La Llorona Revisited: A Post-colonial Ecocritical Interpretation of Josephina López’s Unconquered Spirits

Document Type : Original Article

Author

English Department, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University

Abstract

In the contexts of coloniality and post coloniality, the experience of indigenous people has been shaped by the exposure to the tools of control employed by the colonizers, such as enslavement, racial bias, and acculturation. In her play Unconquered Spirits (1995), Josephina López sheds light on this experience through presenting two stories that take place four centuries apart yet manifest similar experiences of exploitation, betrayal, and injustice, a structure which suggests the continuance of this legacy of oppression. In both stories, the playwright adapts the myth of La Llorona, introducing subversions and adding contexts not only to criticize the legacy of (post)coloniality but also to attack the traditional interpretation of the Mexican myth created by biased norms. The present research attempts to contribute to the criticism of the rewriting of La Llorona myth in Unconquered Spirits through presenting a postcolonial ecocritical reading of the play. Issues that are central to the postcolonial ecocritical approach to literature and at the core of the two stories the play dramatizes—such as entitlement, belonging, colonialist asset-stripping, and the place of the human in a post-human world—will be explored, linking the two heroines’ impoverishment to the transformation of their native environments at the hands of coloniality. The analysis will be informed by postcolonial psychoanalytic theory, one of the theoretical paradigms that play a pivotal role in this rewriting.

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