La Llorona and Rhetorical Haunting in Mexico’s Public Sphere

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes how two public performances (a 2017 protest and a yearly play in Xochimilco) adapt the legend of la Llorona for a rhetorical haunting of Mexico’s public sphere. Rhetorical haunting is defined as a community-based rhetorical tactic that conserves and transmits a community’s painful memories, memories that contest official versions of the past. La Llorona as rhetorical haunting asks the public to keep contested memories alive as an act of communal protest and defiance of the dominant institutions that wish for the public to forget.

Article History:

• Received 6 January 2020
• Revised 1 June 2020
• Accepted 17 December 2020

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ramona Perales, Javier Fernandez, and Nathanael Whitworth for their support and for accompanying me on my research trips to Mexico City.

Notes

1. Trajineras are adorned rectangular boats used in the canals of Xochimilco and navigated by a single person with a long wooden stick similar to a gondola.

2. For those unfamiliar with la Llorona, it is the story of a young woman of humble origins who is abandoned by her lover (and the father of her children) when he decides to marry a more suitable (richer and whiter) lady. In a fit of rage and despair the woman drowns her children and herself. Sometimes the drownings are an act of vengeance to punish her former lover; other times the drownings are an act of desperation when she realizes she and her children have been abandoned. Her remorse and grief over the death of the children turn her into the terrifying spirit that roams Mexico, Latin America, and many southwest regions of the U.S.A.

3. I learned about the performance protest months after the fact but was able to study it via pictures, news clips, as well as audience and participant videos published online.

4. The night of their forced disappearance, the forty three students and their classmates commandeered buses with the intent of getting to Mexico City for a yearly march in honor of the 1968 massacre. For unknown reasons, the students from Ayotzinapa were chased and shot at by local police until three of them were tortured and killed (along with three other bystanders) and forty three of the students were arrested and put into police vehicles. The next day, the students were nowhere to be found.

5. U.S. American scholarship about la Llorona is commonly situated within a Chicanx perspective. Books that feature extended discussions on la Llorona such as Domino Renee Perez’s There was a Woman, Debra J. Blake’s Chicana Sexuality and Gender focus their analysis on a Chicanx literary tradition. This is due in part to the growing presence of la Llorona in Chicanx art, literature, and other creative works. Numerous Chicanx writers have contributed to a body of prose that reclaims la Llorona as a Chicanx feminist symbol in response to the legend’s traditional patriarchal functions. The scarcity of scholarship on the Mexican Llorona may leave readers to assume that Llorona stories have gone unchanged in Mexico, remaining traditional patriarchal narratives. The public events analyzed here indicate that la Llorona is dynamic in Mexico as well since her story can question colonial histories and criticize state institutions.

6. All quotes from YouTube videos are originally in Spanish but quoted in English with my translations of the material.

7. My analysis of the Xochimilco play is focused on the 2019 version (where I was present), and the 2018 version (based on videos, promotional material, and news stories I collected).