Chandler Art Museum is running an exhibition called "¡MONSTRAS!: Female Legends of Latin America." The show features profiles of folklore characters like La Llorona and Santa Muerte, the saint of death.
It’s based on a podcast, also called "¡MONSTRAS!," created by Brenda Salguero and Orquidea Morales, a professor at the University of Arizona.
Morales joined The Show to discuss, saying the goal of the project is to explore the complexity of these ominous figures and why we find them so haunting.
Full conversation
ORQUIDEA MORALES: I like scaring people. I really do, like that's something I've done from childhood. I remember telling scary stories to my cousins and my sister. What I would do is I would read books in English and then tell them stories in Spanish, kind of expanding the narrative and like all that sort of stuff.
So I was a weird little kid, and then as I got older, a lot of my research was interested in kind of like in between, as things that live in the borders of between like normal, abnormal, those sort of things. And so horror just felt like the right genre to think about those complexities of what do we kind of keep outside the norm? What do we keep outside the boundary of safety and who is considered a monster?
SAM DINGMAN: And can you give me an example of what it was about characters from horror and maybe even folklore that resonated with the themes of in-betweenness and liminality that you had been studying?
MORALES: These monsters really reflect our fear of death. They exist between life and death.
They exist between these points that are joyful and something that we fear and that we, you know, we're terrified of dying. So they kind of are in between that. So, like, most of our monsters are like that, like La Llorona. That was like one of the major ones that I grew up with.
DINGMAN: So if I'm hearing you right, they kind of force your perspective onto something that you spend most of your life trying to avoid looking at.
MORALES: Exactly. It makes sense that we're scared of death, but it's also inevitable. That's part of what makes us human or mortality. And they make us think about those possibilities, right?
DINGMAN: I love that idea of possibilities, because it seems like in a lot of these stories, you're fixating on the fact that these figures who have ostensibly died were once human, and that it's not like they are monsters from the standpoint of having nothing in common with humanity. They are humans who we have made monstrous because they're dead. But if we look a little bit deeper, they're actually very similar to us.
MORALES: Exactly. Can you write my book now? Like that is exactly what changes it.
DINGMAN: Well, part of the reason I'm saying that, honestly, is because I was listening to a little bit of your podcast episode about La Llorona. And actually, I want to play a quick clip from it, if I may. I think this is the very first episode of the "¡MONSTRAS!” podcast, which is called La Llorona.
“An evening wind blows. You should be cold. Everything gone. Everything taken from you. How did it once feel holding them? Your children, their scent on your skin. Sound of their laughter ringing in your heart. Each memory fades into some hollow part of you.”
All right, so that's just a few seconds from the beginning of your La Llorona episode. Before we get to talking about the way the episode is kind of phrased, can you give us just like, a very brief overview of the La Llorona story?
MORALES: Yeah. So the story, it has a lot of variations but at its core, it's the story about a young woman. Usually her name is Maria. She's usually Indigenous or mestiza, and she falls in love with a Spaniard. They have children out of wedlock. And then he decides that he's going to marry someone of his own kind. Someone that's actually, you know, upper class all of that sort of stuff. And she is now stuck with children out of wedlock, which during that time is not allowed.
So she drowns her children either as a form of revenge or just out of desperation. And then she herself dies and haunts that body of water, and she cries for her children trying to get them back. And if you go out at night and you hear her crying, you have to stay away or otherwise you'll take you to replace her lost children.
DINGMAN: Yeah. It's a very heavy story. And one of the things that I really love about the way that you approached it in the podcast is that at least at the beginning, there the narration is addressed to you, which implies that the the listener is kind of being put in the position of being like La Llorona, of being the person who has become this supposed monster.
But the way that you're addressing her is very human. Like think about the regret that you feel. Think about the loss that you've experienced. Think about the physical sensation on your body of being out in the woods. And it strikes me as somewhat subversive, this idea that you're putting the listener in La Llorona's shoes.
MORALES: Yeah, and that's something that we really want to do with this podcast, is we want to be monstrous. Like, what does it mean to be a monstrous woman? What does it mean to live in between? La Llorona is such a perfect example of that because she was a product of her time. Like if you have children out of wedlock now, that's totally fine.
You know, society isn’t going to fall down on you and, and ostracize you and isolate you, right? Like she wasn't going to have a life with those conditions. So she found a way to exist, right? And that was death for her. And that is kind of a reflection of, of gendered expectations and the pressure of maternity for a lot of women. So it reflects all these different, like, social expectations.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I just want to flag what you just said, because it might have gone by people's ears quickly. But I think it's really important that the way she found to exist was death.
MORALES: These monsters or these people can't exist in these horrible situations we've created. Right. So monstrousness provides a way to live, and sometimes death provides a way to live as a ghost, right?
DINGMAN So is there an element to it of the monster is not just something for us to fear, but in a way, it's an indictment of the world we've created. And in some ways, there is power in empathizing with the monster, who, of course, would want to come back and terrorize and assault the way of life that exists in the human world, because it's what drove them into the liminal world of death that they now occupy?
MORALES: Yeah, I think so. Like by looking at the monsters, we learn about what society expects from us and what the limitations are, right? Like, you can't behave in certain ways, you can't be too loud, you can't ratchet, right? Because all of those things are going to be policed or are going to be, you know, seen as negative. But why? Who gets to dictate what is bad and who gets to dictate what is normal? And monsters are asking that, why is this normal and why am I a monster?
