Woman Who Weeps She cries in the night, especially on cloudy nights when the vapors of the elements descend upon the land. They say that she is crying for her children, the children she drowned. They say that she lurks in foggy shadows trying to ambush disobedient children. They say that she steals children who disobey their parents. Within a certain culture everyone knows this story. It is a story which my grandmother told my mother in Central America. I've heard the story on both the east and west coasts of Mexico. I've lived on the edge of a swamp in Michoacan and been assured by local villager that The Woman Who Weeps, La Llorona, lives in that very swamp and that she can be heard wailing softly in the darkness. She is known to walk the arroyos and vegas of Nuevo Mexico and Colorado. Some say that she drowned her own children and then committed suicide in order to escape slavery under the Spanish. Others say that she was an indigenous midwife and healer who killed her children and herself to escape the tortures of the Inquisition. Some say that she is the Malinche, a native woman who consorted with Cortés, translated for him, and used her high class connections in the Aztec empire to help the Conquistadores. They say that her name was Marina and that she bore children by Hernando Cortés. They say that she cries for her children, the mixed-blood descendants of the first Spaniards and the first generation of former sovereign native peoples turned to colonial subjects. Others say that La Llorona is La Tonantzin, the progenitive female force who was always worshiped at Tepeyac, now the site of the Basilica of The Virgin of Guadalupe, the name given to her by a Roman Catholic Spanish bishop, not by Juan Diego or by the traditional ceremonial practitioners who continue to offer copal there as it was done long before the arrival of either the Spanish or of their religion. They say that she is crying because the land which is her body, the water which is her blood, and the air which is her breath are poisoned. She cries because she is a mother afraid to breathe into the faces of her children because her breath is poisoned, so poisonous that on many days her children warn each other not to go outside or to breathe deeply. They say that there is now too much ozone. They say that there are many other poisons in the air as well. They call it air pollution and the radios, televisions, and newspapers are full of warnings almost every day in summer. They say not to drink the water in mountain streams because of cyanide, mercury, viruses, and bacteria. Recently the story of La Llorona has been popularized as a "myth". It's not. She's real. I know shes real because my mother told me. And I know that all of these versions of the story are true. Not the end.

Submitted by: Leo Griep-Ruiz Copyright July 2000