La Llorona: Encounters with the Weeping Woman

Compiled and edited by Judith Shaw Beatty. Cover & illustrations by Anita Otilia Rodriguez. Available on Amazon.com as an e-book and in paperback.

If you live in the Southwestern U.S., no doubt you’ve heard or retold a story about La Llorona. Actually, the mysterious Weeping Woman can be found from East L.A. to Guatemala. Her roots may delve back in time to Aztec legends, as well as Celtic (Spain was Celtic at one time) and North African lore. Oddly though, there are rather few books about such a ubiquitous figure.

(Notable exceptions are three La Llorona books by Rudolfo Anaya, beloved and highly acclaimed New Mexico author of Bless Me, Ultima and other works of Southwest literature, who died on June 28. Most recently, he wrote La Llorona: The Crying Woman, a bilingual storybook for children, available in independent bookstores and on Amazon.)

Judith Shaw Beatty’s book stands out because it’s a diverse collection of La Llorona tales from Latinx people who grew up with La Llorona folklore and heard of close encounters with her from family members.

Her book caught my attention because it seemed to bubble into existence from the roots of folklore. Informally, she collected La Llorona tales from Latinx people around the Southwest who grew up hearing the stories of La Llorona encounters. After she published the first edition in 1988, people continued sending her their stories.

For a ghost, La Llorona is pretty busy. Best known for her tragic search for her drowned or lost children, she also frightens children and adults into good behavior, haunts arroyos and bridges and hangs out in cemeteries, advises the bereaved, leads the police on chases, appears as a beautiful young woman, a hag, and even a baby with sharp teeth—and much more. She is said to haunt the PERA building in Santa Fe, site of an old Catholic cemetery. In one story she beats up a drunk and in another she is leader of the witches.

In her foreword to Beatty’s book, illustrator Anita Rodriguez of Taos states, “The archetype of La Llorona is particularly central to the Hispanic psyche.” However, she continues, “the Weeping Woman is crying out in all the languages of the world. She said she weeps for equality, for justice, for patriarchy to recognize the rights of women to our own bodies.”

Ramona : How did you first learn about La Llorona?

Judith : I first heard about La Llorona when I was visiting a couple who lived near the Santa Fe River. He had grown up in Los Alamos and heard about La Llorona as a very young boy, but it wasn’t until he moved to Santa Fe that he heard her on the river. This would have been around 1972. He said it was a deep, throaty cry and that it scared the pants off of him. Naturally, I was intrigued.

Ramona : How did you go about collecting stories for the first edition (1988)? Were they mostly from Northern New Mexico?

Judith: In the mid 1980s I was having a conversation with my husband, Eduardo, who was born here, about La Llorona. I said I’d read the classic story about her and he commented, “There are a lot of other stories from the viejitos here, but you won’t see them in any book.” I thought to myself, that’s crazy! Long story short, we spent the next year and a half collecting stories wherever we heard them. And yes, back then they were nearly all from Northern New Mexico, although we got a few from the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, a hotbed of La Llorona stories. We got in the habit of asking people wherever we were—on a camping trip in Colorado, sitting in a restaurant in Española, and traveling through Mexico. Surprisingly, most of the stories that people shared with us were kind of humorous and rather endearing in their simplicity.

Ramona : Subsequently, people sent you their own La Llorona stories from all over the West, yes? Are they still sending you stories?

Judith : We got an awful lot of stories in the mail back then. There were a couple of them from Guatemala, and then many from all over the U.S—Indiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon. I remember opening an envelope postmarked somewhere in Germany. It included an order, dollar bills and loose change, and a story.

Ramona: When did this new edition come out?

Judith: The new edition came out in 2019, slightly over a year ago. This time, I used Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). While the first two editions were available in bookstores, this edition is not. Amazon competes with independent bookstores by using distributors who undercut the going discount rate, which makes it easier and cheaper to order a book through Amazon than through a bookstore. Do I feel good about this? Obviously not, but I’m 77 years old and no longer have the strength or stamina to publicize the book on my own.

Ramona: In her foreword, Anita Rodriguez asks what’s the difference between appreciation and appropriation (and then she answers it in your favor). But did you worry about appropriating the lore when you put this book together?

Judith: This remains a highly sensitive issue for me going all the way back to 1988. As much as I love the culture and was married into it for 18 years, I am not Hispanic, and I worried a lot about the perception that I was appropriating La Llorona and using her for my own gain. And I was confronted more than once in public places by people who were pretty angry with me about that. When the book was first published, my husband and I were interviewed on NPR and Telemundo, and we also received a lot of publicity in newspapers and magazines, because at the time there were no books we knew of with a collection of stories about La Llorona. I didn’t speak Spanish, and because I had only collected and edited other people’s stories, I was never comfortable with all that attention. For me, the most important thing was to share these stories in the voices of the people who told them to me and to preserve those stories in the book for posterity. 

Ramona: Do you think her lore might be dying out in the internet age?

Judith: Generations of children grew up in the Southwestern U.S. (and throughout Latin America) fearing the legendary La Llorona, who was used—rightly or wrongly—as a disciplinary tool. Kids have become much more savvy because of the internet, and I very seriously doubt any parent would be able to get away with that nowadays. Fear is an effective but poor teaching tool that’s now frowned on. I doubt La Llorona will fade away completely, but now she’s competing with other legendary horror figures popularized in film. On the other hand, she’s an archetype used by a number of writers to show ways in which women suffer abuse in one form or another, and in that role, she has been revived in PhD theses and other literature.

Ramona: Do you plan more editions of this book in the future?

Judith: This is the third and final edition. The second edition was published by Sunstone Press in 2003 and was virtually identical to the original edition, except that the name was slightly changed and the cover art redone. After Sunstone filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, I found an attorney and got the rights back. The first and second editions were illustrated by Tony Sanchez, who also contributed his own La Llorona story, and the cover art was done by Chris Lopez. In the latest edition, I added about a dozen more stories and then approached Taos illustrator and author Anita Rodriguez, who cast a welcome and critical eye on my manuscript and then agreed to do the wonderful cover art and inside illustrations. What an honor and privilege it was to work with her, to break bread with her, and to become a friend.