140 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865greater Southwest and California, those Mexican lands that prior to 1845 stretched
from the Rio Grande northward as far as lower Oregon and Wyoming. This area,
known among Mexicans as Mexico de Afuera, or Mexico abroad, was until quite
recently the site of a vital storytelling culture. Cuentos, or folktales, were usually told at
the end of the day as a kind of intimate performance with all the appropriate dramatic
gestures, pauses, and intonation. And they could take the form of morality tales, tales
of magic and enchantment, tales in which animals speak or the dead come alive. In
“La comadre Sebastiana,” for instance, the tale is told of a poor woodcutter who steals
one of his wife’s chickens to eat in the woods. There, in the woods, he is approached
first by Jesus and then by the Virgin, both of whom want to share his meal. He refuses
them; “and I’ll tell you why,” he says. “I think you neglect the poor. You give everything
to the rich and so little to the poor. You don’t treat us equally.” This slyly subversive
comment on the cosy relationship between the Christian church and the wealthy is
followed by a further, equally wry and equally serious, touch. When a third person
approaches the poor woodcutter, it turns out to be “Dona Sebastiana, Death herself.”
The woodcutter is happy to share his food with her, because death after all treats
everyone equally. Death rewards the poor man with the gift of healing. He will, death
tells the man, be able to heal anyone, even the terminally ill; the one proviso is that, if
he should see Dona Sebastiana standing at the head of the bed, he should not cure that
sick person because “he has been called by God.” Eventually, the poor man ignores the
proviso. Called to the sick bed of a rich man, he sees Dona Sebastiana at the head of
the bed but grabs her and drags her to the foot. He cures the rich man, but, for his
disobedience, he has to switch places with him. The story ends with the woodcutter’s
soul being hurled into Dona Sebastiana’s cart “as it slowly made its way to eternity.”
“La comadre Sebastiana” is an intriguing mix of morality and magic, with a further
element of sly social criticism leveled at the church. There are several extant versions
of the tale. And there are many more about La Llorona, the “weeping woman:”
versions of this story have been found in Mexican-American communities all over
the United States. Essentially, hers is a story of woman as violator and violated. La
Llorona kills her children. Sometimes she does so because their father and her lover
has left her – most often, in these versions, because La Llorona is poor, he is rich, and
he has gone off to marry a woman of his own class. Sometimes she does so because
their father and her lover has threatened to take the children from her. Sometimes she
does so because she has been driven insane. La Llorona then commits suicide and
roams the streets and countryside, wailing for her loss and terrifying all those who see
her. In some versions of her tale, La Llorona is linked with other women with similarly
tragic stories: “Unfaithful Maria,” “the Devil Woman,” and “La Malinche.” The last
probably derives from the Indian name for the woman the Spanish called Dona
Marina, who acted as interpreter and mistress to Cortes during the first stage of the
conquest of Mexico. So the story, strange and supernatural as it is, is threaded into
history: the imperial venture that was literally, for many Indian women, accompanied
by rape and that was also a larger, metaphorical violation, the rape of a culture and a
continent. Both Malinche and La Llorona, in turn, can be linked to another female
icon of Mexican-American culture discussed earlier, the Virgin of Guadalupe. TheGGray_c02.indd 140ray_c 02 .indd 140 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM