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

by Domino Renee Perez

Overview

"How is it that there are so many lloronas?" A haunting figure of Mexican oral and literary traditions, La Llorona permeates the consciousness of her folk community. From a ghost who haunts the riverbank to a murderous mother condemned to wander the earth after killing her own children in an act of revenge or grief, the Weeping Woman has evolved within Chican@ imaginations across centuries, yet no truly comprehensive examination of her impact existed until now. Tracing La Llorona from ancient oral tradition to her appearance in contemporary material culture, There Was a Woman delves into the intriguing transformations of this provocative icon.

From La Llorona's roots in legend to the revisions of her story and her exaltation as a symbol of resistance, Domino Renee Perez illuminates her many permutations as seductress, hag, demon, or pitiful woman. Perez draws on more than two hundred artifacts to provide vivid representations of the ways in which these perceived identities are woven from abstract notions—such as morality or nationalism—and from concrete, often misunderstood concepts from advertising to television and literature. The result is a rich and intricate survey of a powerful figure who continues to be reconfigured.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292718128
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	06/01/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Domino Renee Perez is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Haunting Our Cultural Imagination
• Chapter 1. A Five-Hundred-Year History: Traditional La Llorona Tales
• Chapter 2. Revision and the Process of Critical Interrogation
• Chapter 3. Infamy and Activism: La Llorona as Resistance
• Chapter 4. "Long Before the Weeping": Re-Turning La Llorona
• Chapter 5. La Llorona Lore as Intercultural Dialogue
• Chapter 6. A New Generation of Cultural/Critical Readers
• Conclusion: Folklore as Critical Lens
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Permissions Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Alicia Gaspar de Alba

This book is genius. . . . This is interdisciplinary scholarship at its finest . . . that seamlessly crosses and blurs the methodological boundaries of ethnography, cultural critique, feminist critique, literary analysis, visual analysis, and popular culture studies. . . . I wanted to read every word of it.
— Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Professor of Chicana/o Studies and English, University of California at Los Angeles