NEW MEXICO CHILDREN don’t play in arroyos for fear of La Llorona, the spirit of the wailing woman. “She searches waterways for her drowned children,” says Mora storyteller Ray John de Aragón, author of numerous books on New Mexico folklore. “If she mistakes you for them, we’ll never, ever see you again.” Such stories are at least as old as Spanish colonists’ arrival to the New World. “Folktales teach a lesson,” he says. “They were strangers in a new land, trying to irrigate their crops, and they needed their children to be careful around the acequias.”
When I was a little boy, my mom and dad, and my aunts and uncles, they would gather in the kitchen and tell these stories. Maybe we weren’t listening. We lived right next to an arroyo. My friends and I would go searching for her. When I wrote The Legend of La Llorona, every elder I talked to said the same thing: “My great-grandfather knew her! She lived here!”
The story changes depending on where it’s told. In Santa Fe, La Llorona is usually the daughter of a poor soldier in the presidio. She falls in love with a wealthy gentleman and has two children by him, but he can’t marry her because the classes are well-defined. They are outside, arguing in the rain, and she’s crying as the water rushes down from the Sangre de Cristos into the Santa Fe River. She doesn’t notice her children until the water sweeps them away. She jumps in to save them and drowns.
My mother used to tell me about witches that turned themselves into dancing balls of light and appeared at the top of the hill. Later, I found out Native tribes have similar stories. Science can explain a lot, but it can’t explain everything. They call it ball lightning. People see it all over the world. In New Mexico, the story was that if you saw one, you should follow it because it could lead you to a treasure.
Storytelling was a form of entertainment, which also taught life skills. Priests used stories to evangelize. It's a family affair—gathering around a fireplace, eating piñon nuts, and having fun.
➤ Read another haunting tale in The Strange Death of Melvin Mills.