E3W Literature | University of Texas

Domino Renee Perez

There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture

University of Texas Press, 2008

272 pages

$24.95

Reviewed by Lydia Ann French

Reviewed by Lydia Ann French

Unlike Domino Renee Perez, I never had the experi­ence of hearing the story of La Llorona as a child. Like the author, however, I did learn the story, along with several other aspects of my cultural heritage, through Mexican and Chican@ literature and cul­ture. Initially somewhat baffled by the legendary fig­ure’s actions, I could only comprehend her in relation to other literary and cultural icons. Raised as a light-skinnned pocha, I navigated a world of relative privi­lege, devoid of La Llorona’s looming presence as well as her insights, her warnings, and her voice. Perhaps I could be counted among La Llorona’s lost children.

Perez’s foundational study, There Was a Woman: La Llo­rona from Folklore to Popular Culture, catalogues and critiques the manifold ways in which cultural produc­ers from within and without the Chican@ community return to La Llorona as a figure who imbues daily life and action with meaning. These cultural producers also necessarily draw from the meanings already attributed to La Llorona, whether those meanings are found in early Indigenous Mexican lore, in her correlation with other Western/European figures, or in the stories a grandmother tells. The sometimes highly individual as­sociations that color the legend for particular authors or artists thus become critical to her/his rendering of La Llorona. For this reason, Perez traces the meanings, icons, and mythical figures often related to the Weeping Woman beginning with her origins in Mexica legends of a wailing woman in white and ending in her appear­ance on items of popular culture as varied as bags of coffee and children’s literature. In each of these utterly insightful and piquant readings, the author highlights the importance of La Llorona in Chican@ life. As Perez argues throughout the study, if we lose her, or if we’re only able to comprehend her within the framework of cultural icons outside those of our own communities, we may face a fate similar to that of La Llorona her­self: wandering and wailing for our irretrievable loss.

Through an interdisciplinary weaving of folklore, film, and feminist critique, Perez deftly handles the flux be­tween reception and production that can sometimes prove intractable to cultural studies. Establishing as a starting point the Mexica legend of a woman weeping for the fate of her “children” that constituted the sixth of eight omens portending the demise of the Aztec empire, Perez lays a foundation for the multiplicity of voices that subsequent readings will address. According to legend, when religious leaders translate the omen to Motecuço­ma, the emperor “[has] them imprisoned and their wives and children killed.” While the omen itself constitutes for Perez a point of origin, she carefully points out that the priests’ reading as well as Motecuçoma’s response constitute cultural readings that engender very particu­lar political consequences. Indeed, she argues that “al­though Motecuçoma believed the goddess Cihaucoatl, who could foretell the future, to be the likely source of the wailing…this story about the crying woman repre­sents the first documented recounting of La Llorona as we know her: a figure whose Indigenous origins were later written over by the Spanish.” Reading, and specifically cultural reading, is implied in the very act of “recount­ing.” In both reading and (re)telling, as this discussion suggests, cultural consumers and producers encounter fundamental conceptions of race/ethnicity, class, and gender encoded in both the tale and the act of telling.

In addition to tracing the Indigenous roots of the story of the Weeping Woman, Perez begins her study with a catalog of “traditional” versions of the tale. Such ver­sions “usually position or promote La Llorona as selfish, vain, vengeful, whorish, and, worst of all, a bad mother, while excusing or ignoring the behavior of the man.” Traditional renderings, which occur both in storytelling traditions and popular representations such as painting or literature, accept the premise that the woman’s ac­tions are at once sinful and selfish. Whereas the first chapter interprets these conventional elements—“a woman, weeping for lost children, wandering, and wa­ter”—uncovering the colonial, patriarchal, and class as­sumptions undergirding them, in subsequent chapters Perez examines revisions of the story, variations of the story used as acts of resistance, performances and pro­ductions that recuperate lost elements of the story, uses of the story by non-Chican@ producers that create (or belie) cultural bridges, and, finally, variations of the leg­end included in children’s and young adult literature. Some of the artifacts fall into several categories, but in identifying and defining the various uses to which Chi­can@s primarily put the legendary figure, and the legend itself, Perez privileges the experiences and interpretive abilities of Chican@s themselves. Indeed, in each dis­cussion, save that of chapter five, the author examines  only productions by Chican@ producers. One of the most outstanding—and potentially suspicious—exam­ples appears in chapter two, “Revision and Critical In­terrogation”: responding to inadequate demand among “Hispanic” consumers, “the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) asked Latino students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to submit ideas for ‘Got Milk?’ commercials that would reflect Latin@ cultures and traditions.” I say potentially suspicious because, on the surface, the producers in this instance appear to be non-Chican@s as indicated particularly in the references to a “Hispanic” or “Latino” market. However, the win­ning advertisement, which cinematically follows a ste­reotypically white-clad La Llorona through a house and to the refrigerator where she takes a bite of pan dulce, lifts the carton of milk only to find that it is empty, and begins to weep, “becomes an assertion of the cul­tural identity of Mexican@s and Chican@s within the larger subset of Latin@ consumers.” By turning to the figure of La Llorona for this satiric cultural production, the students who created the spot revise the melancholy aspects of the legend itself thus performing a cultural reading that interrogates both the values ascribed to the “traditional” legend and those of mainstream culture.

In fact, in addition to the scrupulous attention that Perez devotes to La Llorona and her actual and meta­phorical children, one of the most prominent features of There Was a Woman is its capacity to serve as a man­ual for cultural readership. In each chapter Perez offers guidelines for what comprises a reading for revisions, a reading for resistance, a reading for re-turning, and so on. Taken as a whole, the primary injunction for read­ers of culture is to critically engage both the source(s) of the artifact and its audience. With what informa­tion do producers come to their art, and how do they perceive that information? With what information or understanding does an audience, particularly a native audience, interpret, however subtly or sub-consciously, the work at hand? These questions, which underpin the critical foundation of Perez’s work, should serve as guides for many future works of popular cultural studies.

The ultimate marker of the work’s success, though, is its personality. By turns humorous and incisive, There Was a Woman resounds with the voice of its author. Domino Renee Perez’s passion for and responsibil­ity to her community and her work appear on each page. Pioneering in Chican@ studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism, both the book and its author give new meaning to the phrase, there was a woman.