Lost in the Cinematic Landscape

Abstract

La Llorona is the woman of our dreams and nightmares who wanders through the landscape of our imagination, crying, searching, nurturing, always calling out to us. She is the wronged mother, lover, or woman who murders or abandons her children, though she will never stop searching until her children are brought home. La Llorona’s prominence within Chicano popular culture has given her iconographie status.¹ Corridos, plays, poetry, and art represent this mysterious figure in her numerous incarnations, but while her appearance in the literature and music of Chicanos and Chicanas has been analyzed, La Llorona’s representation in film has yet to be explored, and this is my project here. No Chicano or Anglo mainstream filmmaker has overtly foregrounded this cultural figure or focused on the implications of her deep roots in Chicano consciousness, but I see distinct outlines of La Llorona in the narratives and depictions of Chicana characters in film. My approach, in part, is informed by Tey Diana Re-bolledo, who offers that contemporary Lloronas are not only symbolic of women but of Chicano culture as a whole, “whose children are lost because of their assimilation into the dominant culture or because of violence or prejudice.”² This reading accounts for those women and men who become lost in our racially charged, xenophobic world.