costa Rican version calls her harmless, since her only concern is finding her son. Another, from the same country, says she kills anyone she meets, mistaking them for her deceiver. In Ecuador, she drowns her son and searches until she finds his body, which is missing the little finger. For that reason, she cuts off the little finger of anyone to whom she appears.

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• 6. A Hundred Versions

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  The typical telling begins with a beautiful woman named María, who marries a rich ranchero or conquistador and bears him two children. One day she sees him with another woman. In blind rage she drowns the children in a river, and regrets it at once. Consumed by guilt, she drowns herself, but cannot enter the afterlife. She is forced to roam the earth in purgatory until she finds her children. Another version makes the children illegitimate, drowned so their father cannot take them to be raised by his new wife.

  In Mexico, the story names an Indigenous woman called Luisa, who falls in love with don Nuño de Montes Claros. He abandons her, and in revenge she stabs the three children they had together. She is burned or hanged, and becomes the ghost weeping in the streets of Mexico City.

  In Guatemala City, the legend says a woman had an affair, became pregnant and gave birth to a boy named Juan de la Cruz. She drowned him so her husband would not find out. She is condemned to search for him wherever there is a pool of water. In this telling she is a criollo or mestiza woman of high social standing who betrayed her husband with a hacienda servant. The legend is deeply rooted in Antigua Guatemala, the former capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala. A peculiar detail says that when her cry sounds close, she is far away, and when it sounds distant, she is passing close to the listener.

  Nicaragua places her on Ometepe Island, in Moyogalpa. An Indigenous woman there fell in love with a white man against her mother's advice: "the blood of the slave should not mix with the blood of the executioner". When he abandoned her, she drowned her child in Lake Nicaragua. She repented and jumped in to save him, without success.

  Costa Rica's tale makes her the daughter of a Huetar king, in love with a Spanish conquistador. They met in secret atop a waterfall, and she bore a child. Her father killed the boy by throwing him from the falls and cursed her to wander rivers, pursued by evil spirits. The events are set at the Río Grande de Tárcoles.

  In Puerto Rico, the legend merges with the vanishing hitchhiker. A woman appears on the Las Calabazas bridge and asks for a ride. If ignored, she suddenly appears inside the car. If refused, a tire soon punctures and she appears again. She is believed to have been killed together with her child after a sexual assault.

  In Colombia, the spirit of a woman who left her newborn near a stream, where the current carried him away, is condemned to wander and search. In Pasto she is said to appear on full-moon nights. On the 31st of October she is said to walk through cemeteries holding a candle, and anyone who meets her eyes is trapped by her screams.

  Venezuelan versions are set in the Llanos during the colonial period. In one, she falls for a soldier who abandons her once she is pregnant. Driven mad by the infant's crying, she kills him with her own hands. Her wailing draws neighbors and relatives who curse her, and she flees into the plains to steal children left alone. Families traditionally place wooden crosses above their doors to ward her off.

  Ecuador knows La Llorona de Los Ríos and La Llorona de Los Andes. She lost her lover and drowned her children in a river, and locals say they hear her somber cries at night along rivers like the Guayas. In Peru, her cry is said to foretell death for people living near farmers who dare to enter huaca ruins. That is why locals avoid ancient Indigenous monuments.

  Uruguay sets her at the lake in Parque Rivera in Montevideo. There, she and her child drown accidentally on a stormy night. Some accounts omit the children and blame thieves who murdered a woman and her husband and threw them into the lake. In the southwestern United States, parents tell the story to scare children into good behavior and keep them away from dangerous water, much like El Cucuy. In Chumash mythology of Southern California, she is linked to the nunašɨš, a creature whose cry resembles a newborn baby's.

  Even the motive changes. Most stories say she kills her children after the father abandons her, out of madness or revenge. In versions from Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua, the death is accidental while she washes clothes in a river. One Costa Rican account has her drown a newborn out of madness and shame, rejected by family or community. Another has a mother with mental illness who drowns her child while bathing him. In one Venezuelan telling, she kills each child at birth without remorse. When the village priest finds her pregnant again, he advises her to breastfeed the baby before killing it. After doing so, she is overwhelmed by guilt and wanders the countryside weeping.

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• 7. What She Means

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  The Aarne-Thompson classification places tales of La Llorona under type 300, The Dragon Slayer. The reason is that she behaves like a predator from which one must escape. They also fit the Enchanted Woman type, where a human meets a being in its area of power, here water, through a series of trials. She is a spirit of ill omen, and her nighttime wails are an oracle of misfortune. She can cause illness, worsen the sick or bring curses on loved ones.

  From the underworld she bursts into villages with a message, warning of rising rivers and approaching misfortune. Her warning is against carelessness, negligence and the lack of caution that leads to disaster. Her link to night and the realm of the dead ties her to the archetype of the Triple Goddess: the virgin who becomes a mother and finally the cadaverous old woman, the witch. Like Hecate, she walks the roads at the head of a procession of night specters, the queen of American ghosts.

  A literal reading condemns the unnatural woman who disobeys her mother's advice and makes her child pay for a deceiver's crime. It warns against sex before marriage, unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Scholars see in her the behavior a male-dominated colonial society demanded of women, and Indigenous women especially. Failing the maternal role meant madness, death and suffering. Her sin is the gravest a mother can commit.

  Men have their own reason to fear her. She terrifies those who roam at night, especially drinkers and the unfaithful. She climbs onto their horses and kills them with an icy embrace, drives them mad, or turns her angelic face into a skull or a mare's head with decayed teeth. The kiss of death she leaves on a cheek marks the unfaithful man. In this role she polices behavior and lets social normality return to its course.

  Mothers also use her as a bogeyman, like El Coco. They warn children that she will come looking for them at night if they disobey. The same threat keeps children from drowning in ponds, lakes or rivers.

  The colonial setting added a darker use. The legend originally functioned as a horror story warning Indigenous peoples against disobeying established authority, frightening and subjugating them in their own towns at night. Stories about the dead and apparitions multiplied in that era to censor behavior judged immoral, and hers condemned illegitimate relationships.

  Read as metaphor, she is the woman condemned to watch the historical abandonment of her symbolic children, the Indigenous peoples displaced militarily, politically and culturally by the Conquest. Modern literature and popular culture have turned that reading around. She now appears as a champion of defeated Indigenous peoples who terrifies white conquerors. She is a defender of undocumented immigrants crossing into the southern United States. She is also a symbol of feminist discourse against patriarchal society among Chicano writers.

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• 8. Retold and Reclaimed

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  In the late twentieth century, Chicana feminist writers and poets began retelling La Llorona as a symbol of resistance and female identity. The rise of Chicana feminism and the Chicano movement encouraged them to reinvent their cultural presence in the United States. In their hands she became a strong woman forced to accommodate her colonizers and punished for challenging traditional female roles. Chicanas recognized in her the agony of being stripped of identity.

  Gloria Anzaldúa reads her wail as the resistance of Indian, Mexican and Chicana women against border violence, reproductive injustice, domestic violence and other harms. In her poem "My Black Angelos", La Llorona has roots in the Aztec family tree. A young protagonist named Pretita is lost in the woods, searching for an herb to save her mother. She hears the wail, but instead of taking the child, La Llorona points her to the herb. Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera calls her one of the three mothers of Chicanas.

  Sandra Cisneros turns her around in the short story "Woman Hollering Creek". Cleófilas endures patriarchal violence and emotional abandonment but does not turn her suffering on her children. A woman named Felice drives her toward freedom. Crossing the bridge over La Gritona, a creek named for the wailing woman, Felice hollers, and the despairing wail becomes joy, power and liberation.

  The painter Juana Alicia gave La Llorona a protective role in her 2004 mural La Llorona's Sacred Waters. The mural also includes the Aztec goddess Chalchiuhtlicue. It is two stories high and sixty feet long, painted after warnings of water damage to her earlier mural Las Lechugeras, from 1983. She kept a monochromatic blue palette with red, to hold a somber tone and to unify groups through colors tied to gangs.

  The story reached film early. The first screen version was La Llorona in 1933, shot in Mexico. René Cardona's La Llorona followed in 1960, and Rafael Baledón directed The Curse of the Crying Woman in 1963. In 2001, Rebekah Del Rio plays La Llorona de Los Angeles in Mulholland Drive, singing a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" called Llorando. The characters who watch suffer severe consequences. The 2008 Mexican horror film Kilometer 31 was inspired by the legend.

  The 2011 Mexican animated film La Leyenda de la Llorona shows a sympathetic mother whose children die in an accident. In the 2019 film The Curse of La Llorona, produced by James Wan, Gary Dauberman and Emilie Gladstone for Warner Bros. Pictures, María is left by her rich husband for a wealthier woman. When he visits with the new woman to see the children, she drowns them in the riverbed. She finds them hours later, too late, and cries by the river for days until she dies of exhaustion. Also in 2019, Jayro Bustamante directed the Guatemalan film La Llorona, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

  Jaquira Díaz, in her 2019 memoir Ordinary Girls, writes that the scariest part was "that once she'd been a person, a woman, a mother." Tehlor Kay Mejia based Paola Santiago and the River of Tears on the legend. Rodolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima mentions her as a river spirit. In Guadalupe Garcia McCall's Summer of the Mariposas, she mentors the Garza Sisters.

  The folk song "La Llorona" was popularized by Andres Henestrosa in 1941. Chavela Vargas, Joan Baez, Lila Downs and Rosalía have covered it. In the 2017 Pixar film Coco, Alanna Ubach sings it as Mamá Imelda. Lhasa de Sela's 1997 debut album La Llorona went Platinum in Canada and won her a Juno Award for Best Global Artist in 1998.

  Television has used her in Supernatural, Grimm and Riverdale. On RuPaul's Drag Race, the queen Mirage portrayed her in a runway round themed on iconic mothers. She is a collectible demon in Atlus's Shin Megami Tensei series, first appearing in Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers in 1997.

  The most recent honor belongs to a drink. Tears of Llorona, an extra añejo tequila named after the ghost, earned the top score in its category at the 2025 World Spirits Championships.

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