Chapter 1 - La Llorona’s Undead Voices: Woman at the Borderwaters

Summary

Ay, de mí Llorona, Llorona, Llorona Llévame al río […]

“La Llorona,” as sung by Ángela Aguilar

There's always / something left to lose.

Deborah Miranda, “The Zen of La Llorona”

If a single character links cinematic horror and gothic narrative with the deep time of the Gulf, it is La Llorona, rising from haunting boundary waters. She moves, like the gothic itself, from nightmare and uncertain boundaries, and is simultaneously the imperiled young protagonist and monstrous siren, wronged, infanticidal, and vengeful. Mothers tell her tale to keep children from wandering after dark, and away from rivers or creeks where they can be swept into the spirit realm. But her provocations are also recounted within earshot of potentially wayward romantic partners. She is a fatal attraction spoken of by those who live to tell of her—beautiful and ominous, Indigenous and mestiza, her wailing voice associated with water, eros welled up inside.

Imagine growing up along the Rio Blanco in Ciudad Mendoza, a small town in the mountains of central Veracruz, where everyone can tell a version of the tale. A Náhuatl-speaker from La Cuesta—a pueblo up the mountain from Mendoza—speaks of a weeping woman who appears in a long white dress on the river's shores, seducing roving men. Men drawn to La Llorona are often left psychically shattered or found dead from heart attack. These tales caution boyfriends and husbands to stay faithful, while reminding women of the vigilance necessary to protecting their households. People across Veracruz know La Llorona's backstory and the horrifying remorse of her action: the drowning of her children following her Spanish (or elite criollo) partner's abandonment of her for a more class-appropriate woman. Her subsequent suicide. With no place in Heaven, she wanders between Limbo and Earth, seeking her children's souls in the waters, bringing grief to men to whom she remains both attracted and repulsed.

Higher in the mountains, by the Sierra Madre headwaters of the Rio Blanco, a classic-era stone monolith found near the cloud-swept town of Maltrata bears witness to an early example of an American woman's literary voice (AD 600–900). This “Lady of Maltrata,” as Cherra Wyllie writes, “emits a speech scroll” much like the comic book caption of a superhero (“In Search,” 171). Wearing a royal headdress, she speaks to an attendant in a scene annotated with glyphic, numbered day signs.