Tag: la llorona

Mixtec Singer : Lila Downs

Lila DownsA few weeks ago I posted a music video on twitter, after reading about the Nahuatl language. It reminded me of Lila Downs, a Mexican singer who has written and recorded music not only in Nahuatl and Spanish, but also in Maya, Zapotec, and other indigenous languages (a.k.a. a Mixtec singer). A native of Oaxaca, Mexico, she is the daughter of Anita Sánchez, also a Mixtec singer. Her father, Allen Downs, is a Scottish-American filmmaker and art professor. Her culture and her life’s work are easily reflected in her music. Her studies of voice and anthropology from the University of Minnesota influence her work aesthetically and in sound.
I first heard of her when shopping around at a yard sale with my mom and finding some of her music. After listening to her album, “Tree of Life” (2000), both of us fell in love with her voice and her sound. I had never encountered a Mixtec singer before thus I thought of this as a once in a lifetime find. It was later that I found out that Lila Downs is actually quite the acclaimed singer throughout the American continent and has released several albums overseas. This was one of those music experiences that definitely opened my eyes due to the narrow genre that apparently is widely admired and sought after in other mediums for example, in film.
One of the giveaways of Downs’s diverse contributions was her soundtrack and acting performance for the film Frida directed by Julie Taylor, and starring Salma Hayek. During the final scenes of the film, just before Frida’s death, she attends her solo exhibition where a musical number is then set up. Frida, having arrived in her bed, spins around the room with Lila Downs singing to her one of her most popular songs, La Llorona.
It was in fact her album, “Tree of Life”, which placed her more solidly as an international artist, but it was her album, “One Blood” (2004) which brought out her activist side. Much of the lyrics of the songs were on the subject of the case of Digna Ochoa, the human rights defender who was found murdered during the time of her defense of peasant ecologists from Guerrero. The controversial way in which the investigation of her death was executed, was what inspired Downs’s album.
Today, Lila Downs continues to work on her musical mixture of jazz, blues, mixtec, etc. Her most current project includes a musical theater presentation of Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate. I encourage anyone to give her music a listen that has transcended through generations by making fans out of my grandfather, my mother, and I. As described on her site, her music is like “a heat fueled road trip from Oaxaca to New Orleans.”
Additional Sources:

The La Llorona legend equality meaning

The La llorona story has been passed down in the areas of Mexico, the American Southwest, Puerto Rico and Central America for hundreds of years. Even though the story tends to vary depending on which region you hear it from, they tend to all have the same themes. The legend always consist of a beautiful woman named Maria that had kids, the kids end up dying somehow, and the woman’s ghost is always found around bodies of water. According to La LLorona by Joe Hayes, Maria was a very pretty and proud woman that vowed to only marry the most handsome man. She ended up getting engaged to a handsome ranchero, and they had a couple of kids over the years. The ranchero started paying less attention to Maria, but more to his kids, and he would even go away to prairies and wildlife for months at a time without seeing her. One day he came back home on a carriage with a beautiful woman and he only acknowledged his kids, but ignored Maria. Maria got so jealous of her children getting all the attention from her husband, that she drowning them. After she realized what she had done, she drowned herself as well. The first night she is buried, her cry of “where are my children?” can be heard in the night.

The La llorona legend represents a bad women and how women are not supposed to behave towards their children. The message that the La llorona legend teaches is that no matter what sacrifice a woman has to make, no sacrifice is to big for your children, if you are a good mother. Maria in the story is depicted as a bad mother because she couldn’t sacrifice the lack of receiving attention from her husband, to just be content with being a good mother to her kids. If she had put her children first and continued to care and love them, even when her husband ignored her needs, she would’ve been considered a good mom.

Putting your children first is very difficult for some mothers to do because they are pressured to sacrifice and suffer for their families, while such pressures aren’t expected of the men. In The Women of La Raza by Enriqueta Longeaux Vasquez, Enriqueta touches on the point of this double standard between the Chicano/a men and women concerning child raising. She describes the expected responsibility of a Chicana woman for her family when her husband divorces or separates from her as,

“ In order to find a way to feed and clothe her family, she must find a job… She is probably unable to find a job that will pay her a decent wage. If she is able to find a job at all, it will probably be sought only for survival. Thus she can hope just to exist; she will hardly be able to live an enjoyable life (pg 30 La Raza).”

It is automatically assumed in the quote, as well as in the La llorona legend that it is all right the man to just leave the children anytime he feels like it and place the responsibility on the wife to take care of them. In the La llorona legend, the husband would go to the wilderness for months at a time and not see the kids, but when he returned home, the kids and the father still had a mutually loving relationship.

 

Sources:

1. http://articles.ivpressonline.com/2011-10-30/la-llorona_30340267

2. http://www.literacynet.org/lp/hperspectives/llorona.html

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona

4. Chicana Feminist Thought by Alma García. Pg 29-31

Heroes Get Remembered, But Legends Never Die

La Llorona and Malinche are two women that have had many renditions of their stories.  Like many stories that are told throughout the years, there are variations of the story.  Yet, through the times, there are many parts of the stories that remain consistent throughout the different retellings.  In the stories that are told of La Llorona and Malinche the thing that remains consistent is the fact that the stories are about two women that stepped outside the dominant portrayal of women.

 

In the stories of La Llorona, she drowns her children in the water.  The reason behind this varies.  One of these reasons is that she drowns them to be with her lover, yet at the end the lover lied and she ends up wandering and looking for her children.   For the story of Malinche, she takes on the role of the interpreter between Cortez and the various tribes under control of the Aztecs.  Well for the majority of the time these stories have been used to talk down about women, either as a way to show that sexuality is bad for women or that women can be traitors.

 

Yet these stories have been reused to highlight these women’s stories and legends.  In the case of Malinche we see a woman who was sold into slavery and took a position of power during a conquest of an entire population.  While some may see her as a traitor for helping the Spanish, others have seen her as a protector.  She was the main interpreter, and either side didn’t know what each other were saying.  So she could have said things to make the conquest turn out the way it did and not worse for the population.    The conquest could have been a lot worst if it wasn’t for her. “La Malinche embodies those personal characteristics–such as intelligence, initiative, adaptability, and leadership–which are most often associated with Mexican-American women unfettered by traditional restraints against activist public achievement.” (Fox).   Malinche is seen in a positive light.  Instead of seeing her or using her as a scapegoat, writers have began to recognize her as a woman that used her intelligence, courage, and other traits to step outside the boundaries of society.  In “Victoria Moreno’s poem, ‘La Llorona, Crying Lady of the Creekbeds, 483 Years Old, and Aging,’ “we see that it is not La Llorona’s fault, but is society’s fault for taking away her unborn and born children away from her. Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands talks about La Llorona, in which she states that the wailing is the way that she is speaks out (Anzaldúa, 49).

When I think of La Llorona I think of the quote “women should be seen and not heard”.  In her own way she refuses that saying instead of being silent she lets her anger and emotions out. Even though she kills her children she lets her emotions out.  Both stepped out of their boundaries.  While these stories at first showed what happened when women stepped outside their so called “boundary areas”, they have been re-envisioned to showcase women in a better way and the struggles that women still face.

 

Resources:

Fox, Linda C. Obedience and Rebellion: Re-Vision of Chicana Myths of Motherhood. Women’s Studies Quarterly; winter 1983, Vol. 11 Issue 4, p20-22, 3p. Print.

http://0-search.ebscohost.com.linus.lmu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=510090813&site=ehost-live&scope=site

 

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.  San Francisco: Aunt

Lute Books, 2007. Print.

La Leyenda de La Llorona

The story of La Llorona is one of those legends from Mexico that has crossed the border to the Chicano community, largely due to its support through oral history. Many members of my family and friends who know the story, originally heard it through word of mouth. I heard it first, like many other children, as a story of warning from the adults in my family. The way I heard it, a young couple who lived in a small village in Mexico, had just had two boy twins. Soon after, the man left without a trace. The woman, so upset over her husband’s disappearance, ended up drowning her newborn children in the nearby river. Eventually the grief and the guilt ended up killing her. As a result, her ghost haunted the same river where she could be heard late at night, to this day, screaming out loud, “Ay mis hijos!” If any of us or my cousins found ourselves outside, late at night, La Llorona would snatch us up as her children and drown us.

My mother on the other hand, heard it from her friends when they shared scary stories from their hometown. The story had been appropriated, as it often was, by the small city in San Luis. Thus the story was told as having happened “to a friend of a friend” who had seen her in the nearby river. She was said to be found weeping, or flying over houses in her white garb. She admitted to never having reconfirmed it within her family, although the legend was brought up later in one of her elementary school books that cited it as an example of legends in the culture and part of literature. A friend of my mom’s, from an older generation, stated that she heard a version of the story set in the Colombian era. She’d heard that the woman was an “india” who fell in love with a Spanish “general.” He did not lover her back. Thus she drowned her children thinking they were the source of his dislike. Feeling guilty for what she had done, she committed suicide. Her soul then grieved and cried for her children.

‘The Spirit of La Llorona’, a site dedicated to La Llorona, presents 4 primary versions, and a timeline linking the historical figure, La Malinche, to the tale of La Llorona. One of the versions in the site revolves around the idea of La Llorona as a virgin (invoking ideas of the Virgin Mary) who had gotten pregnant without “having been with a man.” Her father ended up throwing the baby into the river. The mother disappeared and was soon followed by apparitions in the river of a young woman holding a child, weeping, still seen to this day.

Film adaptations of La Llorona have been made, including a recently animated film from Mexico: ‘La Leyenda de la Llorona’ released on October 21, 2011. The 2007 version, ‘The Cry: La Llorona’ set, and made in the United States, has adapted its own version of the history of Malinche. This history can also be found in ‘The Spirit of La Llorona’ website. It places La Malinche as a woman who killed her own twin boys the she had had with Hernán Cortés after one of the gods told her that if she let him take them back to Spain, one of them would return to kill the rest of her people. As a matter of fact, Malinche, born at the turn of the 16th century from a noble Nahua family, was later presented as a slave to Hernán Cortés. From slave she went to translator, then mistress, and bore his son, Martín Cortés (although he had another son by another woman, of the same name). Martín Cortés sailed to Spain with his father, then back to Mexico, before being exiled to Spain where he married and eventually passed away.

Another origin given to the legend of La Llorona dates even further back in Aztec mythology with Cihuacoatl, the “woman-snake” and goddess of midwifery. She is said to have been the first woman cited near a river crying for her children, the Aztecs. It was later interpreted as an omen of the coming of the conquistadors and the massacre of the natives of Mexico.

The Spirit of La Llorona cite can be found here, I highly recommend navigating through it-
http://www.lallorona.com/La_index.asp

The recent animated film (in Spanish) –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE0a3hvBaFQ&feature=related

Additional Sources:

http://archive.suite101.com/article.cfm/history_mexico/58848

http://www.lallorona.com/1legend.html

Miller, Mary Ellen., and Karl A. Taube. An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011. Print.