La Llorona / The Crying Woman by Rudolfo Anaya, and: Amadito and the Hero Children / Amadito y los Niños Heroes by Enrique R. Lamadrid (review)

These two children’s books, La Llorona and Amadito, bring to the forefront very different stories that are sure to appeal to different audiences. I have never reviewed children’s books before, but I feel qualified to render an opinion on these two, written by renowned Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya and folklorist Enrique R. Lamadrid, because they are working within the traditional storytelling tradition and at the same time disrupting well-known narratives.

In retelling the well-known story of La Llorona (The Crying Woman), Rudolfo Anaya brings us a variant of the tale situated before the conquest of the Americas, and, although it remains a cautionary tale, the familiar narrative of a scorned woman is nowhere to be found, perhaps because the target audience is not an adult one. Unlike Anaya’s La llorona, a novella (1994), this children’s book presents a story imbued with all the elements of the classic folktale.

The traditional legend of La Llorona, the weeping woman who cries for her children after she commits infanticide, has numerous versions throughout the Americas; in one she commits the crime as revenge, to get even with her philandering husband, and in others she “saves” her children from formidable suffering. Anaya creates Maya, who, because she is born with the sign of the Sun God, is doomed to never grow old. To keep her safe from Lord Time, who seeks to punish her for defying time by killing her children, her parents isolate her and she lives alone on the edge of a volcano. As she grows lonely, Lady Owl instructs her on how to have her own children by creating a beautiful clay pot that then magically grows a child with special seeds supplied by a young man who is told by Lady Owl to plant them in Maya’s special pot during the full moon. The sexual allusions are inescapable, but Anaya goes further and Maya does the same several times. Many more children are “born,” as the young man comes periodically with various seeds: bean, squash, mango, papaya, lemon, and orange; thus were born Corn Maiden, Jaguar Boy, and many more children. Following the advice of Snake, Maya keeps the pots safely by the fireside, knowing that as long as the pots are safe, her children are safe. One day, of course, Lord Time, disguised as a wise old teacher, finds a way to get the gullible Maya to break her pots and fling them into the river by convincing her that doing so will ensure her children’s welfare and immortal life. As soon as she does this, a terrible storm occurs and Lord Time grabs the children and throws them into the lake. “Now they are mine,” he exclaims. Maya tries to put the pieces together but the water has dissolved the clay and she is left alone to cry eternally for her lost children. The story ends with the usual admonition of mothers calling to their children and instructing them not to go near the lake, lest La Llorona will mistake them for her own children and take them.

This disruption adds to the retelling of the familiar story, and although still obviously set in an indigenous framework, we are told that Maya is born in a village in ancient Mexico on the day the village is celebrating the Festival of the Sun. She weaves feathers and tends to her children in traditional ways. Even the seeds she receives are traditional Mexican foods—corn, squash, mango, papaya. Gratefully, because this story is based on an ancient tale, there is no reference to La Malinche or to the contemporary variants that have the woman...