LOS ANGELES, October 21, 2026 — A downtown Los Angeles stage production merges traditional Mexican bogeymen with modern immigration fears to reframe who poses the real danger. In “Yamel Cucuy,” a 13-year-old girl is hunted by immigration agents and encounters Mexican folkloric monsters in a horror-inflected story running at the Latino Theater Company through November 1, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Folklore and Historical Displacement
Mexican American folklore encompasses the tales and history of Chicano people who live in the United States, according to Wikipedia. People of Spanish descent, or Chicano people, have been living in the southwestern part of the United States since Mexico had been a colony of the Spanish empire prior to 1821. Mexico gained independence in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence. Following the Mexican-American War, most of this area, almost half of Mexico’s northern territory, was ceded to the United States, and approximately 80,000 Spanish-Mexican-Indian people suddenly became inhabitants of the United States, according to Wikipedia. After the war, the United States acquired a huge chunk of land, and as a result, all of the Mexican nationals living in the area were now part of the United States, according to Wikipedia. Citizens of the United States began flooding into the area to find land to live on, according to Wikipedia.
A well-known example in Chicano folklore is La Llorona, the weeping woman, according to Wikipedia. There are varying different variations of La Llorona, with one common account describing her as the ghost of a murderous mother who haunts near water like river banks or lake shores, according to Wikipedia. She is always described as having long hair, down below her waist, and is seen wearing a white gown, according to Wikipedia. As the tale goes, her lover left her with their two children, and angrily, she drowned her children in an act of revenge or grief, according to Wikipedia. For that reason, she is doomed to walk the earth forever in search of her children, according to Wikipedia.
La Llorona serves as a cultural allegory, instructing people how to live and act within established social mores, according to Wikipedia. Her tale is often used as a bedtime story to get children to go to sleep or behave when out in public, according to Wikipedia. Given the popularity of the legend, there are many works done by folklorists, literary critics, anthropologists, and feminist writers, with children’s books, short stories, novels, and films being just a few of the ways La Llorona has been inscribed into history, according to Wikipedia. As Gloria Anzaldua, a scholar of Chicana cultural and feminist theory, discussed in her article “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” living on the United States side of the border made it difficult for Hispanics to relate to their national identity due to their oppression by Anglo-American colonizers, according to Wikipedia. These colonizing groups forced those of Hispanic descent to speak English at schools and other institutions, and Anzaldua stated how she recalled being caught speaking Spanish at recess and got three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler, according to Wikipedia.
Theatrical Fusion and Monsters as Protectors
The stage production mixes puppetry, live theater, and Indigenous percussion to turn familiar bogeymen into protectors while asking audiences to reconsider who, and what, poses the real danger, according to the Los Angeles Times. The play connects children’s folklore and immigration enforcement, suggesting that borders and fear-driven systems can be questioned and changed rather than accepted as inevitable, according to the Los Angeles Times. Running inside the Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown Los Angeles’s Historic Core, the play follows a 13-year-old girl named Yamel, played by Diana Patricia Guizado, who is hunted by immigration agents and haunted by specters from Mexican folklore, according to the Los Angeles Times. These specters include the chupacabra, La Llorona, La Lechuza, and El Viejo del Costal, according to the Los Angeles Times. The story also features borders including the frontier between life and death, with Yamel journeying at one point into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The narrative also folds in modern-day horrors both literally and figuratively, as Yamel is a horror fan bingeing scary movies in the apartment she shares with her older brother, Gustavo Martinez, and her aunt, Minerva Villa, while she waits for them to get home after school, according to the Los Angeles Times. Caroline Reck co-wrote and directed the play, and she noted that horror movies provoke fear, stating that she did not want audiences to passively watch while somebody else is scared on stage, according to the Los Angeles Times. Reck stated that she wants the audience to be afraid on behalf of the character, to worry about her, to feel complicit in watching her be in trouble, and to ask what they are doing about it, according to the Los Angeles Times. Horror movies are uniquely interactive, and Reck wants the audience to sit in those churning emotions, according to the Los Angeles Times. During a recent performance, when El Viejo del Costal, played by Michael Galvan, appeared onstage draped in rough burlap with liquid and slithering movements, a kid in the audience whimpered, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Political Context and Audience Engagement
The election of 2024 was a major letdown for many performers in “Yamel Cucuy,” which last played in Los Angeles just after President Donald Trump won a second term in office, according to the Los Angeles Times. The very next morning, the cast soldiered on to perform a high school student matinee as part of the Latino Theater Company’s Encuentro festival, a celebration of contemporary Latino theater in the heart of Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Times. The mood was morose among both the cast and the students, but the Austin-based production company Glass Half Full held an after-show talkback, engaging directly with the high schoolers, according to the Los Angeles Times. As the name implies, Glass Half Full filters its work through a hopeful lens, confronting the Trump administration’s immigration policies while offering potential solutions, however imaginative they may be, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Sources
- 'Yamel Cucuy' is hunted by immigration agents and haunted by Mexican folklore
- Mexican American folklore
- 'Yamel Cucuy' is hunted by immigration agents and haunted by Mexican folklore
Photo: Timathom (CC BY-SA 3.0)
