An Aztec goddess appeared in Tenochtitlan, an Aztec city, as a beautiful lady dressed in white. She cried all the night in misery: “oh my children… Your destruction has arrived. Where can I take you?”
In 1505, 2 years after the event we just mentioned, a girl named La Malinche was born in an Aztec province for a noble Aztec family. She has lived peacefully until 10 years later, in 1515 her father died, her mother remarried. Consequently, she was given to a Mayan slavery merchant. She learned to speak Mayan beside her mother Aztec tongue/language.
In 1519, La Malinche was given to invading Spanish as a gift along with 20 other girl. According to the story, she was too pretty and attractive to a European style that Cortés decided to keep her for himself. Few weeks later, she started to translate between Mayan and Aztec languages. The Spanish priest Gerónimo de Aguilar understood the Mayan language, because he had spent several years in captivity among the Maya peoples in Yucatán following a shipwreck. Cortés used Malinche and Aguilar to interpret until La Malinche learned Spanish and could be used as the sole interpreter.
La Malinche was linked to Cortés as a couple. Also, she was faithful to him. According to surviving records, Malinche learned of several plans by natives to destroy the small Spanish army, and she alerted Cortés of the danger and even played along with the natives in order to lead them into traps.
Cortés continued his conquest. He rejected the king requests for Cortés to return. That made the Spanish king and queen grew concerned more, since Cortés may claim the new lands to himself, and betray them. During that period, in 1521, La Malinche gave a birth to 2 boy twins by Cortés.
In 1522, the Spanish king convinced Cortés to return to spain. He simply sent him a beautiful seductive Spanish woman. Cortés told La Malinche about his decision to return to Spain with the twins and leave her behind. She started to be aware of her role helping Cortés killing and slaughtering her people. So, she prayed to her gods seeking help, one of them appeared to her and told her: “If you let him take your children, one of them will return and destroy your people.”
The night before Cortés departure, La Malinche escaped with the babies. Soon, the soldiers noticed her absence and started chasing her. At the lake that Mexico City rests on now, the soldiers approached La Malinche and surround her. Before capturing her, she pulls out a dagger and stabbed her 2 children in the heart, and dropped their dead bodies into the lake. She shouted in pain and sorrow from her heart: “oh, my children”
Until La Malinche death in 1531, she was seen and heard near the lake crying and weeping for her children. She is given the name “La Llorona,” the crying woman.
In 1547, Hernán Cortés dies of dysentery disease. In a letter preserved in the Spanish archives, Cortés writes “After God, we owe the conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina (La Malinche)”. While in Spain Cortés praises her name, in Mexico “Malinche” becomes a word stand for betrayal.
However, La Malinche death didn’t finish the story. Honestly, I believe the story has only begun. First appearance of La Llorona after La Malinche death was in 1550, in Mexico City. La Llorona most often appears in full moon eves, walking in the streets, wearing a white dress, with a light veil over her face. Her heartbreaking cries terrify everyone hears or sees her. In her last stop, she lets out her most desperate, horrific cry, after which she vanishes into the lake.
The ghost started to be real. In 1995, Susan Smith is found guilty of murder in the drowning deaths of her two sons by strapping them in their car seats and rolling the car into the John D. Long Lake in South Carolina.
Again, in 2001, Andrea Yates drowns her five children, ages 6 months to 7 years, in the bathtub in her house, Houston, Texas. Yates claims that she heard voices. She’s found, later on, to be guilty and sentenced for life long prison.
Last not least, in 2002, A woman named Bernadine Flores drowns her two children and herself in a river near Pilar, New Mexico.
Sources:
La MalincheHernán Cortés
La Llorona
La Llorona movie and legend
