I’ve been very out of Tumblr lately because WORK, but I’ve just seen this maravilla crossing my tl and I wanted to add something I noticed a few weeks ago, about Imelda and the version of La Llorona they chose for the movie.

As you all probably know by now (if you’re not Mexican; because if you are, you surely knew it since the beginning XD), there are many different versions of La Llorona. Lyrics can vary a lot from one to another, though it always talks about this llorona and about love/lost love, melancholy, longing, etc. But the version Imelda sings in Coco is very revealing. We’re used to talk about the “y aunque la vida me cueste, no dejaré de quererte” verse, but there’s more. If you know the extended version from the OST, there’s a second part that wasn’t showed in the movie. Its lyrics:

La pena y la que no es pena, llorona,

todo es pena para mí (x2)

Ayer lloraba por verte, llorona,

hoy lloro porque te vi (x2)

“Pena” in Spanish can be translated in many ways: pain, sorrow, sadness, heartache. What that first verse means is that everything, whether it’s something sad or not, feels sad/painful to the person who sings. The whole life is pure sadness, even those things that should be happy. The second verse can be translate as: yesterday, I cried to see you (I cried of longing), and today I cry because I saw you. Which means that both things (being apart or seeing each other) are equally painful, too.

Now think about Imelda’s life and afterlife. In the Land of the Living, even the little joys of the everyday life would be shadowed by Héctor’s absence: weddings, births, any tiny triumph or good news… He’s not there to share it with her. Deep inside, she’d probably miss him and cry of longing. But once she died, she did see him in the Land of the Dead. And seeing him there was even worse, because the pain was too strong and the grudge was too heavy; so even if she still loved him, seeing him was a torture. The reconciliation wasn’t possible. There’s a Spanish saying for that: ni contigo, ni sin ti (the famous “I can’t live with or without you”).

I had to think a lot about this when I was writing the last one-shot I posted of my prompts collection, because I was exploring Imelda’s side of the story along those 96 years of being apart: the music ban, the grudge, that “how many times must I throw you away?” and so. Then, I realized the song tells us exactly what happened and how it was like for her. In two verses :_)