Claudio Lomnitz's study of death and Mexican national identity situates La Llorona within a much larger Mexican cultural relationship to death and mourning, in which figures of grief-stricken, wronged or punished womanhood carry weight well beyond a simple scare story, intersecting with colonial-era anxieties about mixed-race children, abandonment, and the position of indigenous and mestiza women under Spanish rule.
The legend has hundreds of documented regional variants across Mexico, the American Southwest, and Central America, with differing explanations for why she drowned her children, ranging from poverty and abandonment to deliberate revenge, and differing outcomes for anyone who encounters her, which folklorists read as evidence of a story continually reshaped to carry whatever local anxiety about family, loss and womanhood a community most needed to process. Her continued vitality in Mexican-American communities specifically, where she remains one of the most widely told cautionary legends passed within families, has made her a significant figure in Chicano literature and folklore studies as a symbol reinterpreted across generations rather than a fixed, static tale.