Colonial narratives transformed La Llorona into a warning:
a cautionary tale against women’s emotion
a threat to mothers who grieved too loudly
a spectacle of excess feeling
Her tears were no longer understood as response to violence, displacement, betrayal, or loss of land and kin. Instead, they were framed as madness, danger, failure.
This was not accidental. It was instruction.
THE PUBLIC SHAMING OF WOMEN’S TEARS
Colonial modernity disciplined grief by gendering it.
Women were allowed to cry only:
quietly
privately
apologetically
Public tears became evidence of moral failure. Maternal grief became criminalized. Emotional excess became something to fear. La Llorona’s crying body was turned into a site of terror so that real women would learn to silence themselves.
WHAT WAS ERASED
What colonial retellings refused to name:
the loss of land and safety
the violence of conquest
the severing of kinship systems
the impossibility of grief within colonial survival
La Llorona was made responsible for harm she did not create. Her tears were blamed so colonial violence could remain unnamed.
LA LLORONA: A COLONIAL WARNING STORY
Before she was a monster,
La Llorona was a mirror.
A woman who cried openly.
A woman whose grief could not be contained.
A woman whose tears crossed thresholds—
between private and public,
between mother and land,
between love and loss.
Coloniality could not allow this figure to remain relational.
So her story was rewritten as punishment.
(RE)WRITING HER STORY
Lloronequis does not seek to redeem La Llorona.
She does not need saving.
We are returning her tears to context.
We are refusing the lie that crying women are dangerous.
We are refusing the myth that grief is pathology.
We are refusing stories that teach shame instead of truth.
In Lloronequis, her tears are not curse. They are witness.
THIS IS US
We are the descendants of those taught not to cry.
We are the inheritors of disciplined grief.
We are the bodies that learned silence for survival.
To (re)write La Llorona is to (re)write ourselves.
Not as monsters.
Not as failures.
But as people whose tears were never the problem.
LLORONEQUIS AS COUNTER-ARCHIVE
This site holds La Llorona differently.
Not as folklore for fear.
Not as spectacle.
But as a counter-archive of emotional truth.
Here, crying is not a warning. It is a remembering.
FROM LA LLORONA TO LLORONEQUIS
Coloniality turned La Llorona into a warning by gendering grief.
Her crying was framed as:
feminine excess
maternal failure
emotional danger
In doing so, colonial narratives taught a lesson: Grief belongs to women, and women must be punished for it. This was never about folklore. It was about control.
GENDER AS A TOOL OF EMOTIONAL POLICING
Colonial modernity organized emotion through rigid gender scripts:
women were made responsible for feeling
men were trained to suppress
public grief was shamed
communal mourning was criminalized
La Llorona became the figure through which this discipline was taught.
Her tears were not allowed to be relational. They were made personal, pathological, and punishing.
WHAT LLORONEQUIS INTERRUPTS
Lloronequis breaks the gendering of grief.
It names tears as:
communal
ancestral
ecological
ethical
Ungendered grief means:
grief does not belong to women
grief does not belong to mothers
grief does not belong to failure or madness
Grief belongs to relationship.
LLORONEQUIS AS A COUNTER-ETHIC
Where La Llorona was isolated, Lloronequis gathers.
Where her crying was feared, Lloronequis listens.
Where her grief was punished, Lloronequis restores context.
This is not a reversal—it is a correction.
UNGENDERING TEARS
In Lloronequis:
anyone may cry
tears are not ranked by legitimacy
grief is not proof of weakness
emotion is not labor assigned to a gender
Tears become shared responsibility. They move between bodies, land, memory, and time.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT SAVING HER
La Llorona does not need redemption. She needs her story returned to the collective.
Lloronequis does not rewrite her as innocent or guilty. It rewrites the conditions that required blame.
FROM WARNING TO WITNESS
Colonial stories said:
If you cry like her, you will be destroyed.
Lloronequis says:
If we do not cry together, harm continues unnamed.
This is the shift.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Ungendered grief:
dismantles emotional hierarchy
restores collective mourning
interrupts colonial nervous-system training
allows grief to finish its cycle
When tears are freed from gender, they can finally return to the earth.
LLORONEQUIS NAMES THE CONTINUATION
La Llorona was the figure coloniality tried to contain.
Lloronequis is what emerges when containment fails.
Not a woman.
Not a monster.
Not a warning.
A practice of collective remembering through tears.