In There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture, Domino Renee Perez investigates the evolution of the character of La Llorona from her origins in Mexican history to her role in shaping contemporary Chicano communities in the United States. In surveying texts, Perez privileges Chicano traditions, and using an intertextual approach brings Chicano perspectives into dialogue with other cultural and social interpretations of the Weeping Woman. This comprehensive text accomplishes three main goals: producing a “critical catalogue” of Llorona lore across genres, providing a guide for interpreting Llorona texts from a Chicano cultural perspective, and finally showing how studying folklore as a cultural resource can foster critical intercultural dialogues.

The Weeping Woman (La Llorona) has many faces in the American cultural imaginary. She is popularly understood as an indigenous woman, who is scorned by a Spanish husband and in turn commits infanticide. Perez offers to both the popular and academic communities a new, multilayered, and multipurpose understanding of the Weeping Woman as a cultural symbol that transcends the traditional narrative elements of the legend that surrounds her. Beginning with the grandmother’s narrative that piqued the author’s own interest, this text is as much a critical, multidisciplinary exploration of La Llorona lore in Chicano culture, as it is an exploration of the author’s place within its intellectual history. The reader will find that for the Chicano community of artists and writers that Perez engages, the search for La Llorona is in fact a search for the self and an elusive “truth to live by” (15). In this way, Perez does not explain how artists use La Llorona, but rather deals with the creative and critical ways in which artists invoke her in different cultural contexts and historic moments, from ancient narratives to contemporary media. This invocation marks the character of the Weeping Woman as continually present in a Chicano social imaginary as a necessary and valuable cultural figure, continually made relevant by those who tell her tale in one artistic medium or another. This notion of cultural relevance remains a key theme in Perez’s work.

La Llorona takes many forms. As Perez notes, she emerges as “personal legend, ghost, goddess, metaphor, story or symbol” (2). Perez explores the works of many artists and writers, working in varying media, and examines how they each invoke the Weeping Woman differently, and yet, in folklore fashion, come to share the meaning of her spirit—most importantly, her place as a living entity within the Chicano cultural imaginary. Perez’s literary interpretations of artifacts and texts allow her to conclude that La Llorona, as a legendary character, is in a state of constant reinvention. Consecutive generations incorporate her story into their own lives, highlighting ambivalences in history, while creating a niche in the present for her to work. Perez elucidates how the Weeping Woman’s constancy as a character of a living legend makes her an ideal lens through which to refract contemporary Chicano culture and better understand how Chicano communities interact in a larger multi-cultural American mainstream.

The author begins her work by invoking the deep history of La Llorona in Mexican and Mexican American culture. While she efficiently surveys five hundred years of versions and variants, she divides Llorona lore into two key categories: conventional and contemporary. Conventional versions are those whose narrative and message more closely approximate the historical, social, cultural, and political values of greater Mexico. These conservative stories retain historical elements of the Llorona legend (infanticide), and create a window into a culture of the past. Perez is most concerned with contemporary versions. These versions are the works of artists who choose to reinterpret the Llorona legend and create artwork that reflects a different side of history and patriarchy. These versions, appearing in such diverse forms as plays, short-stories, poetry, art installations, and television programs, work to make the narrative of La Llorona compatible with the lives of contemporary Mexican American communities. Perez ultimately arrives at three main classifications for visual and oral narratives of La Llorona: traditional, revisited, and resistance. While this schema may oversimplify the nuances of particular narratives and tellers, works and artists, it is nonetheless potent as an innovative way of uniting Llorona lore and artists within a single system of impulses and images wrought from common experience and cultural understanding. Perez’s focus throughout the text remains process—the recreation and personalization of versions to create powerful variants that speak to diverse, contemporary audiences. Revising narratives of La Llorona shows readers a cultural process of regaining agency from a subjugated and marginal history.

One of the key tropes within revised narratives that Perez explores is that of empowerment. While popular outsider narratives of La Llorona exhibit her as a fickle, weak character moved by erratic emotion to commit horrible acts, Perez features a particular type of reinvention of La Llorona’s character within the Chicana community, one of activism. Her transformation as a character is connected to a transformation in a community of twenty-first-century Chicanas where her story is not justified, but rather refunctionalized. In re-imaging the history of La Llorona from a perspective of empowerment, audiences have the opportunity to reinvent themselves in the process. Perez notes that this process is about something profoundly personal, “our [Chicano/a artists] relationship to her” (9). This ideological perspective transitions to discussions of the superorganic nature of Llorona lore in chapter 4. Here the tale, the woman, and the message are themselves seen as a living complex that is continually appearing within society, and offering itself as an allegory of life. At the core of her work, Perez takes an intertextual approach to these texts, assessing the dialectic between forms, across time. Constructing new multiplatform narratives about La Llorona is the construction of self. However, within Perez’s work it is not so clear who these "selves" are. While she posits a Chicano focus, the Chicanos on whom she focuses are in a subclass of the social and cultural elite within Chicano communities—scholars, poets, artists, and playwrights. This connection to what Perez calls the “parent community” makes the interpretations of non-Chicanos most useful only when they too privilege a Chicano worldview, as do those represented in chapter 5. This perspective begins to draw lines between and within communities where outsiders are seen to lack the “culturally informed strategies” (177) to represent La Llorona. Perez may walk a fine line here, as her text, though critical and multidisciplinary, lacks the voice of Chicanos residing outside her intellectual and artistic niche. From a folkloristic perspective, it raises the question: who has the right to regulate the interpretation of this, or any other, culturally potent image? To whom does La Llorona belong?

In the final chapters, Perez refocuses the role of La Llorona from cultural icon to “cultural ambassador” (10). Drawing on examples from previous chapters, the author discusses the gap between the readings of La Llorona as a text between Chicano and non-Chicano communities. Perez begins to move beyond the singularity of Chicano culture, to see how the image of La Llorona, as a symbol of ethnic and gender-based subjugation, can help facilitate intercultural dialogues of resistance and empowerment in “the colonial context of America” (9). Looking beyond the parent culture allows the narratives of the Weeping Woman to continue to evolve, influence, and be influenced, ultimately being repositioned by cross-cultural factors. The author illustrates this evolution in chapter 6, as she explores the use of La Llorona amongst the next generation of young Chicanos. Here, Perez looks at the widely popular images of La Llorona invoked in children’s theater and storybooks to create contexts of “community storytelling” (180) where La Llorona’s life is interpreted on stage and in text. Like the artistic idiosyncratic works of Chicano authors and artists, these artistic re-imaginings draw on La Llorona as a familiar cultural vehicle through which to draw in and speak to audiences. Particularly in the reinterpretation of plays, performing La Llorona takes on new forms, where multiple narratives of her character and history are staged with no single narrative privileged over another. Rather, La Llorona’s role in helping transmit cultural knowledge is being broadened as cultural histories are relayed, questioned, and expanded. These versions are not synonymous with the versions of the tales circulated orally amongst individuals, but are a new, hybrid form facilitated by artistic and technological intervention and mass media distribution and appeal. Perez reflects on a variety of films and television examples where shades of La Llorona seem to peek out in the lives of Latina characters and examines how audiences may become critical readers who “use lore to seek out oppressive forces” (201). Here the author illuminates how La Llorona as folklore can be used as a critical lens through which to view culture—but cautions readers to avoid generalizations that might attempt to gloss over the realities of cultural difference. Narratives of La Llorona as a meme circulate and stimulate artists both in and out of Chicano communities. Artists use her to simultaneously reflect and resist conformity while reflecting their complex cultural and social selves. So many different Lloronas exist, yet they remain recognizable through their reinvention while gaining and losing meaning and currency from one generation to the next.

Although not by a trained folklorist, Perez’s work is an exceptional text that utilizes folklore in conjunction with a myriad of analytical tropes from literary criticism, film studies, feminist critique, and folklore to actively reposition marginalized minority perspectives, both within the academy and within popular discourse. La Llorona’s status as a shared artifact of greater Mexico allows this text to confound notions of nationality and identity that come to be defined by arbitrary physical and political borderlands. Moreover, these widely varied interpretations not only confirm that La Llorona is alive in Chicano communities, but that through repositioning these narratives, Chicano artists are re-imagining their own fluid cultural identities in the twenty-first century. Through Perez’s work one can see how La Llorona functions as an avatar of social and cultural conflict (12). While beginning with traditional methodology of categorization of narratives, Perez moves on to make critical strides in understanding a ubiquitous legend and begins to show the ways in which contemporary Chicano culture is inextricably tied to mainstream American culture. La Llorona, in very traditional fashion, is now reappearing in new contexts. No longer wailing at the water’s edge, she is finding currency on major television networks, in milk commercials, on stage, and in galleries. Perez’s work allows audiences to see La Llorona as a muse. She shows how the image of the Weeping Woman produces art that reflects as well as constitutes a particular movement of scholars, playwrights, painters, and poets, who fold themselves into her story and in turn, create a new Llorona to offer into the Chicano cultural imaginary and thereby recreate the imaginary itself.

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[Review length: 1796 words • Review posted on October 20, 2009]