Llorona

La Llorona is a wraith of Hispanic-American folklore that, according to oral tradition, presents herself as the banshee of a woman who murdered or lost her children, looking for them in vain while saying `` Where are my children? '' and scares with her overwhelming cry those who see or hear her. Although the legend has many variants, the core facts are always the same.

Origin of the legend
The legend has a wide variety of details and versions. In a typical version of the legend, a stunning young peasant woman named Maria who marries a wealthy man. The couple lived happily for a time and had two children together before Maria’s husband lost interest in her. One day while walking by the river with her two children, Maria caught sight of her husband ride by in his carriage accompanied by a pretty young woman. In a fit of rage, Maria flung her two children into the river and drowned them both. When her anger subsided and she realized what she had done, she drowns herself. God forbids Maria to enter heaven, forced to roam the earth searching for her children.

The presence of ghostly beings that cry in the rivers for various reasons is a recurring characteristic of the aboriginal mythology of the pre-Hispanic peoples. This is how features of these spectra can be found in several of the pre-Columbian cultures, which eventually, with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, were assuming common features due to the expansion of Hispanic rule over the continent. The legend is a story that has mythical references in the pre-Hispanic universe, but that establishes its drama and its imaginary and anguishing courtship in the colonial order.

In Mexico, several researchers estimate that La Llorona, as a character in Mexican mythology and legends, has its origin in some pre-Hispanic beings or deities such as Auicanime, among the Purepecha; Xonaxi Queculla, among the Zapotecs; the Cihuacóatl, among the Nahuas; and Xtabay, among the Lacandon Mayans. She is always identified with the underworld, hunger, death, sin, and lust.3 In the case of Xtabay (or Xtabal), this Lacandon goddess is identified as an evil spirit in the form of a beautiful woman whose back has hollow tree shape. By inducing men to hug her, she drives them crazy and kills them. The Zapotec goddess Xonaxi Queculla, meanwhile, is a deity of death, of the underworld and of lust that appears in some representations with emaciated arms. Attractive at first glance, she appears to men, falls in love with them, and seduces them to later transform herself into a skeleton and take the spirit of her victims to the underworld. Auicanime was considered among the Purépecha as the goddess of hunger (her name can be translated as Thirsty or Needy). She was also the goddess of women who died when giving birth in their first childbirth, who, according to belief, became warriors (mocihuaquetzaque), which made them divinities and, therefore, objects of worship and offering.