La Llorona

As a kid, I spent many Sunday nights at my grandparents Augustina and Pablo’s house with my cousins, playing the latest 45 dance records and gossiping about our classmates. Meanwhile, our parents ate donuts and drank coffee around the grey Formica table in the kitchen, laughing and chattering simultaneously in Spanish and English. Eventually, we kids got around to telling stories about el Cucuy and la Llorona. El Cucuy was a scary boogeyman that grabbed little kids who misbehaved. At least that’s what our parents told us, to keep us in line.

“Ay Cucuuuuy,” my Uncle Ray loved to intonate as he bugged his eyes at us. But la Llorona was somehow more frightening.

This was the legend of a mother who had drowned her own children, and now her ghost wandered around lonely country roads crying. The thought of this caused us many sleepless nights. What mother would do that? Would she get us? My cousin Linda swore that her friend’s friend had driven out Friant Road and at the big curve, you know the one, saw a lady standing there all dressed in white, her long gown fluttering in the wind. “Oh my God. Did they see her face? Did she say anything?” “That was la Llorona,” whispered my cousin. We would scream out in fear, and then start laughing at ourselves. But deep down inside, we were never sure how to feel.

I hadn’t thought about these childish games for a long time until I read the 1995 news story about Susan Smith, the woman in South Carolina who had let her car sink into a murky lake with her two little boys strapped into their car seats. She had done this because her boyfriend didn’t want kids.

I thought about la Llorona again in 2011 when a Texas mother, Andrea Yates, drowned her five children in the bathtub following post partum depression. Her haunted expression on the evening news defied understanding. My dread of the ghostly woman arose many times in 2015: two-year-old twins were drowned by their mother in Arizona; a year-old boy was drowned in Oceanside, another in New Jersey, all killed by people who were supposed to love and protect them.

Finally, the shocking image of the drowned Syrian refugee child on a Turkish beach tormented my soul and caused as much fear as any I had imagined from la Llorona. The journalist’s photograph of the beautiful dark haired boy lying wet and lifeless on the sand made the world cry. This Syrian child had died along with his mother and a sibling in their anguished flight from man-made problems in their homeland. His mother had not killed her children. Who was to blame this time?

I am not a historian or politician. I cannot explain why this latest innocent child drowned. But I am weeping for him. I am weeping for him and for all the children. I am la Llorona.