La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

The most famous legend in Latin America, centuries deep

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, is the ghost who walks the rivers and canals of Mexico at night, crying for the children she drowned. Whoever hears her, they say, will meet misfortune or death, and children are warned that she takes any she finds out after dark. Her story is told across Mexico, Central America and northern South America and deep into the American Southwest, and in Mexico it is said to have begun in Xochimilco and the Lacandon jungle.

Her roots are older than the Spanish. The Florentine Codex, compiled in the 16th century, lists the omens that foretold the fall of the Mexica a decade before the conquerors arrived, and the sixth was a woman heard many times at night, weeping and shouting, "Oh my children, we are about to go forever." Around 1550 Friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded her as Chocacíhuatl, the first mother to die in childbirth, crying over her son in the night, and identified her with the goddess Cihuacóatl, the serpent woman and patron of the cihuateteo, the spirits of women who died giving birth, who wailed in the air and haunted crossroads. Sahagún described her appearing dressed in white, her hair arranged in little crossed horns above her forehead. In one telling the goddess rose in a flowing white gown over the waters of Lake Texcoco, wandering among the lakes and temples, crying out, "Ay, mis hijos, where shall I take you so that you may escape such a dreadful fate?"

After the conquest she kept walking. In colonial Mexico City people told of a woman in white who crossed the main plaza, where the temple of Huitzilopochtli had stood, looked toward the east and vanished at Lake Texcoco. Spanish tales of weeping phantoms blended with the Indigenous ones and passed back and forth until the legend became one of the first products of mestizaje, and she is sometimes confused with La Malinche, Cortés's Nahua interpreter, mother of his son and a double-edged symbol of the Mexican nation. Every region has its own version, and similar figures cry in the folklore of Costa Rica, Peru, Chile and beyond.

On the canals of Xochimilco she still appears, in a night-time production staged on the water at Cuemanco and reached by trajinera. Its 2026 season runs from 2 October to 22 November with more than 50 actors, live music, traditional dance and a monumental pyramid, linking Cihuacóatl, who wept for her children and foretold the end of an empire, to the woman who drowned her own.