Mexican Halloween
I.
The tourists want her to sound more Mexican.
Sofía practices in the bathroom mirror before her shift, softening her Rs, adding rhythm to words that don’t need it. She was born at Sharp Memorial, six miles from here. Her Spanish is functional, grammatically correct, emotionally useless. When her abuela was dying, Sofía held her hand and understood maybe sixty percent of what she said. The other forty percent disappeared into the space between them like water into clay.
“Perfect,” Derek said at her audition. “That’s exactly the vibe we need.”
Vibe. Like her culture is a Spotify playlist.
She adjusts her name tag. SOFÍA, CULTURAL EXPERT. The plastic digs into her collarbone. Her phone buzzes against her hip. Her aunt: llamame cuando puedas.
Sofía doesn’t call. Tourists are already arriving in their Halloween sweaters. The October sun doesn’t know it’s supposed to be fall, high in the sky and causing an unseasonable heat wave.
Derek doubled the ticket price to $70 for the weekend. “Premium holiday experience,” he’d called it on the EventBrite page. The group includes two Frida Kahlos, a half dozen sugar skull faces, and a white guy wearing a sombrero with a fake mustache. She counts heads while they cluster near the entrance the way her abuela used to count rosary beads. Twenty-two tonight, and talking loudly enough for her to hear everything.
“I never would have bought something from Shein,” one of the Frida Kahlos is saying to her friend. She’s holding a painter’s palette and brush. “But they have a Frida Kahlo license and it’s so important to buy the licensed version to support the artist.”
Her friend adjusts her flower crown. “Exactly. It’s not appropriation if you’re supporting the artist. Frida Kahlo deserves to get paid for her art.”
Sofía blinks. Her phone buzzes and she silences it without looking.
At 5:00, she steps forward.
“Bienvenido.” She softens her voice, tries to make it more musical, which is Derek’s way of saying to make it sound more ethnic. “Tonight you’ll hear about La Llorona, the weeping woman who drowned her children in the river. She is cursed to wander forever, searching for what she’s lost.”
Someone’s already filming. Sofía can see herself reflected in the window of the building behind them. Her name tag and dark hair and brown skin checking the authentic box for people who’ll caption this something like amazing cultural experience with three emojis and a hashtag.
“But be careful.” She drops her voice lower. A siren somewhere a few streets over makes her flinch. It adds to the atmosphere, she’s sure. “If you hear her crying, or if you feel cold hands on your shoulders, run. Because La Llorona can’t tell the difference between her children and yours.”
She leads them down the path past an empanada truck on the side of the street decorated with papel picado that costs $2.99 at Party City and electric candles that smell like a pine air freshener instead of warm, woody copal.
A blonde woman raises her hand. Her shirt says Namaste Bitches in that font from the live laugh love signs at Target. “Is this based on a true story?”
“The legend has been told across Mexico and the Southwest for generations,” Sofía says, the words smooth as river stones in her mouth, worn down from repetition. Derek is very particular about his tour script. It came to him in a flash of brilliance, ‘like a revelation on a vision quest!’ he’d phrased it. “Some say it dates back to the conquistadors.”
“So it’s like the Mexican Bloody Mary.” A man who looks too old to be as fully entrenched in the college bro look as he is says this to his girlfriend loudly enough for it to really be for everyone around him.
“Similar,” Sofía says, not disagreeing, because Derek was specific that you don’t argue with customers. But it’s not similar at all. La Llorona is about what men do to women and what conquerors do to the conquered.
The tourists want slumber parties and mirrors.
The kind of scary they can laugh off, not the kind of scary that makes them think.
Derek told her during training, “We’re selling an experience, not a history lesson.”
The group passes Casa Jalapenos, which is owned by a restaurant group in Phoenix that is owned by investors in Korea. It serves margaritas in glasses the size of fishbowls and salsa that comes from a gallon jug manufactured by a subsidiary of PepsiCo.
The tourists neither know nor care that this was once Mexico, before the border moved like a scar across the land.
Ten minutes east, ICE raids the Home Depot parking lot where brown men wait for work in the pre-dawn dark three times a week.
But here, everything is sanded down and sanitized into something safe enough to sell.
As they reach sight of the river, Sofía tells the group, “Every night La Llorona walks along the water, crying for her children.”
Derek’s version stops there, but her abuela’s didn’t.
The San Diego River has been narrowing as the stretches between rain grow longer. It’s nothing like the Rio Grande, which Sofía has never seen but knows is where people drown in the trying. The legend says La Llorona cries for children she lost, but ten minutes from here it’s the children who cry, calling for parents who were taken and won’t be coming back.
The tourists see a river and that’s enough for them. They pull out phones.
Namaste Bitches is already posing by the railing, one hand to her forehead like a silent film star, making faces at the camera. “Can you take a picture? Make me look mysterious?”
Sofía takes a photo.
“You’re amazing! This is so authentic.”
That word tastes like Derek’s pan de Muerto that’s available year-round from the bakery outlet in Chula Vista: mass-produced and wrong.
“Do you believe in this stuff?” another woman asks from somewhere in the back of the group.
Her phone buzzes again.
“I believe in stories,” she says, and it’s the only true thing she’s said all night.
More stops. More script.
“You don’t look Mexican” from someone who doesn’t understand that Mexican isn’t a look.
“What’s the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you?” from someone who thinks fear is entertainment.
(ICE like locusts. Devouring everything, leaving nothing behind. Her tio’s face as he was swallowed up into the swarm.)
“Oh, you know,” Sofía’s tone is bland as salsa that you buy by the gallon. “Creepy shadows.”
They laugh.
By the final stop, they’re debating dinner. Casa Jalapenos or the place doing “authentic street tacos” in what used to be a Chipotle but is now a pop-up space. One of them mentions how much they love Mexican food. Another adds, “Mexican Halloween is so fun!”
Namaste Bitches presses a twenty into Sofía’s palm. “This was incredible. So cultural.”
Sofía thanks her and tells her to enjoy her evening, then starts the walk back to do another four tours. By the time she finishes at 11 PM, she’s made $340 in tips. Enough to cover her student loan payment due next week, but not enough to cover rent, too.
She checks her phone in the parking lot.
llamame cuando puedas
es sobre mireya. ya la deportaron.
las niñas estan conmigo, necesito ayuda
The words blur. Sofía blinks and they come back sharp.
Mireya is already gone. Her daughters are only eight and five. Sofía’s aunt now has to take in two more kids to a house already crowded with too many bodies and not enough money.
She sits in her twenty-year-old car looking at the 167,000 on the speedometer, the check engine light glowing orange like it has since June. She can’t remember the last time she saw Mireya. They worked opposite schedules, Mireya always on the graveyard shift to be there for her kids during the day.
She drives past lights flashing on the side of the road, holding her breath.
She touches the plastic bag in her pocket. Birth certificate. Driver license. Papers that say she belongs here, that she was born here. But belonging is something white people decide when they decide whether they’ll accept your papers.
Her apartment is a studio in a shared house that is actually a modified walk-in closet and bathroom with a deadbolt chain on the door into the master bedroom. The landlord called it a separate entrance and charges her $800 a month to sleep on a fold-out sofa bed that takes up most of the room. Parking is not included. Tonight, she’s lucky enough to find a space on the street two blocks away and walks back.
Rachel is waiting outside on the front stairs in casual clothes that probably cost more than Sofía’s rent. She looks up from her newly upgraded iPhone. She could be any influencer on any tour that Sofía led tonight, except that she’s never been on one of Sofía’s tours. “Hey, you. I texted but you didn’t reply.”
“I was working.”
“I know. Thought I’d surprise you after work.”
Rachel is only four years older, but has light years’ more accumulated accomplishments. Her Master’s and connections got her hired on as a DEI consultant at a tech company making six figures out of grad school. And when the tech companies decided DEI was the real problem, she shifted to “strategic team dynamics consulting” and the same companies pay her the same amount of money to talk about maximizing potential and agile business processes.
Rachel has an Etsy shop where she sells “Smash the Patriarchy” coffee mugs and tote bags she created with Canva. She made $3,000 last month selling them at her workshop series on finding your authentic purpose.
“You look tired,” she says with genuine sympathy. Everything Rachel does is genuine, at least from her perspective. “You know Derek is exploiting you. You’re worth way more than minimum wage.”
Rachel is endlessly disappointed that most other people don’t ever get what they’re worth, Sofía knows. “Nobody’s willing to hire me for more than minimum wage.”
“But you have a degree. Maybe if you reframed your experience, or networked more. I know a career coach who’s really good.”
“I can’t afford a career coach.”
Rachel’s expression fractures for just a fraction of a second, a flinch. Like Sofía pointed out the expensive menu prices at a restaurant in front of Rachel’s colleagues. But Rachel smooths it over and touches her arm lightly, “I’m just worried about you. You’re so smart and you’re wasting it.”
“On rent?”
Rachel looks at her, somewhere between hurt and called out. Sofía doesn’t fill the silence.
“You’re right,” Rachel says, and her voice cracks a little. “I don’t know what it’s like. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t.”
Sofía believes her. Rachel tries.
Softening her tone, Sofía sighs and relents. “Look, you’re fine. I’m just tired.”
“Do you want to come over? I could make dinner.”
“I’m sorry. I really just want to crash and rest for a little while.”
“Okay.” Rachel leans in and kisses her softly. “Text me?”
“Yeah.”
Inside, Sofía sits on the floor, back against the door that doesn’t lock. Opens her banking app. The numbers glow: $843.27.
Rent: $900. Student loan payment in eight days: $340.
She texts her aunt: cuanto necesitas
The response is immediate: lo que puedas
What she can do is pray. If she’s lucky, tips will help her get the rent and possibly enough for gas.
She opens her camera roll instead. Scrolls back three months to her aunt’s birthday party. There. Mireya holding her daughters, both of them laughing at something off-camera. Sofía can’t remember what was funny. If she talked to Mireya that day or just waved from across the yard.
She closes the photos. Opens Instagram.
Rachel posted an hour ago, an image of a “The Future is Female” mug, lavender candle, succulent in a ceramic pot shaped like a llama.
Caption: Small business Sunday! 20% off with code RESIST 💕✨ Link in bio
Sofía closes Instagram. Opens her texts to Rachel. Types: my cousin got deported today
Stares at the words. They look fake on the screen. Too simple for what they mean. Mireya is gone. Her daughters are crying themselves to sleep in a house that’s not their home. Her aunt is trying to stretch food for eight people instead of six.
She deletes the text. Types can’t do dinner this week and sends that instead.
Her aunt’s text pops up in her notifications: cuando vienes
Sofía looks at her schedule and types back: mañana despues del trabajo.
Her phone buzzes with a text from Rachel: ok babe ❤️ let me know if you need anything
She turns off her phone, watching the screen go black. Her face reflects back warped and dark.
Tomorrow is Halloween. She has seven tours.
II.
Sofía sits in her car applying makeup her abuela taught her when she was eleven. The face in the mirror becomes less hers with every brushstroke. White base first, then the black circles around her eyes, the delicate lines radiating outward like cracks in porcelain. Her abuela used marigold petals crushed with oil for the orange details. Sofía uses a $4 palette from CVS because a bouquet of marigolds this time of year costs at least three times that much.
Derek didn’t know what to call it when he texted her. Big night - let’s bring the authentic Mexican Halloween vibes. Can you do that skull face thing? Guests will LOVE it.
She’d started typing calavera and deleted it halfway through. Typed sure instead.
Her phone vibrates. She doesn’t look.
The screen has been lighting up and she knows it’s her aunt about Mireya’s girls, but there’s nothing she can do right now. Her shift doesn’t end until midnight. El dinero no cae del cielo.
The black lines around her mouth take the longest. Stitched shut, like the dead. Her abuela called this face el espejo del otro lado. The mirror of the other side. You wear it so the dead recognize you, so they know you haven’t forgotten.
Sofía traces the lines carefully. Remembers being small, sitting on a kitchen stool while her abuela’s hands moved over her face with a sureness Sofía has never felt about anything. Esto no es un disfraz, mija. Es una puerta.
It’s not a costume. It’s a door.
When she finishes, the face looking back could be anyone. Her abuela, or Mireya. Her phone lights up again and she slides it into her pocket to go meet the first tour.
The October heat hasn’t broken. eighty-one degrees at 5 PM, and the tourists are already sweating through their costumes. The group includes a bachelorette party, all of them wearing matching black shirts that say Till Death Do Us Party in silver glitter. The bride has a veil made of tulle and plastic skeleton hands.
“Oh my God,” one of them says when she sees Sofía. “Your makeup is amazing. Where’d you find the video for that?”
“It’s family tradition.”
“That’s so cool. Is it a Mexican thing?”
Sofía feels her jaw tighten beneath the painted lines. “It’s a Día de los Muertos thing. Day of the Dead.”
“That’s like Mexican Halloween, right? We’re so excited for the tour! Brittany thought about Vegas, but her fiancé said no.”
Brittany is taking a selfie with the empanada truck in the background. The papel picado flutters in a breeze that does nothing to cut the heat. Sofía watches her tilt her phone, try different angles, frown at the screen. “The lighting’s weird,” Brittany says. “Can we move somewhere else?”
“The tour starts here,” Sofía says.
“But for photos after?”
“There’s a gift shop at the end.”
The gift shop is a card table off a food truck in a parking lot with merch Derek designed himself to look authentic. He has a synergistic partnership with the food truck owner that creates cross-promotion, he’ll tell anyone who asks and several people who haven’t. He’s running a second set of tours tonight himself, although he assured her that he wouldn’t accept tips because it would be exploitative for the owner to make money twice that way. (She never asked and doesn’t really care, but it clearly made him feel good to say it, so she nodded and said nothing, and he walked away satisfied.)
Derek appears from somewhere, wearing a guayabera he bought online and khakis. He claps his hands once and grins at the bachelorette party. “Ladies! Welcome to Spirits of Old SoCal! You’re in for a treat tonight. Sofía here is one of our cultural experts. She’s going to take you on a journey through authentic Mexican folklore.” He gestures at Sofía’s face. “And as you can see, she really commits to the experience.”
Sofía’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She feels it against her hip like a heartbeat.
“Have fun,” Derek is already moving toward the next tour group forming near the parking lot. “And don’t forget to tag us. Hashtag SpiritsOfSoCal, hashtag MexicanHalloween.”
The bachelorette party is already taking photos with Sofía. She stands still and lets them. Someone’s arm around her shoulder, someone else making a duck face, someone shouting “Say tequila!”
She doesn’t say tequila. The camera flashes.
“Okay,” she says when they’re done. “Let’s begin.”
The script comes out of her mouth the way it always does. Bienvenido. Tonight you’ll hear about La Llorona. She softens her voice, adds the music Derek wants. The tourists lean in. The bride is still on her phone, but her friends are listening, clutching each other’s arms in anticipation of being scared.
They pass Casa Jalapenos. The margarita fishbowls glow neon green in the window. A group on the outside patio is wearing sombreros that the restaurant provides for birthday photos over their costumes. Sofía hears someone yell “Fiesta!” and a group laughing.
“Is this where the ghost lives?” one of the bachelorette party asks.
“La Llorona walks the river,” Sofía says. “We’ll get there.”
“But like, is there a specific house? Because I read online there’s a haunted house.”
“There’s no haunted house on this tour.”
The woman looks disappointed. “On Yelp someone said there was a haunted house.”
“They might be thinking of a different tour.”
“Are you sure? It had really good reviews.”
Sofía keeps walking. The group follows. Her phone buzzes twice in quick succession. She feels her hand twitch toward her pocket, stops it. She can check between tours. At the river overlook, she tells them about La Llorona’s children. Drowned in this very river, she says, even though the script is lying. The San Diego River is nothing like the rivers in the legend, but the tourists don’t know that. They take photos of the water catching the last of the daylight.
“Wait,” someone says. “Is this the same La Llorona from the movie? The one with the, like, Mexican ghost? It was on Netflix. Or maybe Hulu.”
“The Curse of La Llorona,” another woman supplies. “It’s really good. Kind of like The Conjuring but Mexican.”
Sofía has gotten this question before. She’s read the Wikipedia page summary. “The legend predates the movie by several hundred years.”
“But is it the same story?”
“The movie is loosely based on the folklore.”
“So yes?”
“The folklore is about colonial violence and the destruction of Indigenous families.” The words escape before she can filter them safely into the void of things she wishes she could say out loud. Her voice sounds matter-of-fact, like a walking encyclopedia.
This is not in the script. She can almost feel Derek’s disapproval from his own tour, some sixth sense he’s developed for when she goes off-book. “The movie is about a white family being haunted.”
The bachelorette party exchanges looks. The bride puts her phone away. Someone says, “That’s dark.”
“Yes,” Sofía agrees. They move on. Sofía tells them about the crying, about the cold hands, about how La Llorona can’t tell the difference between her children and yours. The tourists shiver even though it’s never cold here.
Someone asks if she can do the wailing sound. Sofía says no, that’s not part of the tour.
Her pocket vibrates and Mireya’s daughters take over her thoughts for a moment.
A man in the back of the group raises his hand. He’s wearing a costume Sofía can’t identify. Some superhero, maybe, or a character from something she hasn’t seen.
“Hey, so, question. If La Llorona is looking for her kids, why does she take other people’s kids? Wouldn’t she be able to tell they’re not hers?”
Sofía stares at him. “She’s been searching for centuries. Grief does things to you.”
“Yeah, but like, logically—”
“She’s a ghost. She’s not logical.”
“I’m just saying, it’s kind of a plot hole.”
Sofía feels something behind her painted face, something hot and sharp. She can feel the words clawing up her throat to say, “She lost her children. She was abandoned by the man who promised to love her. She was driven to madness by a system that treated her as disposable. And you’re worried about plot holes.”
But she doesn’t.
Instead, she says, “Let’s continue.”
She catches her reflection in a storefront window as they pass. The skull face stares back, cracked and hollow, and for a second she doesn’t recognize herself. She thinks about her abuela saying es una Puerta and wonders what door she’s opened, what’s looking back at her from the other side.
The second tour is worse. A family with two kids, both under ten, both crying before the first stop because they’re scared of Sofía’s makeup. The mother snaps at the father about not checking to see if it was family-friendly and asks if Sofía can tone it down somehow. Sofía says she can’t remove it mid-tour.
They leave 15 minutes into the tour, the mother still snapping at the father. (At least if she’s mad at her husband, she’s less likely to blame Sofía in a Google review.)
Between the second and third tour, she checks her phone. Seven texts from her aunt. The kids won’t stop crying. They’re asking when mom is coming back. Her aunt doesn’t know what to tell them.
She has four more tours.
She types: estoy trabajando. mañana voy temprano.
The third tour includes a couple who keep asking about authenticity. The woman wants to know if the pan de Muerto is made by a real Mexican bakery. Sofía says yes like Derek has instructed her to. (Technically, the Chula Vista bakery employs Mexican workers, Derek says.) The woman seems satisfied. Her husband asks if Sofía grew up celebrating these traditions. Sofía says yes because it’s easier than explaining.
“That must be so special,” the woman says. “Keeping your culture alive.”
Sofía thinks about her abuela dying in a hospital room, speaking Spanish that Sofía couldn’t fully understand. “Yes,” she says. “Special.”
At the river overlook, a teenager asks her to make a TikTok. “Just say something spooky in Spanish. It’ll go viral.”
Sofía says no.
“Come on, it’ll take like ten seconds.”
“No.”
The teenager’s mother intervenes, apologizing, explaining that her daughter is just excited. Sofía accepts the apology. The daughter rolls her eyes and films anyway, her phone pointed at Sofía’s painted face while she delivers the script about La Llorona’s eternal searching.
Tour four. Tour five. The makeup is cracking at the corners of her mouth. She catches herself in reflections, in phone screens, in the dark windows of closed shops. Each time the face is less familiar. Each time she has to remind herself it’s her under there.
A woman on the fifth tour tells her the makeup is cultural appropriation.
“I’m Mexican,” Sofía says.
“Oh.” The woman pauses. “Well, it’s still kind of problematic. You’re commodifying your own culture.”
Sofía doesn’t have an answer for that. The woman is right and wrong at the same time, and Sofía is too tired to untangle it.
Her phone has stopped buzzing. That’s worse than when it was constant. She imagines her aunt giving up, putting the girls to bed, sitting alone in a house that’s too full and too empty at once. The last tour ends at 11:47. Sofía walks the group to the gift shop, thanks them for coming, reminds them to tag Spirits of SoCal on social media.
The last tour group disperses toward the bars that are open for two more hours since the restaurants are closing. Sofía starts walking the mile back to her car. A scream somewhere to her left seizes her heart and lungs, but it’s only drunk women leaving a restaurant. The sound is already curdling into laughter.
Her phone sits silent against her hip.
Near the crosswalk, four men in military gear are standing by an idling SUV. They might be costumes. Or they might be ICE. Her hand finds her phone instead of documents. The documents are in her glovebox two blocks away, paper proving she belongs to a country that taught her to flinch at uniforms. She should have thought to keep them with her.
She keeps walking.
One of the men stares at her the entire 74 seconds she waits for the crosswalk signal to turn white. She can feel his gaze follow her, but he doesn’t.
A white woman on the corner in skintight skeleton bodysuit with rhinestones spots Sofía and shouts something inaudible over the music coming from a bar nearby. Her makeup is half-calavera and half-Instagram beauty guru.
By the time she reaches the parking lot, the screaming has moved somewhere else. Her car sits under a dead streetlight, waiting the way it always waits. She gets in and locks the doors. In the rearview mirror, her face skeletal and cracked along the lines of her mouth, all the places she didn’t say what she wanted to say.
Her aunt called but didn’t leave a voicemail. (She says they feel like talking to ghosts.)
Tomorrow is Día de los Muertos. Seven tours.
III.
Saturday. Sofía wakes at five, planning to get to her aunt’s house before work. She lies in the dark doing the math: twenty minutes there, an hour with the girls, twenty minutes back. Shower, makeup, arrive by nine.
At six-fifteen she’s still in bed. At six-forty-five she texts: vengo después del trabajo. Her aunt doesn’t respond.
She does her makeup in the parking lot because she left late and the 5 was worse than she calculated. The white base goes on streaky in the rearview mirror. She tries to fix it but only makes it worse. The black circles around her eyes come out uneven, the left thicker than the right. By the time she gets them close to even, she’s used too much product and her face looks caked, artificial in a way that has nothing to do with the calavera tradition and everything to do with being exhausted in a Taco Bell parking lot at 9:15 in the morning.
Derek is already setting up when she arrives, arranging merchandise on the folding table next to the ofrenda display he ordered off Amazon: sparse plastic marigolds with two battery-operated candles and a motion-activated skull that shrieks when anyone walks past. “Totally authentic,” he told her when it arrived. “The listing said Mexican Day of the Dead style.”
“Big day,” he says now, not looking up from arranging DEAD TIRED shirts in descending size order. “Seven tours. I double-booked you at ten. Twenty-six people signed up.”
“Twenty-six?”
“Casa Jalapenos is doing a Day of the Dead brunch. Bottomless mimosas, sugar skull pancakes. They’re handing out our flyers to everyone who leaves.” He passes her a stack. The flyer has a cartoon skeleton holding a fishbowl margarita, sombrero tipped back. SPIRIT YOURSELF AWAY. “Cross-promotion. Make sure everyone gets one.”
The ten o’clock is actually twenty-eight. Two walk-ups join because they couldn’t get brunch reservations and need something to do until their table opens. One is still holding a to-go cup, something frozen and pink with whipped cream bleeding down the sides. The other is wearing a t-shirt that says TACOS AND TEQUILA over a sugar skull in a sombrero.
“I love this holiday,” she tells her friend while they wait for the group to assemble. “It’s like Halloween but with better food.”
Her friend is scrolling through her phone. “Did you see Madison’s stories? She’s in Oaxaca for the actual Day of the Dead. So lucky.”
“I wanted to do that but the flight plus hotel packages were ridiculous.”
“This is basically the same thing though.”
The group spreads too wide along the path. The people in back can’t hear her, so Sofía pitches her voice higher, louder, until it scrapes. Her throat already feels raw and it’s only the first tour.
A woman in the middle keeps asking her friend what Sofía said.
“She said the ghost drowns kids who don’t listen.”
“She didn’t say that.”
“Yeah she did. It’s a cautionary tale. My mom used to tell me something like that to get me to behave.”
“Your mom told you about a drowning ghost?”
“Not exactly the same. But same energy.”
Sofía leads them past the empanada truck where a man is handing out samples of pumpkin empanadas dusted with cinnamon sugar. The smell makes her stomach clench. She can’t remember if she ate dinner last night. The tourists cluster around the truck, taking photos, asking if they can buy whole orders to go.
The second tour is only fourteen people but Sofía’s voice is already wearing thin. The words come out while her mind goes over numbers that never add up like a computer with a background process running. A woman near the front keeps nodding with her eyes closed, like she’s receiving a transmission from another world. At the river overlook, she stands with her palms pressed together at her chest, breathing deliberately. When the tour ends she presses a ten into Sofía’s hand and holds it there for a moment too long.
“You have such a soothing voice. You should do ASMR. Or guided meditation. You’d be really good at it.”
Sofía’s throat feels like she’s been swallowing glass. “Thank you.”
Between tours she checks her phone. One text from her aunt, sent an hour ago: las niñas preguntaron si vas a venir
She types: sí, después del trabajo, como a las 9
The third tour, someone asks where Sofía is from. When she says San Diego, a woman wearing leggings covered in colorful sugar skulls tilts her head. Sofía has learned to recognize that look. “But like, originally…”
“San Diego. I was born at Sharp Memorial.”
“Oh.” A pause. The woman is probably twice Sofía’s age, wearing a visor that says VACAY MODE. “But your family.”
She needs Sofía to fit somewhere that makes sense to her.
“My grandmother was born in Jalisco, Mexico,” Sofía tells her what she wants to hear. “She came here when she was fifteen.”
“See, that’s so interesting. You can really tell. It’s in your blood.” The woman smiles like she’s given Sofía a compliment. “That’s why you’re so good at this. It’s authentic for you.”
Fourth tour. The sun is high and merciless. Sofía’s makeup is melting at her temples. She can feel it sliding, the white base separating from her skin in the heat. Someone takes a photo of her mid-sentence. She doesn’t stop talking.
The fifth tour includes a woman who introduces herself as a travel content creator before the tour even starts. She’s wearing a linen romper in a shade the tag probably calls “desert rose” and carrying a ring light attached to her phone.
“Is there somewhere more photogenic than the river overlook?” she asks while they’re still at the first stop. “I checked your Instagram and the lighting there looks really flat.”
“The legend takes place at the river.”
The woman frowns at her phone, scrolling through something. “Right, but for content. My engagement drops when the visuals aren’t strong.” She tilts her phone toward Sofía, showing her Instagram grid. Every photo is the same: the woman in front of something, smiling, wearing earth tones that probably have names like “terracotta” and “sage.” Her bio says CULTURAL IMMERSION • AUTHENTIC TRAVEL • DM FOR COLLABS. “I do cultural immersion content. My followers expect a certain aesthetic.”
“The tour goes to the river,” Sofía says.
“Okay, but could we do like a detour? I saw this really cute bridge on the way here. Very Spanish colonial. The light would be perfect right now.”
“The bridge isn’t part of the tour.”
“I’d tip extra.” She says it like she’s solving a problem, like money makes things flexible. “I really need content that pops, you know? I’m trying to hit ten thousand followers by end of year.”
Sofía looks at her. At the ring light and the carefully curated grid and the romper that probably cost more than Sofía makes in a weekend. “The tour goes to the river,” she says again.
The woman sighs and goes back to her phone. For the rest of the tour she’s half-present, checking light meters, tilting her head at angles. At the overlook she sets up a tripod, does seventeen takes of herself looking pensively at the water.
“Could you stand in the background?” she asks when she’s done. “For scale and like, authenticity?” Sofía stands where she’s told. The woman shoots for another five minutes, checking each photo, adjusting Sofía’s position like she’s a prop. When she’s finally satisfied she thanks Sofía. She doesn’t tip.
The sixth tour includes an influencer couple who ask Sofía to pose with them at the overlook. She stands where they point. The man takes a dozen photos while his girlfriend adjusts her flower crown between each shot, checks her teeth in her phone camera, reapplies lipstick.
“Can you look scarier?” the girlfriend asks Sofía. “Like really sell it.”
Sofía’s face is a mirror to the other side. The paint is cracking at her temples, separating along her jaw where sweat has dissolved the base.
She stares at the woman.
“Yes! Perfect. Hold that.” The girlfriend takes more shots, checking each one, her face lit blue by the screen. “So authentic. I’m gonna caption it ‘When the dead come calling’ with the little skull emoji. Or is that offensive? I don’t want to be offensive.”
“It’s fine,” Sofía says.
“Are you sure? I’m totally respectful of your culture. If it’s offensive, I wouldn’t post it.”
“It’s fine.”
The girlfriend looks relieved. “Thank god. My engagement has been down this month and holidays always end up trending. It could really boost my numbers.”
Between the sixth and seventh tour, Sofía checks her phone. Nothing from her aunt. She stares at the last message. las niñas preguntaron si vas a venir. The girls asking if she’s coming. She types out lo siento and deletes it. There’s nothing to say that makes it better.
The seventh tour starts at eight. The sun is almost down, streetlights stuttering on along the path.
When Sofía walks out to meet the group, Rachel is standing at the edge of it. She’s wearing a black dress Sofía has never seen before, embroidered flowers along the hem in colors that look hand-stitched. Her hair is down and she’s holding two iced coffees from the place near her condo, the one that charges seven dollars for oat milk.
She sees Sofía and waves. Small, uncertain.
Sofía walks over. Takes the coffee because refusing it takes more energy than accepting it, and she doesn’t have energy to spare.
“I wanted to see what you actually do,” Rachel says. “I talk about your job but I realized I’ve never actually seen it.” Her eyes move over the cracked paint on Sofía’s face, the uneven circles. “How long have you been here?”
“Since nine.”
Rachel grimaces, but in the pretty way that women on tv do. “Have you eaten?”
“I’m fine.”
“Sofía.”
“I’m fine.” Rachel means well, she knows. She forces her voice softer. “I’ll eat after. Thank you for the coffee.”
Rachel steps back, gestures at the group forming behind her. “I’ll stay out of your way.” Sofía can’t pretend she’s not there. She turns to the group of fifteen people, someone already filming on their phone, and starts Derek’s script. “Bienvenidos.” Her voice comes out scraped thin, barely recognizable as hers. “Tonight you’ll hear about La Llorona, the weeping woman who walks the river—”
“Is this the one from the movie?” The man asking is wearing a Deadpool costume. “The creepy one who takes kids?”
Sofía doesn’t even blink. “The legend is older than the film.”
“But it’s the same ghost, right?”
“Loosely.”
They walk past the empanada truck where the papel picado hangs crooked now, one corner come loose from its string. At the river overlook, Sofía tells them about the children and the drowning and the endless searching on script. Someone asks if La Llorona ever finds what she’s looking for.
“No. She searches forever.”
“God. That’s depressing.”
“Yes.”
She can see Rachel in her peripheral vision, standing slightly apart from the group. Not taking photos, just watching. When Sofía catches her eye, Rachel looks away first.
The tour ends near Derek’s merch table. He’s sold out of the DEAD TIRED shirts with the yawning calavera. The skull in his ofrenda display cackles as the group passes, that shrieking mechanical laugh on a loop. A woman in head-to-toe Alo Yoga like an Instagram ad come to life peers at the taco truck that’s set up in the adjacent parking lot.
“We should eat here,” she tells her husband. “Support local Mexican businesses on their holiday.” Her husband checks his phone. “Reddit says the owner’s from El Salvador.”
She frowns. Turns to Sofía. “Is that part of Mexico?”
Sofía hands her the last pub crawl flyer. “This was all once part of Mexico.”
The woman looks confused. Her husband is already walking toward his car.
The group disperses but Rachel lingers.
They stand by Derek’s ofrenda while the skull cackles and resets, cackles and resets. The taco truck radio plays something with horns and an accordion. Rachel turns her empty cup in her hands, the ice rattling.
“You’re really good at that,” she says.
Sofía doesn’t answer.
Rachel stares at the plastic marigolds. “This isn’t what it’s actually like, though, is it? The real holiday.”
“No.”
“How would you tell it? The story.”
Sofía looks at her. The embroidered dress that Rachel bought for tonight, the flowers stitched in colors that look like they were chosen carefully. Rachel put thought into being here. Into trying to understand something that can’t be understood by showing up.
“I don’t know,” Sofía says. “My grandmother had a version. An Indigenous woman and a Spanish soldier. He made promises. She believed them.”
She reaches for the rest but her grandmother’s words have worn away, smoothed down by Derek’s script, by years of English layered over Spanish, by all the tours where she said what people wanted to hear instead of what was true.
“And then?” Rachel asks.
“And then the river.”
The skull cackles. Rachel flinches at the sound. Sofía waits for it to stop, for the mechanism to reset.
“My grandmother used to say it was about…” The shape of it is there but the words won’t come. Something about women who search for pieces of themselves that men took, and the weeping never stops because the loss never stops. Borders that move and people who disappear and children who grow up not knowing which language holds the truth. “I don’t remember exactly.”
It’s not quite a lie. The words are there somewhere, in the part of her brain where her grandmother’s voice lives. But reaching for them feels like touching something hot.
“I should go,” Sofía says. “I told my aunt that I’d stop by after work.”
“Okay.” Rachel doesn’t move, that look on her face like when she’s gauging whether or not to ask Sofía to stay the night knowing that Sofía almost always turns her because of work or family or not wanting to be brown in a wealthy white neighborhood after dark. “Sofía… If there’s anything I can do…”
Sofía nods and leans in when Rachel hugs her goodbye, enough to keep Rachel satisfied that everything’s fine between them. Then she promises to text tomorrow about time together and walks to her car.
When she gets in and checks her phone, she finds her aunt has texted her that the girls are asleep and everything is fine. (For now.) If she has time tomorrow to stop by, her aunt writes without finishing the sentence. She sits with her hands on the steering wheel, staring at the words.
Tomorrow.
She turns the key. The freeway is lighter this time of night and she merges on heading south, birth certificate and passport in the glove box. The papers that say she belongs here. (But they mean nothing if she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
Three miles from her exit, the lights on the shoulder seize her lungs. Red and blue, but not police. She knows before she sees them. She knew when they came for her tío, too. Locusts in tactical gear, body armor and rifles like they’re storming a warzone instead of pulling over a minivan on the side of the freeway. There’s a Baby on Board sticker in the back window.
A woman is screaming. Sofía can’t hear it through her closed windows and the sound of the freeway, but she can see the shape of it in a slow-motion flash up ahead. The woman struggling against the hands holding her. A man being dragged out of the driver’s seat by the swarm until he’s face-down on the asphalt, completely still.
Her foot drifts toward the brake. Some instinct to stop, to help, to do something other than drive past like everyone else.
She corrects it. Presses the gas instead.
In the rearview mirror, the swarm overtakes the woman. The Baby on Board sticker catches the red and blue lights, strobing.
Sofía takes her exit.
She doesn’t know if there were children in the van. She’ll never know. It will be one more thing she doesn’t let herself think about, one more image that shows up when she’s trying to sleep, one more ghost to add to the collection.
She parks under the streetlight that’s been dead for months. Her landlord says the city is supposed to fix it but the city never does. Inside, she goes straight to the bathroom. Turns on the light. The face in the mirror is cracked and streaked, the calavera paint sliding off.
She washes it off. White and black swirl down the drain, revealing her own face underneath. Brown skin. Dark circles that aren’t painted on. She looks exhausted. She looks exactly like what she is. She sets her alarm for eight and gets into bed without eating. She can hear her neighbors through the wall, watching something loud. An explosion. Gunfire. Laughter.
She closes her eyes.
Bienvenidos. Tonight you’ll hear about La Llorona, the weeping woman who walks the river—
Tomorrow is Sunday. Five tours.
END