La Llorona (Mexican folklore tradition)

“We gather here, we line up, weepin' in a sunlit room”

Community readers connect the song's white-woman / weeping-woman register to La Llorona, literally "the weeping woman", a recurring figure in Mexican folklore who, in some versions, killed the children she now seeks. The mapping carries an additional resonance for the masters-dispute reading: La Llorona's grief is for what she herself destroyed, paralleling the speaker's own conflicted relationship with the work she would later "scuttle" through re-recording. The recurring elements of the La Llorona tradition, white dress, nocturnal wailing, association with water, sit behind the chorus and bridge's ghostly register across the song.