» La Llorona sightings — and a history about the little railroad that could
La Llorona sightings – and a history about the little railroad that could
LA LLORONA: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE WEEPING WOMAN
Compiled and edited by Judith Shaw Beatty; illustrations by Anita Otilia Rodriguez
EM. Tippetts (2019, 130 pp.)
She can drive a Model T like a bat out of hell. She can gamble like nobody’s business, cleaning out the other guys while tapping them lightly on the shoe under the table with her hoof.
Or, she flees an abusive husband and accidentally leaves her children to freeze to death – or drown – by the river. She shows up at village dances, wailing and moaning and showing off her hairy, hoofed feet. She is dressed all in black, or all in white, with a veiled face, and is either a viejita, a little old lady, or young and beautiful, haunting the river where her children drowned.
And she’s still furious that the crooked dentist pulled out all of her teeth.
These are some of the 56 first-person “particular stories” of encountering the legendary La Llorona that author Judith Shaw Beatty has included in this second edition of her compilation (first published in 1988).
These plainspoken I-swear-it-happened eyewitness accounts are by turns bemusing or super spooky, and range in time and place from turn of the 20th century Parral, Mexico, to Mora County, New Mexico – called “La Llorona’s highway” – in the 1950s, to present-day Santa Fe and southern Colorado.
Perhaps she came from Spain, a lady named María, or from Mexico, whose husband took off with another woman, leaving her with two children, whom she drowned in a rage.
Or, she was a lady who liked to party and abandoned her children by the river, and when it was time for her die, the Angel of Death told her she couldn’t kick off until she found them.
Beatty, who has lived in New Mexico since 1973, notes that La Llorona legend in some form can be found in Celtic and North African cultures, and in the Bible. Perhaps Hernán Cortés’ interpreter and mistress, La Malinche, is the root of the legend – a mother who grieved the loss of their son, Martín, when he was taken back to Spain.
But “the most haunting, memorable and terrifying tales of all,” writes Beatty, “seem to come from the American Southwest.”
In any case, La Llorona’s appearance acts as a powerful corrective force, especially to borrachos who swear after sighting her on the way home from the cantina that they will give up drinking forever.
Artist Anita Rodriguez’s suitably creepy black-and-white illustrations capture the terror the apparitions in their many forms inspire. There is the crying bundle left on the road that reveals a gruesome face and knarly fangs (“Mira, Daddy, tengo dientes,” it cries), the requisite hauntings in the cemetery, even the bathing of the stinky sheepherder who cowers under her skeletal veiled form, scolding him to take his bath.
Rodriguez (Tempo’s own columnist and author of “Coyota in the Kitchen”) writes in her Foreword that she has been inspired in her drawings by these authentic voices in the rural oral tradition – the voices “of my grandparents, their peers and neighbors.”
There are as many versions of the unfortunate lady as there are tellers of the tale.
TRACKING THE CHILI LINE RAILROAD TO SANTA FE
American Through Time/Arcadia Publishing (2020, 128 pp.)
The vision of career railroad General William Jackson Palmer resulted in the building of a narrow-gauge track from Antonito, Colorado, to Santa Fe – the Chili Line – begun in 1880, completed in 1887.
It was visionary because the transcontinental railroad extended from East to West coasts, but this subsidiary of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad would go north to south. Moreover, “narrow gauge” meant 3 feet between rails, as opposed to the standard gauge (4 feet, 8.5 inches) – allowing locomotives to navigate the steep grades of the Rocky Mountains.
Although part of a much longer stretch planned to extend from Denver to Mexico City – mired in financial woes as well as battles with other railroad lines like the extensive Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe – Palmer’s Chili Line from Antonito to Santa Fe took seven hours, 15 minutes, at a speed of 17.3 miles per hour.
It ran until September 1, 1941 – and “played a major role in opening up vast stretches of Northern New Mexico.”
Mike Butler’s elucidating story is chock-full of historic photographs from the Richard L. Dorman collection. He tells the vintage tale of the poky little railroad line running from watering hole to rural town, Palmilla to Tres Piedras, Taos Junction to Embudo, Española to Santa Fe, running right in front of the Santuario de Guadalupe and parking at the Santa Fe depot, which is now Tomasita’s restaurant, on Guadalupe and Manhattan streets.
Each chapter features photos of the early depots, gone for the most part; the “colorful characters” who were part the story, like forester Aldo Leopold, who established the first ranger station at Tres Piedras; and, finally, how to track the remnants of the Chili Line today – like finding Maria’s Taos Junction Café Bar (at the junction of Highway 285 and State Road 567), shuttered, but still on its last legs.
Accompanied by wonderful photographs – of Santa Clara Pueblo residents selling their pottery by the railroad tracks, and along the way of bridges and derailments – Butler’s story of the Chili Line is a significant history of this part of the country, and still resonates strongly today. For example, the building of the Embudo (Spanish for “funnel) streamgauging station in December 1888 was thanks to John Wesley Powell’s U.S. Geological Survey, and a group of fledgling hydrographers hauled out from the East.
Embudo’s steam-gauging station was the first of 8,000 such stations established in the United States – and it is going strong today.
Some readers might be surprised to learn that harvesting timber had been a big part of the local economy in the early 20th century at La Madera, until all the trees had been cut down by 1926. There were active mines, and even New Mexico native elk, exterminated by 1900 by hunters, notes Butler, and replaced by elk introductions from Wyoming in 1915.
Read more about local legends “Long” John Dunn, the Bond family of Española, and Edith Warner, freight agent at Otowi (Los Alamos), and her tearoom guests J. Robert Oppenheimer and Manhattan Project colleagues – “although she never learned the real names of her brilliant and charming guests until the end of the war.”