La Llorona on 24th Street
At the beginning of this evening I noticed that the moon was getting large and bright against the powdery layers of turquoise and pink dusk. I decided it was time to see La Llorona, the crying woman. La Llorona is the new mural painted by Juana Alicia deep in my neighborhood. I thought early night right at the end of dusk would be a good time to see it, because the La Llorona of where I come from is a scary weeping spirit who wanders the desert. She wails or floats silently in the form of a blue light over the arroyos (stream beds) in the foothills of New Mexico's Sandia Mountains. Many people have encountered her there, especially teenagers. But even those who are older, or who have not been partying have felt presences or shadows in their nocturnal desert wanderings, and many people, even in bigger cities like Albuquerque, close their curtains at night so La Llorona or other spirits can't watch them.
I thought that seeing the La Llorona mural at night would be scary, but walking on bustling 24th Street was bright and joyous in its vital humor. The only scary part was trying to cross the street while someone was performing one of the thousand curly u-turns that occur each day here in the Mission. I was almost in tears at the beauty of teeming humanity out in full bloom in the unusually warm San Francisco late August Friday night. The beauty salon was full: lovely young goddesses staring distantly while receiving manicures as their young children sat by. The whiff of cardamom from Philz famous coffee. The store with no doors, no shelves -- only bright or shiny fabrics, bedspreads, fabric throws like vevet paintings, and one little plastic restaurant table for two against the wall. The outdoor food vendors, taqueros with a big bowl of cooked meat and ready corn tortillas. The blasts of smells and ranchera music from the bars where only men go. The gargle of modern-twanged English from the knots of local and visiting hipsters in bars that used to have different clientele who spoke Spanish; and different clientele before them, maybe the Irish or Italians. Pounding bass vibrations coming from the evangelical church band and music from everywhere else: Corridos, Salsa, Meringue, Norteno, Tejano, Ranchera, Mariachi, Reggaeton. The Latin sonic experience of the cars passing now includes hyper-bass, passed over from the rap music. The hip hop records for sale, 75 cents each in the tiny shop containing only a lot of TVs, all on, and some large men and a dusty carpet. TV monitors with art playing on them in the Galeria de La Raza, where some young people consumed gallery opening refreshments and a couple others actually looked at the art. The historic Saint Francis ice cream parlor now, too, filled with post-new wave inhabitants...
I got to La Llorona's corner on York at 24th Street, and looked at her from the sidewalk below. If I stepped all the way back to the curb, or in the street, then I could see people inside through the windows in the mural. Someone turned off a light. They didn't close their shades to keep the evil spirits out; those are painted on the outside: the little corporate fat cats who take over world water supplies perch on top of the windows like gargoyles. Back home in New Mexico, people paint the exterior doors and window frames a cobalt blue to keep out evil spirits, but this whole wall is vibrating in that part of the spectrum. I saw the red flowers on the cacti, the white lightning and barbed wire, the women in India whose home/land in the Narmada Valley is swallowed by the new dammed lake, the helicopters, the owl who could be the animal form of a curandera (mystical healer), the goddess dead center of the whole thing and the Large Crying Woman with one hand in a stream, the other holding her child. All across the bottom, large waves move in their own third dimension of motion within the paint! The red sky in the top of the mural was dimly electric against the evening sky. I crossed the street and from there saw that the dark blues of the early night sky were present in the water of the mural. The mural is composed like the earth or our bodies -- mostly water, yet with so much thirsting...
The New Mexico legend of La Llorona that I grew up with is about a young woman who was very beautiful and married a very handsome but irresponsible man. Her life had been shaped by cultivated vanity and selfishness that left her with no capacity for true intimacy, just the ego's inevitable need to consume surfaces for feeding the insatiable, empty heart. Her spoiled greed led her to fall in with this other lovely, hungry creature, against the cautions of her family. They had some children and the husband, who tired of family life, left her for another woman one evening. When this occurred, the enraged and hysterical wife blamed her children for the loss of her husband and pushed them into a river. The instant she did that, she regained her senses and ran screaming and crying along the river but could not pull her children out, and they drowned. She fell and died from her head hitting a rock. Thereafter her spirit was doomed to wander forever in the night, searching and crying for her children, and trying to kidnap any kids unfortunate enough to find themselves alone in her presence.
Juana Alicia has turned the legend of La Llorona around, and provided some pre-history for it, too. The weeping woman is now protecting her child near the stream which flows from under the Aztec goddess in the middle - Chalchiuhtlicue - the goddess of ground waters. Legend has it that in 1502 the goddess Cihuacoatl manifested as a beautiful woman in white flowing garments In the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. In anticipation of the future conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, she cried out through the night: "Oh my children . . . your destruction has arrived. Where can I take you?"
There was nothing scary about my walk home tonight from seeing La Llorona. I liked looking into the doorways of bars, pupuserias and even the sad, sad recovery meeting in its grayly fluorescent lit room. I had to laugh about the nutty guy on a bicycle in the crosswalk at 24th Street and Valencia, blowing into his whistle and cursing at the Valencia Street revelers--I laughed even more when I saw another fellow laughing to himself at the same scene. I controlled my mirth as I walked into the packed cafe on this newer main drag, Valencia Street, the perpendicular universe to the older Mission from which I had just emerged. The cafe was full of people playing games and I amused myself with silly silent alliterations. But the barista had sweat on his brow and I said, "Oh, you need a fan." To which he responded with a plaint about needing the manager to understand that it is very busy Friday nights, and she shouldn't burden him with chores like re-stocking at that time. I tried to acknowledge his situation and we kindly said goodbye. I thought about him and his small family whom I've seen in the cafe, a young woman and a small child, and wondered what might be better for them.
Now, hours later, the moon hasn't travelled very far but it is still very bright. I cannot see or hear La Llorona the infanticidal banshee-- she is mixed into the din and streetlights, but I feel the ruin of the greed which created her. I think she turned back into the evil god, a little up and left of the center of the mural, the one who curses those below, the one we view from under water as he treads upon us: we see the soulless bottoms of his shoes with the logo of Bechtel emblazoned on them. If you think of La Llorona as a personification of evil or a metaphor for a society that has done violence to its children, then you understand that the Mexican women in the mural holding photos of their disappeared and murdered daughters near the border factories are one part of the separation: they are the mothers looking for their lost children and the story of an infanticidal, vain madwoman is just a foil for the real demons. Juana Alicia’s La Llorona is now the women whose tears irrigate their courage: look at them in the mural, protecting their people's rights to water in Bolivia. La Llorona stands up to the police who protect corporate law and not people. Her tears cannot be privatized.
The following Sunday I return to see how the mural looks in the daytime. Even in daylight it is still a night mural. La Llorona's reflection is flowing into the window glass of the nearby storefronts; her spirit is present in the early autumn shadows.
Claire Bain c2005
Sources:
http://www.juanaalicia.com/la-llorona-project-san-francisco/
http://www.jstor.org/pss/40170187
http://www.trinalopez.com/llorona.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=4853301
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