La Llorona

Completed in 1577 by Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua elders, authors and artists, the Florentine Codex records traditions about omens said to have preceded the Spanish arrival in 1519. In Book XII, chapter 1, the sixth omen is an unnamed woman crying at night for her children. The passage neither calls her La Llorona nor describes a mother drowning her children.

Scholars have connected this figure and the Mexica goddess Cihuacoatl with later La Llorona traditions. These are interpretations of the legend's Indigenous antecedents, not proof that the Codex records the familiar María story. As the Library of Congress's folklore analysis explains, accounts vary, and scholars differ over how Indigenous and European traditions shaped them. No single historical origin is established.

In the most common modern telling, a beautiful woman named María drowns her own children, often after discovering her husband's betrayal, then drowns herself in grief, and is cursed to wander forever searching for them, weeping "¡Ay, mis hijos!" Sightings cluster around water: the canals of Xochimilco in Mexico City, where a carved wooden statue of her now stands on a small island, as well as rivers and irrigation canals throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, where the story spread with migration and remains a staple of regional storytelling.

Folklorists generally treat La Llorona not as a record of one historical woman but as what scholars call a parabolic legend, a story that uses a haunting, sympathetic figure to carry real cultural weight, including, in some readings, as a voice for grief and loss experienced by Indigenous and colonized communities during and after the Spanish conquest. Its specific "true" originating event, if any, has never been identified. Across generations and several countries, the story has been told to children as a warning to keep away from dangerous water.

Trajinera boat tours through the canals depart from here year-round. The seasonal La Llorona night show sails from Embarcadero Cuemanco, not from here, and the show's producer posts each season's dates at xochimilcoexperience.com.