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Posted by: Stephen Winick
The American Folklife Center's 2021 Mummers play is about a zoom meeting that gets invaded by a hacker who won't let the participants leave until he gets a bitcoin ransom. 2021 has felt like a zoom meeting that wouldn't end, so we hope our audience can relate! Find a video of the play and the complete annotated script in this blog!
Posted in: christmas, Folk Drama, Holidays, Mumming, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Halloween and Día de Muertos are almost here! So, believe it or not, Season 4, Episode 1 of the Folklife Today Podcast, our 2021 Halloween and Día de Muertos episode, is ready for listening! It features interviews about the Weeping Woman, La Llorona, a spirit from Latin American folklore, plus related songs and stories. The people interviewed are Juan Díes, leader of the Sones de Mexico Ensemble, Camille Acosta, who wrote her masters thesis on La Llorona before interning at AFC, and Allina Migoni, AFC's Latinx subject specialist. This blog contains links to download the podcast, background on our guests, and links to full audio of the songs.
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Folksong, Halloween, Halloween Songs, Halloween Stories, La Llorona, Podcasts
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is the fourth blog post in a series about La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, a spirit that haunts the folklore of Mexico and other Latin American countries. We'll present comments on the legend by the writer Rudolfo Anaya, the scholar Domino Renee Perez, our former intern and Llorona expert Camille Acosta, pioneering Costa Rican writer Manuel Argüello Mora, and Esperanza Sernas, a restaurant worker interviewed in 1977 by fieldworker Philip George for AFC's Chicago Ethnic Arts Project. This blog also contains one of the most gruesome traditional descriptions of La Llorona we've seen so far! The whole series will be published in time for Día de Muertos (aka Día de los Muertos) 2021, so stay tuned....
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Halloween, Halloween Stories, Hispanic American History, La Llorona, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is the second blog post in a series about La Llorona, the weeping woman who haunts Mexican and other Latinx cultures. The series will be published in time for Día de Muertos 2021. In this post, I'll show some of the story's long history, especially in Mexico. I'll give links to primary sources from the 1570s showing the story was already present among Indigenous Mexicans at that time and earlier. I'll also present what I believe is new evidence of a strong link for some La Llorona stories with Spain.
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Halloween, Hispanic American History, La Llorona
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In Latin America, in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S., and especially in Mexico, no ghost story is told as often, discussed as enthusiastically, or interpreted as widely, as the legend of La Llorona. With this introduction, AFC kicks off a short series of blogs on La Llorona stories and songs between now and Día de Muertos
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Halloween, Hispanic American History, La Llorona, Uncategorized