La Llorona On The Blue Line
A Site-Specific, Immersive, Horror play
TUYO Theatre, a San Diego–based company dedicated to telling stories from diverse Latinx perspectives, presents La Llorona on the Blue Line, a new play by Mabelle Reynoso. The play interweaves multiple historical timelines aboard San Diego’s Blue Line trolley, haunted by La Llorona—a spectral embodiment of maternal grief, injustice, and memory.
“Set in light rail train cars from 1920, 1946, and 1982, each era unfolds as a chilling vignette, revealing hidden truths and long-buried pain.”
Playing Lita and Angela was an incredibly vulnerable and grounding experience. Both women carry such profound wounds and handle each moment with grace and power.
Lita
Lita, in the 1920s trolley car, confronts Bobby, a former US Public Health Officer who administered gas baths to Mexican migrant workers at the border. She takes her revenge by haunting him and airing out his violent past. Lita was a real person who ‘disappeared’ after bravely protesting these dehumanizing practices, though it is suggested that she was murdered. It is also revealed that Hitler took his inspiration from these practices for the gas chambers in Auschwitz.
Angela
Angela, a 17-year old girl in the 1940s trolley car, wrestles with a different kind of haunting. She’s consumed by fear—fear of going to hell, of societal shame, and of choosing to keep her pregnancy or journey to Tijuana to get an abortion. Her emotional turmoil deepens when she confides in her sister, Ceci, that the sex was not consensual. The scene crescendos into an evocative, cathartic dance sequence where Angela’s rapist is symbolically defeated and La Llorona blesses both sisters.
La Llorona on the 1920s Car
Carrying the voices of Lita and Angela was a profound experience. These characters are more than roles, they are echoes of real people, shaped by systems of violence and resilience, forced to make impossible choices in impossible times.
Their stories are reminders of how much history still lives in our bodies, our choices, and our public spaces. Especially here in San Diego, a border city layered with grief, strength, and untold stories.
La Llorona on the Blue Line doesn’t simply dramatize the past, it insists we feel it in the present. And it asks us: What ghosts still ride with us today?
