La Llorona: Retelling a Mexican Legend

author: Wim Coleman

author: Pat Perrin

illustrator: Martha Avilés

Red Chair Press (Lerner), 2015

grades 3-5

“Aztec”

REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION

La Llorona (The Crying Woman) is a sad and haunting tale from Mexico. Parents have told the story for hundreds of years to misbehaving children and to guard against vanity. Some say the story is about Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and a native Mexican woman who served as his translator. Her loss can be compared to the loss of native Mexican culture after the Spanish conquest.

The “native Mexican woman who served as (Cortés’) translator” was Malinalli (aka, “la Malinche”).

Long before Columbus came to the Americas, a similar legend was told by the Aztec people. Some very old European legends are also a lot like this tale. So perhaps those stories from the New World and the Old World got mixed together as they were retold.

The story of La Llorona is not an Aztec story. La Llorona (typically known as Citlali) was not an Aztec woman. She was from Xochimilco, a tributary kingdom of the Aztecs (whose inhabitants also spoke Nahuatl).

Sometimes the legend is mixed with the story of a real woman. La Malinche was an Aztec woman who helped the Spanish warrior Hernán Cortés. La Malinche and Cortés had a son together. Some stories say that La Malinche killed the child when Cortés left her for a Spanish lady. (This is probably not true.)

Malinalli (aka La Malinche, aka Malintzin) was not an Aztec woman. She was from a town near the Coatzacoalcos River, a tributary nation of the Aztecs. She was probably of mixed Popoluca and Nahua ethnicity. Malinalli did have a son with Cortés, and she did not kill him; rather, she raised him until Cortés took the boy with him to Spain. Malinalli never saw her son again.

Others say that the story of La Llorona is about Mexico’s history. They think that it is really about the bitter meeting of Aztecs and Spaniards after Europeans first came to America.

No, it’s not. It’s about a real woman who “chose” to sacrifice her children rather than to surrender them to colonialism. 

To many people, this is more than a story. Countless people claim to have heard, seen, or even met the Weeping Woman. And in Mexico, children are warned not to go out at night because La Llorona might take them away. 

“Countless people” have claimed countless things about countless occurrences. The story of La Llorona is a story rooted in the history of colonialism, and, for Mexican and Mexican American children, it has morphed into a scary, sometimes cautionary, bedtime story.

—David Bowles

(published 7/1/2021)

                                               REVIEW OF THE STORY

This project for third-graders—allegedly “Setting the Stage for Fluency”—presents as a story within a five-scene play. The “cast” consists of the narrator, Older David, a Mexican American man in his 30s; Younger David, at ten years of age; Tía Viviana, David’s aunt; José and Lilia, Tía Viviana’s servants; La Llorona, the spirit; and María (who becomes La Llorona). The settings are Tía Viviana’s home in Mexico, La Llorona’s nightmare world, and the village where María lives. The time frames are the present, the past (when David was 10 years of age), and the “more faraway past” of the “La Llorona” story.

SCENE ONE: Young readers meet “Older David,” telling of when he was “Younger David,” and his Tía Viviana, who speaks in short, italicized, Spanish words or phrases—which Older David translates on the spot or before she actually utters them—and whose pronunciation is shown at the bottom of each page. For instance, “¡Mi casa es tu casa!” becomes the incorrectly emphasized syllables, “Mee CAH-sah ehs too CAH-sah!” There are also bolded English “vocabulary” words, such as foyer and patio.

SCENE TWO: Older David describes the scenes and characters, while Younger David appears in the story. Now he’s in bed at Tía Viviana’s home. La Llorona shows up, scratching at the door and screaming, of course: ¡Aaaiiiiii! And then she screams again, but first, Older David translates from the future: “Help me, please,’ she cried.” ¡Ayudame, por favor!

Then, Younger David (in the past) questions La Llorona, while Older David (in the present) describes her.

Younger David: Who are you?

Older David: Her thick, black hair hung down to her ankles. Her hair was tangled up with twigs and briers. Her long, white gown was badly torn and faded. Large patches of it were stained and caked with dry, brown mud. Or was it blood? A lacy white veil hung over her face.

At this point, Older David confesses: I was terrified—but my heart was full of pity. (Young readers are forgiven for not knowing what this all means.)

Younger David wants to see her face and Older David notes that she is sobbing: She lifted her hands in a pleading motion. Those dull-colored, bony hands had frightfully overgrown nails. This woman appears to be majorly in need of a meal and a manicure.

Younger David notes that La Llorona speaks English, but the ghost reassures him (in English) that she does not speak at all: You hear me only with your heart. While Older David and Younger David appear to be competing for space here, Younger David follows the ghost. 

In this chapter, young readers learn landscape and plateau.

SCENE THREE: La Llorona waxes philosophical and young readers will have to figure out what this all means (because it’s independent reading and their teachers have left the room):

All rivers are one river. It is the river that flows through all our hearts. Listen to that rumbling. It is the war in our blood.

To which Older David responds: “I grew dizzy at the sight of that rushing red-brown water.” (Yeah, young readers majorly don’t want that crap flowing through their blood.)

So, the sobs stop “exploding from her throat” and then they rise up again, “threatening to drown her words.” (Young readers may be confused or bored by all this drowning metaphor stuff, but since this is independent reading, no one will know if they skip a few pages.) 

La Llorona starts to narrate to Younger David: “I was a young woman, a peasant of pure Indian blood. Very poor. It was so long ago…” (We don’t know what “pure Indian blood” may have meant—if anything—at that time, nor do we actually know what it may mean today.)

SCENE FOUR: María is gorgeous and she knows it. According to the artwork, she hides her alleged poverty by dressing in gorgeous, expensive clothing. She demonstrates her indigeneity by wearing large gold hoop earrings and carrying a clay pot. She seems to enjoy being ogled by all the young men, two of whom have handlebar mustaches, so readers will know they’re Mexican.

One day, she says, she was walking by the cantina and sees a beautiful horse, who “bore a saddle of excellent leather, sparkling with silver decorations…” She hears someone inside playing a guitar and singing:

Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona,

picante pero sabroso.

(Yoh soy COH-mo ehl CHEE-leh VEHR-deh, Yoh-ROH-nah, / pee-CAHN-teh PEH-roh sah-BROH-soh.)

OK, wait! Stop! The guy inside the saloon is singing a song to (about?) Llorona, who is still María (but hey, no one will notice how ridiculous this time-travel stuff is getting because it’s independent reading and no one really cares, anyway).

So María notices that the guy who’s singing is white, and therefore, a prize catch: He was blond, fair-skinned. His face was lightly sprinkled with freckles. I was sure he was of pure Spanish blood. He’s wealthy. They flirt. After a short courtship, she agrees to marry him. 

“We lived on his grand hacienda. We had two beautiful children.”

Fast-forward. Really fast. Her wealthy white husband takes a girlfriend (or another wife). He disdainfully refers to María and their children as “peasants from the village,” so María (now, the narrator) confesses (to the reader) in a soliloquy worthy of an imitation of something Shakespeare might have written had Shakespeare been a hack writer:

Why did I do what I did then? Did I hate my little ones? Did I think my husband had stopped loving me because of them? Or did I pity them because he no longer wanted them? Did I pity them so much that I’d rather they died than suffer from his neglect? Or was it simple madness? I took each child by the hand. I led them here, to this place. I pushed them off this ledge and watched them fall into the water. As the current carried them away, they called out…

“I ran and ran until my heart burst,” she continues. “I fell dead to the ground. And yet… here I am. Still trying to save my children.”

SCENE FIVE: Older David knows he is about to die. (Young readers are mystified. So is this reviewer.) “But there is one thing I wanted first,” he says, so Younger David asks La Llorona to show her face.

Back to Older David: Slowly, she lifted her veil. Her brown skin was parched and cracked. Her long, rotted teeth stuck out. Her lips were thin and dry. Her eyes were gone—dried up from weeping. Oh, the hundreds of years of suffering! It had ruined that once beautiful face! I began to cry myself. I began to pray [for her].

Older David becomes Younger David again, and Younger David (who now has some kind of a fever or something), tumbles to the ground.

SCENE SIX: Younger David wakes up. He’s lying in bed, and Tía Viviana is touching his forehead with a cool, damp cloth. José had found him by the arroyo. He tells his aunt that he met a woman, and his aunt knows who she is, because she had snatched his aunt’s little girl, who never came back. Then, when Younger David tells Tía Viviana about the things that La Llorona told him (“she spoke of a war in the blood”), his aunt responds:

Yes, it’s the war between the conquerer and the conquered. The war between the Spaniard and the Indian, the ruler and the ruled. The war between the rich and the poor, the man and the woman. Do you understand?

I don’t.

Then, they talk about the expression, “ni modo,” which Tía Viviana says a lot. “Ni modo” is a short form of “no hay ni modo” or “there is not any way (of getting something done”), and  best translated as “oh, well” or “that's too bad.”

Older David chimes in: He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he believes in giving peace a chance: “those terrible wars that rage in the blood… I believe that there is always something to be done. And there is always something more to be said. Together, we can somehow learn to end these wars forever.”

The illustrations appear to have been executed in Photoshop. The colors are bright and the details are about what one would expect of an abysmally written, poorly executed story in a mass-produced series. 

La Llorona: Retelling a Mexican Legend is not recommended. 

—Beverly Slapin

(published 7/1/2021)

Muchísimas gracias a mi amigo y colega, David Bowles, por su paciencia y generosidad. Once again, I want to thank David for all he does to move the community forward. ¡Palante!

—BHS

Me Oh Maya // You Wouldn't Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice!

It's no secret that I’m a fierce advocate for literary dignity and equity in publishing. I want to see many more books by writers from underrepresented groups (BIPOC, disabled, queer) published each year for kids and adults alike. However, some folks misinterpret that mission as an implied disavowal of any book written by someone outside the culture depicted in its pages. But I actually do think it’s possible (and for secondary characters, outright desirable) for an author to write about characters and communities that don’t perfectly align with their own lived experiences. 

The catch? It’s hard work. You have to put in the time. Research. Advocate. Uplift. Live alongside and be a friend and ally to people from the group in question. Then write with respect and pay a cultural expert from that community to review your manuscript and give you feedback (then incorporate their suggestions or corrections).

“Why, David?” I imagine someone asking. “What’s the worst that can happen?” 

The short answer? People can be insulted, deeply hurt, or perhaps even permanently scarred by mistakes you make.  

I want to take a look at two examples of authors writing “outside of their lane” and getting things horribly wrong. Mind you, anyone can screw up when writing. We’re human. But these are books from major publishers whose entire teams really dropped the ball in terms of literary dignity.

First up is Me Oh Maya, book 13 of Jon Scieska’s The Time Warp Trio. (It’s the volume that made my son Angelo abandon the series, by the way.) The three protagonists—friends Joe, Sam, and Fred—are yanked from their basketball game back in time to a Maya ballcourt. 

Let’s get something straight right away. Maya people still exist. Seven million of them, in fact, in southern Mexico and Central America, with tens of thousands more living in the US. So if you decide to write about pre-invasion Maya, you’re depicting living people’s ancestors, folks who still speak that language and preserve many of those customs. 

Which is why it’s so disappointing that Me Oh Maya jumps immediately to bloodshed and human sacrifice on the first page: “Explain yourselves or your blood will be spilled in sacrifice,” says a “short brown-skinned guy in a wild feathered headdress.” Two pages later, Sam explains “their habit of sacrificing humans,” adding that the high priest is “not kidding about that rip-your-hearts-out.”

By way of explanation, all of this is wrong. Strangers would not have been immediately sacrificed. The intermittent offering of human blood to the gods was a solemn religious ritual at particular times of the year that ensured the wheels of cyclical time kept turning. Those sacrificed were prepared and treated with dignity for many months. Their families were typically compensated after their death. A better analogy for Maya sacrifice would be soldiers who are sent on missions from which they know it’s unlikely they’ll return. That kind of sacrifice, not horror-movie, death-at-the-hand-of-a-slasher kind of death. To call that sort of patriotic, pious laying down of one’s life a “habit of sacrificing humans” by “short brown-skinned” people is problematic, to say the least. 

All that aside, for that to be the IMMEDIATE go-to image for the writer of children’s books when he thinks of the Maya? Gross. Indicative of some deep-seated privilege and ignorance. Imagine if every children’s book written about the US by people not living here featured gun violence. Yes, it’s a part of US life, but hardly the defining aspect of our existence.

But, of course, human sacrifice is the main plot contrivance of Me Oh Maya. The boys use basketball moves to wow the people of Chichén Itzá and win the game (the book mistakenly asserts that losers get sacrificed—imagine how impossible it would be to keep a game going for a year, much less centuries, if that were the case). However, the high priest, who they think looks like their Latino teacher Mr. Ramírez on a bad day, decides to sacrifice them anyway.

That’s when he reveals his name: “Kakapupahed.” The kids have a field day with this, and I’m sure the author and editor found it hilarious.

But making up a name that sounds like foolish words in English to mock a people’s language? That’s straight-up racist. (The invented word is also meaningless in the Itza Mayan language, which furthermore lacks the consonant “d.”)

The book makes some attempt at presenting life at Chichén Itzá as otherwise pleasant and fascinating (though frankly generic Mesoamerican in the details of cuisine, etc.). The boys find an ally in the high priest’s nephew, named “Jun,” or “One,” which is one half of a normal Maya name at the time—they consisted of a number from 1-13 and one of 20 day signs, so it would have been more realistic if the kid’s name was Jun Balam (One Jaguar) or something along those lines. 

It’s nice that Jun and his mother are key to the Brooklynites’ victory and return to the future, but all those moments are marred by the cultural insensitivity, obsession with the lurid or “exotic” aspects of Maya communities, and racist humor. A Maya or Mestizo (part-Indigenous) child reading this book will find their people stereotyped and mocked. How is that pain justifiable? 

A duo of British creatives (author: Fiona Macdonald, illustrator: David Antram) are the guilty parties responsible for the even more reprehensible book You Wouldn’t Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice! Gruesome Things You'd Rather Not Know. (Scholastic, 2001). The reader is cast as a random Mesoamerican (presumably Nahua) from some far-flung conquered town who gets captured by “Aztecs” in a flower war and taken back to Tenochtitlan to be sacrificed. Now, flower wars certainly happened. The Triple Alliance—the Mexica, Texcoca and Tlacopaneca peoples now referred to as Aztecs—did require tribute and take warriors prisoner for sacrifice.

But the author has first of all decided to linger on all the lurid aspects of that interchange without noting that the OTHER side also took “Aztec” prisoners for sacrifice.

In fact, the book treats the unnamed protagonist as shocked again and again at “Aztec” beliefs and practices, even though the Triple Alliance was culturally Nahua just like most of the rest of Central Mexico, multiple nation states worshipping the same gods in essentially the same ways. 

The book also abounds with exotification and inaccuracy. Because of religious symbols on shields, they are referred to as magical: “Many soldiers believe the magic will protect them on the battlefield.” I can’t imagine the creators of the book saying the same about a cross on the shield of a British knight. The Aztecs are called “energetic and warlike,” “fearsome,” and “ruthless.” Captives are marched through a stereotypical northern Mexican desert to reach Tenochtitlan rather than the actual pine forests that once surrounded Lake Texcoco in the Central Highlands. 

Literally every page has at least one completely false statement, from the assertion that all priests stank because of putrid blood in their hair (only one sort of priest had this practice) to the baffling comment that some deceased Nahuas “make a long, miserable journey through the underworld before they finally perish in hell,” which completely miscasts the role of Mictlan (not to mention the fact that the Nahuas didn’t believe in hell). Wherever there’s a debate in scholarship, the creators side with the most extreme, titillating interpretation, as with the possibility of cannibalism (for which the evidence is mostly Spanish, post-Invasion, and in dire need of Indigenous religious context). 

As with Me Oh Maya, the inaccuracies and lies are especially harmful because today there are 2.5 million Nahuas (descendants of the “Aztecs” and the related nations they conquered) in Mexico and Central America plus thousands more in the US. In addition, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans of mixed heritage (we often call ourselves “mestizos”) are heirs to a syncretic culture that blends Nahua and Spanish traditions and language. We grow up proud of the accomplishments of the “Aztecs,” Toltecs, and other pre-Invasion Nahua peoples. 

For our children, You Wouldn’t Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice! is a potentially damaging piece of overwrought nonsense from outsiders who have not done the work of living alongside us and considering the vital cultural heritage of the “Aztecs” that is kept alive in our communities.

Neither of these books promotes the literary dignity of Indigenous or Mestizo people in Mexico and the US. The writers, editors, and publishers should be ashamed of the harm they have done in the name of being clever and cute in that supercilious way that conveys to even the densest reader, “These people were bad and weird. It’s good that they’re gone. Western white culture is so much better, isn’t it?”

Such messages are simply unacceptable and must be fought. 

—David Bowles

(published 6/21/2021)