Introduction
The Biography of a Ghost: Beyond the Borders of the Story (chapter
drafted)
Her Life
Chapter One
An Aztec Life
La Llorona and Cihuacoatl: Recuperating an Indigenous
Heritage
A Stolen Life
La Llorona and La Malinche: Colonialism, Motherhood, and Mestizaje
in
Chapter Three
Haunting the
Her Afterlife
Chapter Four
La Llorona for Children: Ghosts of Nation and Narrative
Chapter Five
Ghosts and Memory: The Cultural Past in Chicano/a Literature
Her New Life
Chapter Six
“Alien” Resurrection: La Llorona’s New Life in the
Borderlands
La Llorona Loca: Violence and Womanhood in Chicano/a
Culture (chapter in progress)
Weeping, Wailing, and Hollering: Women’s Coming to Voice in
Chicana Literature
The Life of La Llorona Reconsidered
Abstract:
La
Llorona/The Weeping Woman haunts the Americas. The most pervasive
figure in
Chicana literature, La Llorona is often depicted as dressed in white,
searching
for her children--or children to replace them--whom she drowned to
spite their
father. This totemic image has been described variously as “the Mexican
bogeyman,” a ghost, a spirit, and a guide, and even her origins are
uncertain.
Traced alternately to an Aztec story about Cihuacoatl and to the
historical
figure of La Malinche, La Llorona has long inhabited the
borderlands--between
good and evil, between creation and destruction, between corporality
and
spirituality, and between indigenous survival and European conquest. As
a
paradigmatic figure in Chicano/a literature, La Llorona tells us much
about
colonization in the Americas, about Mexican constructions of
motherhood, about
the interplay between narrative and the construction of culture, and
about
cultural memory. Dozens of Chicano/as have published creative works in
which La
Llorona appears, and in this project I seek patterns in her
transnational,
transcorporal, transpiritual, transcultural, transgeneric appearances
as I
reconstruct her life, her afterlife, and her new life in the Americas.
The
writing of
La Llorona’s new life includes a multiplicity of spaces, places,
occupations,
activisms, and interpretations. As María Herrera-Sobek notes,
"the Weeping
Woman narrative aids in the construction of community through
identification
with a cultural icon that offers the possibility of redemption to her
orphaned
and lost children" (73). Exploring the writing and re-writing of La
Llorona from a biographical perspective offers the opportunity to
construct
that community. The significance of biography as part of that project
can be
partly illuminated by the work that Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have
done on
autobiography and life writing. They have suggested that "in telling
their
stories narrators take up models of identity that are culturally
available. And
by adopting ready-made narrative templates to structure experiential
history,
they take up culturally designated subjectivities" (9). Chicana and
Chicano authors are taking the "culturally available" narrative
template and structuring their own experience and the experience of
their
community, defying U.S.-designated subjectivities in favor of
self-definition
and autonomy. Writing the biography of a ghost resonates with the
Chicano and
Chicana literary community’s attempt to recuperate the cultural memory
and
cultural identity threatened by assimilation, oppression, and violence.