This is the power of the recounting. This is why sorcerers use it. It puts you into contact with something that you didn’t even suspect existed in you. – Carlos Castenada
Deep in a forested canyon lives a legend that had not yet reached my ears even after years of living in the Desert Southwest. It is the legend of La Llorona, a cuento or story told in the Sonoran borderlands to frighten children into not wandering too far away from home. La Llorona is a woman who crosses borders. You will find her walking in these borderlands, en el otro lado, at the dimming of the day. It is a magical time, just before the last light dies to the night, and you are held in an unearthly glow. It is the last pulse of life before the descent into darkness. La Llorona is a ghost story brought to life not by the telling but by the living.
Unfamiliar with the tale of La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, I journeyed to my friend Michael Belshaw’s ranch in Northern New Mexico. This visit was to oversee a five-day workshop that included a sweat lodge ceremony, medicine wheel ceremony, and rite of passage ceremony for my eleven-year-old daughter, Loretta. I first encountered Michael when I sought to purchase a wolf cub from him. A breeder of wolf hybrids, he is affectionately known as the “Wolf Man.” Little did I know that our meeting would begin a series of encounters that would forever change my perception of the world around me.
Michael’s ranch serves as his wolf research center, between the Spanish-Indian village of El Rito and the healing waters of Ojo Caliente, and he holds a double Ph.D., one in anthropology and one in economics. His land, an in-holding that sits on one hundred and sixty acres surrounded on four sides by Carson National Forest in Georgia O’Keefe country, is ten miles northeast as the raven flies from Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. Michael named his property Cañoncito after the little canyon whose sheer walls rise above a dry wash. That type of wilderness also bred things my eyes had not yet seen. Witches and sorcerers lived there, brujas y brujos, who have been perfecting their shamanic arts for centuries. The Wolf Man knew of the legend of La Llorona and unwittingly became its keeper.
The Wilderness and idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit. – Joseph Wood Krutch
Eleven participants, 3 men, 2 boys, five women, and Loretta, had gathered for the workshop on Michael’s land. We camped in tents in an area I helped clear a few years prior for another ceremony. Michael lived in a hand-built, off-the-grid cabin up a dirt road from our campsite that he had graded with a dozer he called his “big yeller toy.” With everyone working together, we constructed a sweat lodge and erected a canvas tipi. In the evenings, we told stories and shared songs by the campfire. My raven-haired friend Juanita volunteered to be our cook, and we teasingly called her the “Camp Cookie.”
Only the women would sweat in preparation for Loretta’s rite of passage ceremony, a sacred time forgotten in our modern-day culture that leaves adolescents confused and sorely unprepared. Within the dark womb of the lodge, each woman prayed to Creator for guidance and help as needed. I prayed for healing for myself and Loretta, who didn’t feel emotionally cared for and wrestled with neediness after losing me at such a young age. Her father had been awarded custody of Loretta and her brother even after his repeated affairs with other women. I fled the marriage when Loretta was only five years old. My absence left a gaping void in both of us. I also sensed that Loretta struggled to align with my beliefs without threatening her father while trying to find her own. I struggled with how to nurture Loretta and to help her feel safe. But I felt needy with my own abandonment issues and prayed that, somehow, I could still be a good mother to her.
Unbeknownst to me, after the sweat lodge ceremony, Loretta had wandered off by herself. When I started asking around, no one had seen her for hours. Juanita and I stood under the tarp in the makeshift camp kitchen making dinner when I began to panic. Moments later, I saw Loretta walking toward us, her face ashen and drained. She must have seen a ghost, I thought.
“Where have you been?” I asked, filled with concern.
“Mom, I need to talk to you.” She glanced over at Juanita and then back at me.
“Are you OK? You don’t look so good.”
“I’m sorry. I lost track of time and didn’t know it was getting so late.” Loretta said apologetically.
“Where did you go?” I pressed to know.
“I found the canyon. It was so beautiful – and this woman…” she paused.
“The canyon?! Did you go all the way to the canyon? Alone?! You could have been snake bit! Are you sure you’re OK?”
“Yes, I didn’t mean to go that far. I had something I needed to work out. So I kept walking and thinking about things until I saw this woman.”
“What woman?” I interrupted.
“She was in the canyon, standing in the shadows. She said nothing but smiled and beckoned for me to come over to her. She seemed friendly and maybe a little hungry.”
Juanita, who listened intently, asked, “Was she real?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure. I felt curious and looked at her for a long time, but my mind played tricks. She seemed to turn into an old gnarly tree growing out of the side of the canyon.”
Juanita started chewing on her fingernails. Then she knelt in front of Loretta, made her look straight into her eyes, tilted her head, and asked, “What was she wearing?”
“A long – black – dress,” Loretta answered slowly.
Abruptly, Juanita stood up and stared at me intensely, her brows knitted and lips pursed. Then she exclaimed, “We need to go and find Michael right now!” I wanted to know who this woman was that she claimed to have seen.
Juanita grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the kitchen. I yelled back at Loretta to wait there until we returned. She stared vacantly after us as I hurriedly followed Juanita up the dirt road toward Michael’s cabin, where we found Michael puttering about as usual. Out of breath, Juanita asked if we could speak with him.
“What’s up?” he asked, taking in our urgency.
Juanita took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “I need to ask you about something. Have you ever heard of La Llorona? La Leyenda de La Llorona?”
“Si,” Michael replied. “Tengo oir las cuentos al ella. I have heard something of the stories about her.”
“Tiene a ver aquí? Have you ever seen her here? I mean, aquí, on this land?” Juanita asked emphatically, stomping and pointing down at the dirt.
“No, can’t say I have,” he replied calmly. Then after thinking about it for a minute, he added, “But I think I may have heard her.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but icy chills ran up my spine.
“What have you heard?” Juanita rushed at him.
“I have heard that she is a woman who carries a powerful grief. She killed her two children by drowning them in the river and then took her own life when she realized what she had done. She was a woman driven to madness because her husband left her for another.”
“Bastard,” Juanita spat. Betrayal was also an old story for her. “What else do you know about La Llorona?”
“Well, after he abandoned her for the other woman, he came around with his new wife and doted on the children while ignoring her. Some have traced the story back to Cortez and his Mexican Indian consort, Malinche. He refused to marry her because of Indian blood. When he threatened to take the children, La Llorona, resentful and in a fit of jealousy, killed them for revenge and threw them in the river. I have heard she walks searching for lost children anywhere that water runs; the creek, the river, el arroyo, a dry wash, la cañada. When the wind howls at night, I sometimes think it sounds like a woman crying. It is either the coyotes, the canyon, or La Llorona.”
“The canyon?” Juanita gasped.
“Yes,” he replied.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Juanita said as she pulled me back down the road as quickly as we had come. Not stopping for a minute, she said, “Loretta has seen La Llorona.” That much I had already guessed.
“I’m worried about her. We can’t leave her alone,” she said, confirming my suspicion. “And don’t say a word about this. We don’t need to frighten her.” I felt too shaken to say anything.
Juanita and I, at her insistence, re-pitched our tents on either side of Loretta’s. This decision proved wise because an angry storm crashed through at night, howling and shaking the tents until I feared nothing would remain of them.
In the morning, Loretta’s tent barely stood. One side had collapsed and sagged with a pool of water in it. The storm conjured dreams that Loretta didn’t want to discuss. She said she couldn’t remember the details.
A crystalline clear sky arched over our primitive campsite as we shook out the tents so they could dry. The smell of chorizo frying and piñon coffee brewing drew everyone toward the camp kitchen. I grew excited about Loretta’s coming-of-age ceremony as I gathered my ritual supplies and slipped into the tipi to start the fire.
When it came time for the women to enter, I lit a bundle of sage gathered from nearby hills and purified the ceremonial space. Loretta entered last, dressed only in a robe, and moved to sit on a soft beaver pelt I had placed on the dirt floor. We began the ceremony with ritual bathing by heating water over the open fire and pouring it into a substantial wooden bowl. I passed another bowl containing rose petals scented with rose oil. Respectfully, each woman removed a handful of petals and added them to the bowl of warm water with a blessing for Loretta’s future.
Loretta knelt over the bowl, which perfumed the air with the feminine scent of rose. Modestly, she washed herself using a natural sea sponge, then dressed in comfortable clothes she had chosen for the occasion.
Shortly, I handed her an abalone shell-backed mirror and instructed her in the womanly art of applying makeup. She smoothed the foundation on her olive skin. I applied mascara, eye shadow, and eyeliner to her big, almond-shaped brown eyes that resembled her father’s. I put rouge on high cheekbones passed down from me and lipstick on full Italian lips inherited from her father. The results pleasantly surprised her. Loretta straightened her back as I ran a brush through her long, luxurious, golden-brown hair, then she looked at herself in the mirror and giggled.
As the talking stick passed between the women, each shared the wisdom and experience she wanted to pass down. Some had to do with sexuality. And when it comes to talking about sex, there is none funnier than Juanita.
“Can you baaleeve it?!” Juanita says, shaking her head in feigned dismay. “They just opened a doggie brothel down the street, and ju know what they went and named it?” Juanita pauses, eyes gleaming. “Give Yer Dog a Bone!”
The women howled with laughter. Our raunchy humor was above Loretta’s head, but it got the juices flowing. When it came Loretta’s time to speak, she began to share the story of what happened the previous day in the canyon.
“I don’t know how I even got there,” Loretta started. “I was so in my head thinking about things. It’s hard to have a mom who doesn’t live with me.” The women looked at her encouragingly and nodded.
“I didn’t realize how far I’d gone,” she continued. “Then I saw this woman waving me toward her. I couldn’t tell if it was her in the shadows or the tree branches blowing in the wind.” Loretta shot a glance at Juanita. “I just stood there for a long time. I need to know if she was real or not.”
Then Juanita asked if she could say something and Loretta nodded. “Why do you think she was motioning to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Did she feel familiar, like someone you might have seen before?”
“No,” Loretta replied without needing to think about it. “I have never seen anyone like that before.”
Then Juanita asked the difficult question, “Have you ever heard of La Llorona?”
Loretta answered with a blank stare. The women grew silent as Juanita launched into the legend of La Llorona. As she spoke, I felt that this weeping woman who wanders by the river in search of lost children had something to do with me.
Then, one of the women said to me, “Loretta doesn’t seem to be expressing fear about this encounter; perhaps you might be having your own experience with this energy.” And it was true. I feared for my daughter.
Sensing my discomfort, Juanita suggested that the women sleep in the tipi that night and keep our energy pulled in around Loretta as she completed her passage. Everyone agreed. She said we should keep the fire burning overnight for our protection, and under no condition should we let it go out. With gratitude for the abundant wood that the men had cut and split, we methodically stacked a large pile toward the back of the tipi.
Juanita had worked hard beside me that week, and I admired her spirit, resilience, and heyoka clown humor. She understood abandonment and betrayal. Once a successful artist showcased in the best galleries throughout the Southwest, Juanita lost her land and ceramic studio when her son’s father abandoned her. I, too, lost my home and a career when I left Loretta’s father. Juanita and I shared a mutual trauma and trusted each other with our pain.
After the sun had set, we crawled into our sleeping bags, exhausted from a week of ceremony and desert storms. Juanita agreed to take the first fire-keeper shift, and sometime after midnight, aroused me for the second. The fire crackled and occasionally popped to the sound of slow deep breathing.
Cold air moved through the tipi, whose canvas sides stopped inches above the ground. I stoked the fire, threw on a few extra logs, and checked that no one slept too close. I stared sleepy-eyed into the flames and listened as coyotes howled and yipped in the distance. The full moon penetrated the tipi’s canvas covering, casting an eerie, silvery light within our circle. When my eyelids failed me, I lay close to Loretta, placing her between the fire and myself to keep her warm.
With my back to the edge of the tipi, I counted on the cold to keep me awake. If I did doze off and the fire died down, surely I would wake from the cold in time to stoke it back up again. But exhaustion won, and sleep overtook me.
Lucidly, I dreamt that Juanita tended to the fire. I watched as she danced in the firelight, her long, dark, flowing hair fanning the flames, and she mesmerized me. Then, she began to change form until she took flight on the black wings of a raven, landing on the woodpile. The more I stared, the darker everything appeared until I became unconscious and fell asleep within the dream. I tried to resist. I fought to wake up from the dream within a dream until I found myself standing on a battlefield where many battles had been waged and someone always lost. Darkness dragged me under like the weight of water until a formidable force pulled me up and out toward the tipi’s edge. When I saw a bony arm reaching across me, I thought it was Juanita. Then I saw it was she, La Llorona, grabbing for Loretta. Frantically, I pushed her away, but my strength had left me.
Juanita instinctively woke, jumped from her bedroll, threw more wood on the dying fire, and yelled at me, “Wake up! Wake up and be present!” I felt her yanking me toward the fire and on top of Loretta, but I still couldn’t open my eyes.
“Díos! Wake up!” She screamed at me.
Loretta pushed me off, annoyed and confused. I rubbed my gritty eyes and tried to force them open. I felt drugged.
Slowly, I pried open my eyes to see Juanita glaring into the blackness above the woodpile. Angrily, she stomped her foot and commanded to whoever might be there, “Leave NOW!”
“Bruja,” she hissed under her breath. The fire finally caught, and the flames surged upward. I thought I heard the beating of wings. Then I saw a ball of light shoot under the bottom of the tipi, and it was gone.
Juanita turned to me, furious. “I told you not to let the fire go out! We’re in big trouble here.”
Everyone sat up in their sleeping bags, wondering what was going on. Juanita wanted to know what had happened.
“Why did you let the fire go out?” She demanded.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” I said, shaking uncontrollably.
“And where did you think you were going?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, perplexed.
“You were being dragged out of the tipi. You were out up to your neck with Loretta right behind you.”
I looked over at Loretta, huddled in front of the fire.
“I had a bad dream,” I sobbed. “I dreamt that La Llorona was coming to take Loretta away.”
“That wasn’t a dream!” Juanita said hysterically, jumping up and down around the fire and fanning it like she had in my other dream before she shape-shifted into the raven. I sat dumbfounded, realizing that no separation exists between the living and the dead in the realm of spirits.
Cut off from the ones she loves, La Llorona arises at our southernmost border from the pain and desperation of separation. Abandoned and betrayed, she drowned the only thing left that mattered – hope for the future. A woman who murders her creation is undeniably driven across the border into madness. Nowhere does a woman suffer more than where she is cut off from her earth.
Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. – Wendell Berry
Juanita, who had lived in these borderlands her entire life, tended the fire until dawn. The rest of us slept for a few more hours amazingly well. Upon rising, one of the women greeted me with a cup of hot herbal tea. The scented steam from the soothing herbs comforted me. I breathed them in. I found it hard to imagine that such clarity and light could follow such darkness. I cupped my hands around the mug, grateful for its warmth, and looked into my daughter’s eyes, no longer a child. The Weeping Woman tried to steal her away at the last moment possible before sunrise had completed her passage of initiation. La Llorona would have no claim to this one.
The dark spirit of La Llorona is a vacant howling wind, and her mournful cry unearthed the curse of my abandoned inner child. Lost to my birth mother, surrendered through adoption, I lost my children, too, when the court awarded their father custody. Swallowed by grief, it made me a “weeping woman” who searched endlessly for her children beside a river of broken dreams. A kind of madness lived in me.
Nature holds up a mirror in which, if we care to look, we can see ourselves in a vast scene, not lost but blended… Our home is the desert, and from it will come identity. — Ann Woodin
To avenge her betrayal and feed her bottomless grief, La Llorona would steal your children and murder them, too. She will prey on your every weakness and confront your deepest fears. I know because the “weeping woman” once lived in me. She lives in the psychic underworld of our collective unconscious and drifts beside a buried and forgotten river of tears.
So gather the women around you. Celebrate your every passage, illuminate your every fear. With the courage to confront what lives in the shadows, we enter the mystery that sets us free.
Know every falling leaf is a tiny kite with a string too small to see, held by the part of you in charge of making beauty out of grief. –Andrea Gibson, Colorado Poet Laureate
I would like to offer special thanks to my daughter, She Who Remembers, for her help in the recounting of my La Llorona story, for it is she who will inherit the Earth.
Note: Loretta is a name that derives from the laurel tree, symbolic of victory. Italian in origin. Popularized in the United States in the 1930s. – Wiki
Loretta of the Rivers
Please enjoy this song by Michael Smith
Be sure to visit Thea Summer Deer’s official website for more information
Listen to the podcast version of La Llorona: A Woman Who Crosses Borders
Mystic Mountains
Please enjoy this song written by Thea, a “my mother, my daughter, myself” song released on Eagle’s Gift.
Thank you dear Sister for deepening my understanding of who + what you/we are.. This Song of the Summer Solstice is deeper already for having your story in me.. 🙏 jmo
Thea, thank you for so eloquently sharing this beautiful story. Your writing is impeccable. Love you.