The Incorruptible Sister Irenita

In 1931, Sister Irenita, a young nun of St. John’s parish in Fresno, died from appendicitis. One person remembers her last words: “I don’t want to die.” For some years thereafter, Sister Irenita could still be spotted by nuns and students in St. John’s Catholic School and the nearby cathedral, lingering around the rectory and flicking lights on and off in empty classrooms. She did so until a special mass was said for her soul.

Apparently, in 1936, her coffin was unearthed and opened by vandals. Upon investigation, the story goes, the Monsignor discovered something very strange: he found that the corpse was uncorrupted--the body was free of all decay even though she had been dead for years. Sister Irenita’s story was recently published in a Halloween edition of the Fresno Bee; journalist Tom Bisson included her story with other “spooky tales” of “those phantoms who hoot and gibber and drag the clanking chains of mystery down the stairs of our collective unconscious.” This is how the tale of Sister Irenita is remembered by local residents: as a creepy ghost story, an uncanny brush with the horrific.

But let me just say this: had this story been told 700 years earlier, Sister Irenita might have been called a saint. Medieval narratives of sanctity--hagiographies, the lives of the saints--abound with tales of incorruptible bodies, that is, saintly corpses that prove resistant to decay. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s eleventh-century Vita S. Wihtburge (The Life of St. Wihtburh), for example, tells us that upon the opening of Wihtburh’s tomb, everyone was amazed by the radiance of her undecayed body: “her face glowed for the Lord with rosy cheeks, animated with the breath of life; her breasts are firm and upright in their incorruption, her unwedded limbs blossom with the loveliness of paradise.”

When the papacy began to crystallize an official canonization process in the twelfth century, incorruptibility was seen to be one of the strongest recommendations for the deceased’s legitimacy as a saint. Incorruptible bodies, to medieval peoples, signified purity, sanctity, loftiness. A body that was radiant though in death reflected a soul that was rejoicing among the blessed in paradise. Indeed, an undecayed body could even represent the union of flesh and spirit the saint had achieved while alive.

St. John’s parish did not, of course, begin to whisper about the possibilities of beatification and ultimate canonization. There are no altarpieces, festivals, or medallions commemorating Fresno’s local saint--only an entry in the mysterious annals of ghost lore. Why? First, one may realize that, around the 16th c., the Catholic Church lost its obsession with discovering and creating new saints. Furthermore, the New Code of Canon Law (1983) abandoned most of the complex and subtle criteria--including incorruptibility--for determining sainthood. But this does not explain why Sister Irenita has, failing saintliness, in fact become ghostly. To explore this, I might leave behind ecclesiastical law and look instead to intersecting folklores.

Mexico has a lively and deeply entrenched tradition of “folk saints,” those luminaries (such as deceased curanderos) who are followed, revered, and summoned for healings but are not formally recognized by the Catholic hierarchy. This practice has often caused strife between local believers and the Church, for the Church feels that its monopoly on sainthood--almost a thousand years strong--is threatened by folk saints. And indeed it is: as cultus develops around such folk saints as Nino Fidencio, Fidencistas threaten schism. The Church has responded by frantically discussing the possibility of canonization in order to regain control.

With the wave of Mexican immigration in the first half of the twentieth century, California’s Catholic parishes decided to take an active role in the Americanization of the new immigrants. Although their flocks were largely hispanic, California’s Catholic hierarchy, at the time, was predominantly Irish-American. Irish-American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century, traumatized by the potato famine and rebuked by ecclesiastical reform, de-emphasized the presence and power of the saints. It also found less value in the bodily aspects of sainthood--medieval traditions of saintly healings and paradisiacal bodies (still present in Mexican folk Catholicism) gave way to a strictly liturgical experience of the divine. Perhaps the story of Sister Irenita and her incorrupt body as ghost story, then, became another means of acculturation for Mexican immigrants. The story would, of course, enforce the Church’s grip on the manufacturing of saints by infernalizing Sister Irenita’s miraculous body. But it would also ensure an acculturation to Irish-American forms of folk Catholicism, in which saints were far less quotidian and were, instead, more likely to be disembodied, abstract, and antique.

BN: Dr. Bronner's Mystic Prose

“Passions that quicken your senses, fulfill; quench the thirst of lonesome years! Yet the sun has shadows, learn to control your will; to enjoy life long happiness, not tears! Wait! Rise to the stars above and thrill! Arouse the very flames of life! Sweetheart, kiss me: Hold still, hold still! Listen to God’s reward for strife! Rosebuds, slowly woken, break budding open! delicate, sweet, so on soft fingertips; shivering up your spine, red pulsing blood; in lightning speed through your pure body’s lips! Caressing deep, searching, way out of sight; oh beautiful spirit of God’s eternal Spring! Heat of passion in a warm moonlit night! Ecstasy to be buried in heaven, within! Relaxed then to long, dreamless sleep; body and soul join close in life’s most brilliant bliss! Revealing clarity-beauty-harmony-peace, sailing on far away sun-laden ships! Yet-what-cunning-feminine touch can draw new desire to pulsing lips! When-soft-hands wander-casually-such, deftly down near lingering tips! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life, the Moral ABC uniting All-One, brave, all life.”

By Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997), from the label of Dr. Bronner's Hemp Almond Magic Soap. Compare to the writings of such Spanish mystics as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.

Bronner was a soapmaker, visionary, and former mental patient whose all-natural soaps have become ubiquitous in natural foods stores across the country. Apparently, in Bronner's adopted homeland of California, spiritual seekers in the late 1960s would remove the labels of his wholesome soaps and frame them. One such seeker testified: "Your label is my bible."

The Billiwhack Monster of Ventura County

In 1964, the LA Times published reports of a strange beast haunting the abandoned concrete structures of the old Billiwhack Dairy in Aliso Canyon, Ventura County. The beast of Billiwhack had reportedly been seen several times by local high school students, who seemed obsessed with undertaking valiant quests into the monster’s territory. One youngster said that he had encountered a “snarling, hairy man in a hole,” and other reports unanimously described a tall, furry, muscular hominid with claws and ram-like horns. He was said to be half man and half sheep, and to be extremely aggressive.

Reports have largely been confined to the 1950s and 60s, yet people are still discussing the beast to this day. How can one account for this very time-specific legend that continues to have significance? Perhaps a bit of background is in order. The second half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the notion of the government as ‘mad scientist’: according to popular culture, the secret bureaus of our nation since WWII have been sponsoring programs and experiments meant to change the very makeup of the human body.

Part of this is based on reality. Our government has indeed created programs that furtively transgress the body’s boundaries, such as the fluorination of tap water or the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. And in popular legend, ‘anti-governments’ like that of Communist Russia have, in turn, made a move to poison the American water supply. Postwar thought was highly suspicious of government in all its incarnations.

The decades following WWII sprouted a deep mistrust of our own government’s military and scientists in particular. The legends surrounding Roswell since the 1970s and the Billiwhack monster from the 50s and 60s are only two examples. Before the war, the government was lambasted for idiocy, backwardness, or outright oppression. After the war, many of the citizens of the United States began to suspect that their government was keeping from them earth-shattering secrets. This was perhaps most evident in the West, where vast expanses of open desert facilitated the creation of military and nuclear complexes whose exact activities could not be easily discerned.

I see the Billiwhack monster to be very much a product of this. According to legend, the creature had been created by the old owner of the Billiwhack Dairy, one August Rubel, during the war. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had an outpost training camp on nearby Catalina Island, had supposedly commissioned him to undertake experiments in the underground tunnels below the dairy. He was directed to create a “super soldier.” The beast of Billiwhack was apparently an escaped experiment gone wrong.

When the war enterprise industrialized in the twentieth century, and each individual soldier seemed to become a machine (or, perhaps, cogs in a much larger machine), the notion of the supersoldier was born. The “Captain America” comic series, whose first installment was published in 1940, was one such supersoldier: according to the story, a secret, government-administered serum had transformed a weak young man into the ultimate fighting machine. Captain America was what happened when these governmental experiments turned out right. The Billiwhack monster was what happened when they went horribly awry.

This is only the most popular explanation for the beast of Billiwhack. In addition to this legend, some have dismissed it as the product of the adolescent imagination (most eyewitnesses are, indeed, high school students), and cryptozoologists suppose that it is some form of deformed bigfoot. But here, I’m not interested in origins. What I’m interested in is memory. What this story throws into high relief is another aspect of our memory of WWII. On one side, we have the so-called “Greatest Generation.” On the other, we have a deep-seated uneasiness about and suspicion of wartime governmental activities. We look back on the war years and see a time of secrecy, deceit, aggression, and, ultimately, monstrosity. The embodiment of this memory has, apparently, been lurking in a dilapidated dairy surrounded by Southern California’s sunny orchards.

Japanese Internment Camp Gardens

Recently, I went to a wonderful exhibit at the Japanese-American National Museum in L.A. It was a one-room exhibit dedicated to Japanese-Americans and gardening. I found much of it fascinating, but the most fascinating part of the exhibit was really the smallest part: a brief mention of sagebrush styled as bonsai in the vast prairies east of the Sierra Nevada.

During WWII, when Japanese-Americans were torn from their homes and relocated to internment camps in the great deserts and open country of California and beyond, men who had previously found work and pleasure in gardening turned their creativity and their talents on the native flora and fauna around them.

At Manzanar in the windswept Eastern Sierra, the men gathered Joshua Trees (a remarkable feat) and created fantastic and beautiful Japanese-style gardens for the new community. They moved boulders and massive amounts of earth from the surrounding area, and transplanted sagebrush, willows, cattails, and native grasses.

And over in Minidoka, in southern Idaho, Yasusuke Kogita was amassing magnificent and beautiful stones to display as sculpture in his native rock garden (see, perhaps, the Japanese art of suiseki). There, he transplanted sagebrush and carefully pruned them into gorgeous specimens of fragrant bonsai.

Were Kogita, the men at Manzanar, and the men of many other internment camps creating Japanese gardens? Japanese gardens use a set of aesthetic building blocks to create scenes that are unified in style and philosophy but individual and idiosyncratic in execution. The men in the internment camps used these familiar building blocks to create gardens that approximated these stylistic conventions. But where the approximation failed is, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of their endeavors.

For instance, it is difficult to tell whether Kogita was truly creating bonsai. If his plants were merely sagebrush shaped into pleasing forms, then he could not have been creating true bonsai. Bonsai is necessarily nature in miniature, it takes expansive vistas and focuses them, distills them. This usually involves some sort of shrinking, taking a plant that would usually be much larger and constraining its size; this results in a miniscule sculpture-of-sorts that recalls something much more vast. Unfortunately, Kogita’s sagebrush creations were life-sized. Aesthetically pruned plants, no matter how beautiful, can not be bonsai if they do not, somehow, capture in miniature the essence of a landscape.

And yet, wasn’t Kogita capturing the essence of a landscape? What better way to communicate the essence of sagebrush country than with its namesake plant, pruned to capture the way the rushing winds twist and flay every living thing that dares to show itself in that expansive land? One must remember that bonsai is not really mimesis; in its best forms it does not seek to copy or imitate. Rather, it attempts to manifest, to embody and express a landscape’s pith and substance, its being. Kogita’s sagebrush were bonsai, then, in that they embodied the spirit of place in concentrated form.

Kogita’s sons have said that their father created his garden to take control of his world, a world overturned by forced relocation. This sounds simple enough. But couldn’t the gardening impulse have been much more nuanced? Without daring to state that I know exactly what went on his mind, let me speculate. Perhaps, by taking the plants of his new environment and encouraging them to display their true natures more fully--to express their roles as distillations of place--he was not so much controlling his world as attempting to immerse himself in it, to flow along with it.

The Japanese virtue of gaman, upon which the internees relied, stresses endurance, self-discipline, and dignity in the face of hardship. Kogita’s sagebrush demonstrated gaman, as did the gardens at Manzanar. Forced removal from their homes and internment in strange locales may have focused these men’s attentions on the importance and the power of place. By creating gardens and bonsai that expressed the vastness of their new locations on a human scale, the men may have been miniaturizing their world to embrace it, not control it.

Bigfoot and the Virgin

Bigfoot, the gigantic hairy hominid that roams the forests of Northern California, can often be seen carved out of wood and keeping watch over the doorways of many a business and residence along the old redwood highways. Standing serene yet stern, he recalls the Virgin Mary herself, who also guards portals as faithfully as she guards her virginity. But Bigfoot and the Virgin have more in common than mere statuesque functionality.

Willow Creek has designated itself the capital of Bigfoot country. It has erected a huge, twenty-five-foot-tall statue in Bigfoot’s honor. But in fact, Willow Creek is not the only community to take Bigfoot as its special emblem. Bigfoot can boast as many commemorative statues as can the bears of Yosemite. His hulking form can be seen everywhere, greeting tourists and visitors with his less-than-friendly face. But here’s the catch: it is still uncertain whether or not he exists. What is most interesting about this little complication is the fact that communities take him as their totem whether or not certain individuals within that community believe he’s real.

It is clear that the Bigfoot legend grows scientifically. That is, it acquires detail and specificity through a correlation of eyewitness accounts and other such evidence (footprints, bits of hair, his distinctive screams and odor). In contemporary discourse, there are no equivalents of the fairytale or the myth to illuminate specifics about behavior, personality, or history the way one can investigate, say, the trolls of European folklore. There are only eyewitness accounts, or “memorates.” Bigfoot ‘hunters’ (specialists, really) collaborate various memorates to construct a profile of the creature that is often rather precise in its naturalistic detail.

In recent years, memorates have surfaced connecting Bigfoot to UFOs. This has coincided with the creation of a new legend about these creatures’ extraterrestrial origin. According to this legend, Bigfeet are emissaries of an advanced race and possess highly developed technology and even psychic abilities. For the moment, this sits uneasily with the current legend that emphasizes Bigfoot’s terrestrial animal nature, in which he eats roots and rodents, is afraid of electric lights, and is shy and sometimes aggressive toward humans. Linda Milligan has shown that the two legends may sometimes even coexist unchallenged in the same person.

What is the significance of this new legend? UFO religions such as Southern California’s Unarius Academy of Science often hold fast to a sort of flying-saucer eschatology. Unarian devotees stand waiting for the “Space Brothers” to return to earth and establish universal peace and a highly advanced Atlantean civilization. According to the new Bigfoot legend, he is sort of like one of the Space Brothers: enlightened, benevolent, even sublime.

This brings us back to the Virgin. As a conduit of the divine on earth, she is uniquely placed to aid the communities that invoke her. Simply recall the near-political role of La Virgen de Guadalupe in many Mexican-American communities. And in medieval and early modern contexts in which Christianity came into contact with other faiths (in Spain or the New World, for example), the Virgin became the prime protectress of her ‘friends.’ As such, she came to symbolize and embody the Christian community as it related to other communities. She was Christianity’s standard-bearer, at the forefront whenever culture conflict took place, because God had infused her earthly flesh with divinity and she had kept that flesh tightly enclosed, fortifying her virginity against attack.

Thanks to the new legend, Bigfoot is also now a meeting point between the terrestrial and the celestial, with full eschatological implications. Bigfoot is now regarded with affection, even devotion. The statues of powerful serenity that keep faithful watch over the rural forest communities of Northern California, therefore, may serve to invoke his higher authority. Although statues such as the one in Willow Creek often become tourist destinations, the stoic unfriendliness in their faces and foreboding monumentality may belie their original intention: they are called upon, perhaps, to actually guard against outsiders, or even ever-encroaching urbanity. This may be one reason why he is always placed at doorways and gates, or standing sentinel facing the highway.

But affection never completely replaces fear. The Klamath River Resort Inn beckons to tourists--“it is a great place to stay while on vacation or doing research”--but simultaneously invokes the region’s fearsome guard: “Many times we have walked or hiked in the local forests and have gotten that primordial chill down the spine or hair standing on the back of the neck due to a[n] instinct that we were being watched.  It may have been a deer, mountain lion, or even a bear - but what if it was something more...” Potential visitors, it implies, may wish to think twice.

Even the original, terrestrial legend demonstrates Bigfoot’s significance to rural communities. Bigfoot belongs to the forest, he seems to embody it, or even to embody the fluid boundary between the human and the wild. And yet few can attest to actually having seen him; because he is supremely elusive, he is also untouched, and untouchable. His liminal, ambiguous nature, like the Virgin but unlike Yosemite’s bear, lends him the supernatural ability to embody communal or regional identity and guard it against the outside world.

BN: Earthquake Prayer

BN is short for "Brief Notice," the blindingly clever way I will now designate little bits of randomness I wish to document and/or share. So here's the first, an early Californian prayer for protection against earthquakes:

"Dios, nuestro Señor, nos bendiga,
Mi casa y este pueblo
Y todos los que en ella estamos y habitamos,
Y á ellos y á nosotros nos libra
Del ímpetu del terremoto,
En virtud del dulcísimo nombre de Jesús. Amén."

(God, our Lord, bless us, my home and this pueblo and all whom therein dwell, and preserve them and us from the violence of the earthquake, by virtue of the most gentle name of Jesus. Amen.)

From "Antepasados" (1977), the publication of Los Californianos, which I picked up in a used book store in Eureka.

Monterey Colonial

This was written from a room in the Motel 6 in Auburn, CA. Well, something occurred to me recently. Many of the old 19th c. houses from Mexican California have a common structure. They are two-tiered, but in lieu of interior hallways, they have a covered walkway and a line of railing running along the upper level with doors opening out onto it (see this picture from historic Monterey, on the top). They are made of stucco and tile, and usually adobe. Rancho Los Cerritos, in my hometown, is a beautiful example of this architectural style, and is one of the few remaining structures of its type in the state. Developed by Thomas Larkin in the first half of the 19th c., the style known as “Monterey Colonial” blended Mexican and American architecture to create a style that was uniquely Californian.

Now, as a part-time resident of New England, where wood and red brick prevail, I’ve noticed that Californians almost instinctively turn to stucco and tile when building anything from garages to strip malls. There is a deep-rooted affinity for these two quintessential materials of California’s Mexican past. In the same way, Californians seem to turn to the two-tiered, porched style of rancho architecture, the Monterey Colonial style. I see it being used for private residences, shopping centers, and office buildings. And, interestingly, almost every Motel 6 in the west, or perhaps the country. See the image on the bottom, from Tucson, AZ.

Motel 6 was founded in 1962 by William Becker and Paul Greene in Santa Barbara. Since the 1920s, Santa Barbara has made a very conscious effort to preserve the architectural flavor of its hispanic heritage. The first Motel 6 that was built, which is actually still running, followed a Monterey Colonial structural template. Subsequent Motel 6 buildings throughout California and the rest of the country, until very recently, continued to follow this style. I find it fascinating that this indigenous Californian architectural style may have so worked its way into the psyches of Becker and Greene that the birth of America’s first chain of budget motels was infused with such wonderful regionality.

As more and more Motel 6 buildings take inspiration from the architecture of the luxury hotel instead of the rancho, the older buildings with their regional specificity may eventually go the way of the original 19th c. Monterey Colonial ranchos. Whether or not we designate these motels historic landmarks like Rancho Los Cerritos is, perhaps, a matter of debate.

The Visionary Art of Dov Gertzweig

I have come to consider ‘New Age’ art as the latest addition to the rich corpus of self-taught visionary art, which includes the work of such luminaries as Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Shaker sister Polly Collins. Like all visionary artists, New Age artists construct alternative worlds detached from yet intrinsic to our own. These worlds are homiletic worlds, created to instruct, admonish, and enrich the world of the mundane; in no way, therefore, are we to imagine these worlds as merely autistic fantasies created for the artist’s own delectation. Although the worlds created by New Age visionaries are often incomprehensible to those on the outside, their images must nonetheless be read as texts, as visionary literature meant to communicate truths thought worthy of universal comprehension.

Gary “Dov” Gertzweig of Southern California is one such New Age artist. Born in North Hollywood, Gertzweig recalls how a visit to Yosemite in his youth awakened the environmental consciousness that would come to permeate his work. Initially trained as a musician, he has found outlet in the visual arts as well, in murals and "cosmic paintings;" thus, to Gertzweig, art and song seem to spring from the same visionary impulse, much as they did to Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Shakers.

Indeed, this intertwining of art and song seems to imbue his paintings with a distinct rhythm, but it is neither as frenetic and feverish as in the work of Ody Saban nor as jubilant as that of Sister Gertrude Morgan, two other self-taught visionaries Gertzweig's work recalls. Instead, his paintings seem to shimmer with the pulsing electricity that trickles through the veins of living plants. It is no wonder, then, that he imbues his paintings with heavy doses of vibrant greens and shimmering blues.

Gertzweig incorporates realistically rendered animals, archetypal human figures, swirling stylized plants, and the ubiquitous deep blues of sea and sky into his teeming compositions. He plants these Edens with botanical forms evoking redwoods, coast live oaks, and tropical plants, recalling California’s native landscapes and the exotic pastiche of the luxurious SoCal gardens all around him. Perhaps in response to the expansive views off the California coastline where sky and sea become one, the air and water in Gertzweig’s paintings often flow into each other, creating an uneasy sense of horizon loss and collapsed perspective. This results in works that are simultaneously flat and vast, as if the viewer is gazing in upon the moment of Creation. Asserts Gertzweig: “art can make a moment become eternal.”

Out of Southern California’s brown and brittle chaparral and L.A.’s smog and congestion, Gertzweig has created an alternative world filled with gardens of green, living things and sparkling air and water. Where tired urban postmoderns isolate themselves, trudge, and kvetch, the beings in Gertzweig’s world are radiant and harmonious. “Imagine our world,” the dolphins of the Astral Ocean told him, “where there are no possessions, no countries, abundance and no greed. This is our gift, our consciousness, and we wish to share it with you.”

Gertzweig’s response to his Southern California homeland, therefore, is the same as that of every other visionary artist dissatisfied with sin or vice in their communities. Where the Shakers recorded the whisperings of angels and spirits and Sister Gertrude Morgan captured visions of the New Jerusalem, Gertzweig has here created an alternative world that seeks to demonstrate both how our own world was and the way it could be. Collapsing perspective, time, and place into images of concentrated meaning, Gertzweig has created potent yet seemingly innocuous polemics against the political, social, and biological status quo.

(Image: "Cosmic Egg." Dov Gertzweig, begun 1990)

Bloody Mary and La Llorona

When I was in elementary school in Long Beach, CA, the girls I knew would sometimes talk about Bloody Mary, a specter who would appear in the mirror of the girls’ bathroom whenever her name was chanted a specified number of times (I don’t remember how many). You would go into the bathroom, stand before the mirror in relative darkness (the bathrooms had no lights that I can recall), chant “Bloody Mary,” and she would appear in the mirror and scratch your face. If you looked directly at her, she would scratch out your eyes.

After having done a bit of research, I came across other variants throughout the U.S. in which the chant runs something like “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.” I have also found that this ritual is usually associated with girls and bathrooms, much as it was in my childhood. Although many folklorists connect her to England’s Mary Queen of Scots or Queen Mary I, what I find interesting about her is her similarities to Southern Californian variants of La Llorona.

La Llorona, the Crying Woman, is a ghostly figure well-known to many hispanic families of California, the Southwest, and Mexico. There are many variants of the legend (just Google her); one version, collected by Terrence L. Hansen in Riverside in 1956, takes place in colonial Mexico: according to this version, there was a beautiful young Indian girl who had fallen in love with a wealthy Spaniard. She had three children by him, but he refused to marry her because of her lowly status. However, he told the girl that he would reconsider if the children weren't around to embarass him. In order to win back his love, she drowned her children one by one in the river. But even after this, he wed another, and she went mad with grief. Now, she wanders the waterways searching for her children. Her appearance is said to be a harbinger of death and misfortune.

Ghosts in California and the rest of the United States are, as a rule, indifferent or generally helpful towards the living. A very meager percentage are as malevolent as Bloody Mary and La Llorona; this prompts me to ask some questions about these two figures. In almost every variant of La Llorona collected thus far, she is some kind of distraught mother searching for or lamenting her dead offspring. Whether she killed them herself or not, she wanders the waterways tormented, along beaches and canals; she has even been spotted wailing and drifting along the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River.

In 1968, Bess Lomax Hawes noticed a gendered element to La Llorona folklore in her study of the female ward of the Las Palmas Juvenile Hall in L.A. Although most United States ghosts are male, she found that of the 31 ghost stories she collected, 28 were of female revenants, most of whom were actively hostile according to variants on the La Llorona theme. La Llorona, she argued, “wildly revenging herself upon men, upon her children, and upon herself, [is a] multifaceted, loving-hating ghost-mother [that] seems the explicit embodiment of the emotional conflicts of the adolescent delinquent girl.”

What are the connections between the hostile and feminine worlds of Bloody Mary and La Llorona? Well, for one thing, in many versions, La Llorona is given a name: Maria. Bloody Mary’s connection to mirrors and bathrooms seems to echo the watery associations of La Llorona. In many versions, La Llorona no longer has eyes because they have dissolved in her tears, and her face is somehow deformed. This is why looking into her face usually means certain death or disfigurement; in the versions Hawes analyzed, La Llorona attacks girls’ faces because she is jealous, or because they look like her dead daughters. The Bloody Mary of my childhood would scratch out your eyes if she caught you looking at her. La Llorona searches eternally for her dead children, and you can summon Bloody Mary by identifying yourself as the murderer of her baby. Two teen-age girls walking along L.A.’s Sunset Strip in the 1960s told a journalist about “La Harona,” a woman who had killed her children in a haze of syphilis-induced insanity. “If you shouted ‘La Harona!’ five times, she would come to you,” one said. The girls were still terrified by this story from their childhood. “They said she came through mirrors.”

Perhaps, La Llorona and Bloody Mary stem from one bundle of folkloric motifs lost in the mists of time. What may be more interesting, though, is this prospect: in Southern California, the United States’ Bloody Mary and Mexico’s La Llorona may have begun to intertwine as their communities of origin mingle and cross paths. And this cross-cultural dialogue is not happening in the grand sweep of politics or the media’s riddled mansion but the intimate and troubled female realm of adolescent girlhood.

A Little Introduction

“Folklife” is grassroots culture. It encompasses a wide range of cultural expression, from folk songs to outsider art, religious festivals to ghost stories.

California, according to the rest of the country, means nothing more than palm trees, flip flops, and Hollywood. People do not think of California when they think of folklife, they think of Appalachia, Tennessee, Mississippi. This blog hopes to change that somewhat, to open little windows onto the rich cultural heritage of the Far West.

Until I went to graduate school in Rhode Island, I had never really left California’s borders, especially for extended periods of time. For vacations, instead of going somewhere more exotic, I took roadtrips through the many regions of California with family and friends. Not only is California exquisitely beautiful (as any visitor to Yosemite, Death Valley, the redwoods, or the craggy coastline will tell you), but California has many hidden crevices, curiosities, unexpected turns. But I took California for granted.

Leaving my native state has forced me to reconsider California, to notice its particularity and its quirkiness. Recently, I began a periodic event at my co-op in Providence called “Regional Folklore Night.” The idea was to have people from many regions of the country and the world research and share the folklore of their homelands. A fellow from upstate New York shared a murder story from his high school. A couple Washingtonians sang a clamming song. A Hawaiian told a creation myth. And I brought many bits and pieces of California to the table, sharing Gold Rush ballads, Spanish mission hymns, and stories from old hispanic Los Angeles.

This blog is sort of an extension of Regional Folklore Night. California folklife is rich and needs to be shared. This is a formal call for you, dear reader, to send me your stuff: articles or papers you’ve written, songs and stories you’ve heard, interviews, recipes, photo essays, anything that somehow documents the grassroots culture of greater California, past and present. Thanks!