La Llorona
Her name means “The Weeping Woman,” and if you’ve grown up in a Latinx household, chances are you’ve heard her story whispered by your abuela or passed around on stormy nights.
She’s the ghost of a woman who drowned her children—and now wanders riversides, crying for them. Her wail?
“¡Ay, mis hijos!”
“Oh, my children!”
Her legend has roots in pre-Columbian Mexico, where the goddess Cihuacóatl was said to wander the night, crying for her people. After the Spanish arrived, her image shifted—blending with tales of betrayal, colonization, and maternal grief. In some versions, she became intertwined with La Malinche, the indigenous woman who aided conquistador Hernán Cortés.
As Tejano and Mexican families moved north through colonization, war, and migration, La Llorona followed—and made herself at home in Texas folklore.
You’ll hear her story across the state. At Woman Hollering Creek near San Antonio, where locals say she wails at night. In El Paso, where a woman in white—blurry-faced and footless—was seen screaming outside a home. Along a Mercedes levee, where a man met a ghostly woman in a tattered dress. A curandera later told him: “She found you.” Her sightings span bridges, highways, schools, and homes. She adapts and she evolves, but her cry is always the same.
Folklorists Américo Paredes and J. Frank Dobie helped preserve her legend—one from within the culture, the other collecting tales statewide. Thanks to their work, La Llorona’s story survives as both cultural memory and chilling warning. In some stories, she’s a cautionary tale for children. In others, a symbol of female rage, sorrow, and cultural dislocation—a ghost of generational trauma.
La Llorona endures because her grief is universal because every person who hears her story tells it differently, and because her cry always feels like it’s coming from just behind you.
So the next time you hear weeping near water—or feel the air shift behind you on a dark Texas night—
Don’t follow the sound. Don’t look back. And whatever you do… don’t answer.
