The Damned and the Divine: Decoding and Decolonizing La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen de Guadalupe in U.S. American Narratives

This dissertation examines the evolving portrayals of three central mythic mothers—La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen de Guadalupe—across U.S. literature, film, and television. Drawing from Chicanx feminist theory, decolonial studies, and folklore scholarship, the project argues that these mythic figures function as cultural touchstones through which Mexican and Chicanx identity has been negotiated, suppressed, and reclaimed. Each chapter situates one mythic mother within a genealogy of reinterpretation, beginning with portrayals by non-Mexican or non-Latine creators and culminating in works by Mexican or Chicanx artists.This structure highlights how the symbolic power of these figures transforms over time from colonial and patriarchal distortion toward reclamation, empowerment, and a more fluid, multifaceted consciousness. Through close readings of texts such as Frank Norris’s McTeague, So Far from God, I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, alongside television and film media such as Coco, Under the Same Moon, High Noon, and Snowfall, this study examines how narrative and visual media reimagine folkloric archetypes to challenge inherited hierarchies of gender, nation, and race. Engaging Domino Renee Pérez’s folkloric lens, this dissertation situates these reimaginings within broader discourses of decoloniality and cultural survival. By tracing how these mythic women are adapted and retold, this project reveals how their reconfigurations serve as a strategy for collective healing and resistance. Ultimately, it contends that the reclamation of La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen de Guadalupe not only empowers women of Mexican descent but also reshapes how dominant U.S. culture consumes and understands Latinx identity. These mythic women, once weaponized to silence and discipline women, now emerge as complex symbols of endurance, self-definition, and transnational belonging across the cultural borderlands.