La Llorona

A female spirit recorded continuously across Mexico and the American borderlands since the colonial period. She is heard before she is seen, weeping for children at the river-banks, the canal-edges, and the standing water near settlements. Janvier's *Legends of the City of Mexico* (1910) places her in the streets of the colonial capital. The Library of Congress Folklife survey traces her transmission from the Aztec *Cihuacoatl*, the eighth omen recorded in the Florentine Codex before the fall of Tenochtitlan, through the corrido tradition of the nineteenth century, into the borderland present.

The accounts do not always agree on whose children she calls for. In some they are her own, drowned by her hand and held against her in punishment. In others they are children unspecified, and the warning given to the listener is to keep their own children from the water at dusk. The Library of Congress note records that she is a single figure in name and a many-figured tradition in practice.