La Llorona ("The Weeping Woman") is a legendary ghost prominent in the folklore of Hispanic America. According to the tradition, La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who lost her children and cries while looking for them by the river, often causing misfortune to those who hear her.

Legend

Although several variations exist, the most basic story tells of a beautiful woman by the name of Maria who drowns her children in the Mexican river as a means of revenge because her husband left her for a younger woman. She soon realizes that her children are dead, so she drowns herself in a river in Mexico City.

Challenged at the gates of Heaven as to the whereabouts of her children, she is not permitted to enter the afterlife until she has found them. Maria is forced to wander the Earth for all eternity, searching in vain for her drowned offspring, with her constant weeping giving her the name "La Llorona". She is trapped in between the living world and the spirit world.

Parents often use this story to prevent their children from wandering out at night. In some versions of this tale and legend, La Llorona will kidnap wandering children who resemble her missing children, asking her children for forgiveness and drowning these other children to take their place, but they never forgive her and she keeps trying. People who claim to have seen her say she appears at night or in the late evenings from rivers or lakes in Mexico. Some believe that those who hear the wails of La Llorona are marked for death but if you were to get out in time you will not be marked for death, similar to the Gaelic banshee legend. She is said to cry, ¡Ay, mis hijos! ("Oh, my children!")

La Llorona is the first album by Canadian singer Lhasa de Sela, released in 1997 in Canada and 1998 elsewhere.

Track listing

Folk Legend

Alejandro Sela, Lhasa's father, received his doctorate on literature of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and taught her of the legend of La Llorona. This is the folktale of the crying woman, resembled the mythological wife of Quetzalcoatl who has lost her children. For Lhasa, La Llorona comes from the omen of conquerors. Lhasa believes that the woman cried when the Spanish arrived in America to warn her native children of the doom that the conquistadors would bring to their way of life.

References

La Llorona is a song.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly who was the first to compose the song "La Llorona", since it stems from the hundred-year-old legend. However, the song was first made well-known to contemporary audiences in 1993 by the Costa Rican-born singer Chavela Vargas. The song's name and inspiration comes from the legend of La Llorona popular in North and South America. The story is of a woman said to haunt the valleys of Mexico, weeping for her children whom she drowned in a fit of madness. There are many versions to the story, but all are a variation of certain details. In one version, a woman drowns her kids because the man she had been seeing wanted to break things off with her. He did not want someone who already had a family. After he finds out about that she killed her children, however, the man leaves her indefinitely and she then commits suicide.

Composition

Many different verses have been written for this song over the years. Below are some of them and some of the English translations: