Unheard Grief, Unmovable Men: How an Old Mexican Folktale Speaks to Our Pain Today

There’s a new film about La Llorona coming out next year. The Curse of La Llorona, it’s called, and it looks as silly as it sounds. Llorona, the weeping woman of Mexican lore, is completely pale in the trailer. She is simple and scary like a Halloween costume is simple and scary—scary eyes, scary teeth. She whispers. She menaces small children from outside a car window. The film has an all-white cast; her name is pronounced, “Your-Own-Uh.” Mexicans decried all this. We are protective over our myths.

I didn’t grow up with stories of La Llorona, but I did grow up Chicano, with stories of crying women, as told to me by my abuela and my mother. I had an aunt who caught her husband cheating. “If you do that again,” she allegedly said, “I will kill myself and haunt you.” He did it again, and she slit her wrists in the bathtub. I never met her husband, so I don’t know if he was haunted.

In middle school, I used to play a game. It wasn’t a game, really, or at least I didn’t think of it as one back then. It’s only now as an adult that I look back at the ridiculousness of my younger self, his antics, and call it a game, because it was such a simple and foolish thing to do that “a game” is all I can think to call it. It reminds me of the weeping women of my family, and of La Llorona.

Life was rough for me then, in my small town in Oklahoma, where there was only one actual street and only one actual gas station. (There was only one of anything, never two; it was either one or nothing, unless it was a church, and then there were ten.) I didn’t have any friends. I would move from class to class with my books held tight to my chest, not unlike a ghost. I would ride the school bus home with my knees pulled up and in. I was always clutching and shrinking, balling myself up.

The game was: I would remove myself. I wouldn’t speak. I wouldn’t look in the eyes of anyone who spoke to me. I would be a non-person, a vacancy. It was one way of getting revenge on life, I thought, to abstain from it. If no one liked me, I would disappear. Of course, I was a child. Being invisible isn’t what I actually wanted at all. My silence was, in the end, an elaborate display of grief; grief, which I desperately hoped would land on someone and move them to caring.

Abuela didn’t cry much, I don’t think. But she was sad. She was one of eleven children. When she was young, her older sister put her on a Ferris wheel at the fair. Abuela was at the top of the wheel when she saw her older sister running away with some man. Her sister didn’t come back for years, and when she did it was to drop off a child. My abuela raised the baby. Abuela was so full of scorn all her life, all the time, that I couldn’t imagine this fact, couldn’t imagine Abuela, brow furrowed as always, muttering as always, nursing someone else’s baby.

Abuela was cruel to my mother, her biological child, I heard. “She crazy,” my mother would sometimes say, laughing at whatever Abuela had just said or done (Abuela was crazy), but then, other times, a deep sadness would take over.

“She told me I wasn’t pretty,” she told me once. “She never stuck up for me,” she said another time. My mother put together Abuela’s funeral almost by herself, arranged for a mariachi band to play Abuela’s favorite hymns. My mother, out of all of Abuela’s children, was the one who ended up staying, putting up with her every day.

Suffering is a Mexican thing to do, I think. Being American and being mixed makes me question my conclusions. But I don’t know how else to explain how neatly Mexican folklore dovetails with Mexican reality, how they focus on women who weep.

I feel I could lie and say I grew up with stories about La Llorona, say that Abuela would scare me by telling me about the crying woman searching for the children she’d drowned in the river in a fit of rage, and how I’d better watch out or she’d get me. I feel I could graft that story onto my life, and my life would be about the same.

How neatly Mexican folklore dovetails with Mexican reality, how they focus on women who weep. 

But I met La Llorona as an adult instead, in college. I met her at the same time I met Medea, the Greek goddess who, like Llorona, murdered her own children out of jealousy. In Medea’s case, it was an attempt to spurn Jason, her husband. Academia robbed Llorona of her magic, reduced her to relic, cultural textile.

Over the years, I forgot about the silence game, though there were times when I was sad and times I felt rejected by the world and felt an ancestral urge to withdraw. I moved away from Oklahoma to DC, and then I moved to New York. It was around that time when my mother who’d always steered clear of politics told me over the phone that she went to her first protest rally and someone had told her to “go back to Mexico.” Since that day my mother has been angry and upset.

I thought of the silence game again when Abuela started to die, and I wondered if the game was genetic. Abuela’s cause of death was “No.” She refused sleep, refused food, and refused water. She said she wanted to die. She let the forces of the world—hunger, thirst, rot—whittle her down to nothing.

I respected this in a macabre way, the resoluteness of it. She was done with life, and so, having had enough, she left. I thought it was a damning critique of life and of the big ado around it. I thought she had exposed the fraud of life, shown what it really wanted to do with us, what it would do if we weren’t so bent on beating it back. I became depressed. I made a limp attempt at starving myself, but gave up the very next morning after I slept on it. The world felt cruel.

*

I can’t decide if this cruelty, the cruelty that is presently everywhere and saturates everything, is merely the cruelty that was there all along, or if it is some new, especially menacing iteration. I don’t even know if that matters. What matters, probably, is that the cruelty is inescapable, omnipresent, brutal, numbing, profound. Cruelty is broadcast on every screen. There is cruelty in every word, cruelty in every image. The cruelty conjures halcyon days just to destroy them and take pleasure in destroying them.

Here is an example: At the migrant detention center for children (on its own, an appalling, grueling series of words) in Texas, there is a mural of Donald Trump I saw, a mural I imagine the children there see every day. The president smiles, and next to him is text in Spanish that reads, “Sometimes by losing a battle, you find a new way to win the war.”

I wasn’t raised with Spanish, nor did I live in a place where I heard it much, and so Spanish became the private, semi-sacred language of my abuelos. Hearing it conjured another world that I could only glimpse through scratchy radios in panaderias and the mariachi music Abuelo would play in the van. It was this happy creation myth of Spanish, in my private lore, that nearly broke me when I saw it written on the mural. I wept, wondering if I had finally lost my mind. I revisited the image several times when I realized it had not caused me to lose my mind, perversely hoping it would if I looked at it enough.

I can imagine no brown childhood, even my own, without inviting the specter of cages and separation to the imagining. To see weeping women, a mother or an abuela crying as she clutches the child from whom she’s been separated (it is easy to see this; these images litter the internet), to see the child express nothing at all, empty in the eyes and spirit—there is no way to silence the part of the brain that, looking for symmetry, says, “Here is you, here is your mother, and here is your abuela.”

I’m not the first Mexican to consider sympathy for La Llorona. There is a popular song about her, interpreted by the legendary Chavela Vargas. “Y aunque la vida me cueste, Llorona,” it goes, “No dejaré de quererte.” Or, “Even if it costs me my life, Llorona, I will never stop loving you.” She is, like any myth, a living text, open to reinterpretation. There are many retellings of her tale. Here is mine.

La Llorona was a beautiful girl in rural Mexico named Maria. A rich man became enamored with her and married her, but his parents didn’t approve. They kept their relationship secret, and Maria had two of his children. The man slowly fell out of love with her—it’s the slowness that pangs me, for its familiarity—and one day Maria saw him with another woman. Distressed and hoping to hurt the man, she drowns the children she loves in the river. She immediately realizes her mistake, searches the water for them with her hands, weeps, and then weeps forever.

There is no crying man in this story, which I take to mean he didn’t cry at all.

It’s not mentioned, in the story I chose, how the father feels. We don’t know if Maria’s, now Llorona’s, infanticide inspired anything in him, if it made him feel sadness, rage, regret, or anguish. Nothing. There is nothing. There is no crying man in this story, which I take to mean he didn’t cry at all.

Here is what I’m afraid of: What if, horror of all horrors, when the man discovered his children had died, and then when he discovered that Maria had died too, what he felt was relief?

Canon doesn’t matter so much in folklore, which is personal. These stories are made for practical uses anyway—to keep your children in line, to frighten them into bed and make them behave. It’s my canon that the man felt relief. It’s what makes the story frightening for me, and therefore useful because it cautions me. It cautions me that men don’t care. This was the same lesson I took away recently, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, when people were prompted to publicly share their experiences with sexual assault.

Here’s mine: I was drunk. This was years ago. He put me in his bed. I woke up to feel him inside me. I didn’t tell him to get off of me. I questioned if maybe I wanted this to happen, a question that will make me doubt myself forever—didn’t some part of me want this? I scrutinize, interrogate, worry, while he, that morning, slaps me on the back and jokes, “Don’t call the cops on me for that.” It’s my doubt against his violent certainty that distresses me. I bother to question myself, to worry. He has no such burdens. I consider sharing this online, but then I consider what sharing will accomplish. I wonder how torturing myself is supposed to move torturers. I say nothing instead.

The urge to say nothing grows stronger with time and grueling repetition. Each new event rhymes with the last, but is bigger, worse. A news anchor brags about “catching” a member of the migrant caravan, stopping them from their journey. I think of the migrant’s feet, if they hurt. A shooting spree in a synagogue. The worst of its kind, for now. I say nothing because there is nothing to say, and I have to wonder if I’m playing the silence game again, the game I have come to think of as hereditary, an instinct to grief passed down to me from the stubborn, weeping women who raised me. I wonder if I am curling up, disappearing. I wake up, I put myself together, I break, I sleep, I repeat, I haven’t given up, but I am afraid.

*

I am afraid of the apathy of men. I am afraid of many women, but mostly I’m afraid of men, of the man who feels only relief when his burdens drown in their grief, remove themselves. I worry he is all men. I worry he is these men: the president, the new Supreme Court justice, the pundits on TV, the man who raped me, the man who, after endless phone calls and promises, vanished, the man who will do that next, the man who is my friend, waiting to reveal he too has nothing inside, the man who will let the planet become inhospitable because he is greedy, the man who will watch us die and not feel much at all. I am afraid all men have nothing inside. I am afraid of spending a lifetime just to reach that useless conclusion.

I am afraid of the silence game, of perfect grief; perfect, because it’s endless. Grief is meant to land somewhere, on something. I understand it as an agent of transformation. It’s meant to ferry one to a place where grief isn’t needed; a bruise feels strangely comforting when you press on it, then it turns yellow, the healing color, and goes away. But I am afraid of an endless blue-black bruise, of my brain rotting from grief. I am afraid of my disappointment becoming so great that I resolve to shrink into nothing, respond only with gasps and whispers of ‘no,’ a ghost who cries, and cries, and cries, and for what? For whom? All the wrong people are crying, and all the people who ought to feel something do not.

Should La Llorona have drowned her children in the river? I can’t think of anything that matters less, anything more beside the point. A more worthwhile exercise would be to contemplate why her story is used to frighten children into bed rather than to frighten men into fidelity. She frightens me, not because she’s scary, or because she looks frightening, has scary eyes and a ghostly appearance, but because she goes unanswered.

La Llorona speaks, after all. She wants something. “Mis hijos,” she cries in the dark. “My children.”

Who hears her when she cries? Only victims, it seems.

• 0