La Cucaracha’s Cruel Shadow
If you know that cucaracha is Spanish for cockroach, it’s likely that at some point you heard the folk song about that incapacitated pest.
The melody is festive and the lyrics tell of a critter that, having lost its two hind legs, struggles to walk. La cucaracha, la cucaracha / ya no puede caminar / porque no tiene, porque le falta / las dos patitas de atras. (The cockroach, the cockroach / can no longer walk / because she doesn’t have, because she’s missing / the two hind legs in the back.) The song entered the American imagination over the years when performers as different as Louis Armstrong and Liberace performed versions of the ballad.
There are other stanzas in the song, which have changed over time, but the music and the cockroach as the central character are both constant. Its verse-and-refrain (strophe-antistrophe) pairs are consistent with other European folk traditions. The song was very popular during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and continues to be much beloved and a staple at children’s parties. Most people believe it originated in Spain and traveled to Mexico and then to other countries in Hispanic America. This isn’t the case.
The song originated among the French in Spain. Soon after Revolutionary France set designs on the Iberian Peninsula, Bourbon Spain signed the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1796, presumably to unite Spain and France against Britain. Napoleon, however, then forced the abdication of the Spanish kings Charles IV and Ferdinand VII and installed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne. The Peninsular War (1807–1814) saw Spain and Portugal unite to expel the French occupiers intent on colonizing the Iberian Peninsula in Napoleon’s image.
When the French soldiers returned home, they took with them a drinking song that, while sung in French, mentioned la cucaracha. The first published reference to a Spanish cockroach appeared in 1858: Écoutez, écoutez, / Dans son vol / La cucaracha m’a touché, / Elle est là. / Oh! Qu’elle me pique! / Oh! Qu’elle me démange! / La cucaracha. / Écoutez, / — Il faut que je chante, / — Il le faut . . . (Listen, listen, / In her flight / La cucaracha touched me, / She’s there. / Oh! She stings me! / Oh! How itchy for me! / La cucaracha. / Listen, / — I must sing, / — It must . . .)
One can only speculate what part of the Frenchman’s anatomy the Spanish cockroach bit, but it evoked raucous laughter among the soldiers gathered around to drink and sing, reminiscing about their failed exploits in Spain.
How the Amusing Became a Slur
The practice of assigning human characteristics to animals is charming. Mickey Mouse’s anthropomorphic traits are disarming. The same is true of Snoopy, that beagle who resembles a precious child. The reverse, however, is not true: to call a person an animal is to disparage their character. Mickey Mouse is cool; being called a mouse is not. Snoopy endears; being called a dog infuriates.
La cucaracha, for all her charms, thus has a dark side. She has gone from biting the private parts of invading Frenchmen and from staggering around in Mexico like a drunkard to something . . . sinister.
On both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border la cucaracha has now become a slur, a way of mocking and denigrating the working poor or those the speaker deems to be neither serious nor of consequence. Think of the swarms of people that stream out of a subway station along Avenida de la Reforma in Mexico City or the multitudes crossing through Times Square in New York. Mexicans will roll their eyes and, with a bemused smile, say, “Mira tantas cucarachas.” (“Look at so many cockroaches.”)
In this manner, Mexicans are dismissive of whatever is deemed populist — or beneath their class. All those fans filling the stadiums for a World Cup soccer game or the Super Bowl come the first Sunday in February? Cucarachas. How about those supporters assembled for a MAGA or BLM rally? Cucarachas. The countless bargain shoppers waiting in line all night for stores to open on Black Friday? Cucarachas. The raucous crowds of Spring Breakers, from Mexico and the U.S. alike, determined to trash Cancún? Cucarachas.
Technology has accelerated the visibility of cucarachas. The entire realm of social media, for instance, is now deemed to be the mother lode for finding cucarachas. “My daughter, who wastes her time that way, showed me a photograph on Twitter of this Chicana reporter’s refrigerator freezer filled with tortillas,” a Mexican diplomat to the United Nations said, laughing. “Chicanos are the worst cucarachas in their shameless flaunting of the superficial. These people are not serious.” He blamed Graydon Carter for empowering the crass when he was editor of Spy magazine. “Yes, he was the first to call Donald Trump ‘a short-fingered vulgarian,’ but he brought legitimacy to this kind of unfortunate exhibitionism. And look where this has taken us.”
La Cucaracha in the United States
In 1973 Mexican-Americans/Chicanos were proclaimed to be cucarachas when Óscar Zeta Acosta’s novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, was published. This is how the inexplicable self-denigration appears in the novel’s opening paragraph: “It is Christmas Eve in the year of Huitzilopochtil, 1969. Three hundred Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church. Three hundred brown-eyed children of the sun have come to drive the money-changers out of the richest temple in Los Angeles. It is a dark moonless night and ice-cold wind meets us at the doorstep. We carry little white candles as weapons. In pairs on the sidewalk, we trickle and bump and sing with candles in our hands, like a bunch of cockroaches gone crazy. I am walking around giving orders like a drill sergeant.”
To speak of parishioners exiting a church in a procession as a bunch of cockroaches gone crazy is astounding. To choose to denigrate one’s own community this way is self-loathing. For Acosta to posit that Chicanos are like cockroaches is dispiriting. Acosta, however, pressed forward, writing in a style of his idol, Hunter S. Thompson. In so doing, he, in the spirit of the gonzo journalism he and Thompson pioneered, abandoned any claim to objectivity and interjected himself in a first-person narrative, presenting himself — and the majority of U.S. Latinos in the process — as cucarachas of no consequence in the nation’s life.
Thompson loved self-referential degradation; it was his art form. Thompson, in fact, based his character Dr. Gonzo in his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on Acosta. That Acosta went along with Thompson’s depiction, which portrayed him as living a dystopian American life in a drug-induced haze and fantasizing about the failed 1960s countercultural movement, speaks to his lack of self-esteem. There’s no question Acosta was reprehensible in a way that Cheech Marín, who glorified indifference to formal education and purpose, never was.
Acosta died in the same ambiguous way he lived: leaving unanswered questions. An alcoholic with an untreated addiction to amphetamines, he embarked on a trip to Mazatlán, Mexico, in May 1974. He then vanished without a trace. “The body was never found, but we surmise that probably, knowing the people he was involved with, he ended up mouthing off, getting into a fight, and getting killed,” his son said. It was an inglorious end to the man who christened the Mexican diaspora in the United States as cockroaches.
Thompson, shaken by the disappearance of his kindred spirit, wrote a tribute, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” published in Rolling Stone in December 1977. Thompson concluded his bizarre eulogy thusly: “Óscar was one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die — and as far as I’m concerned, that’s just about all that needs to be said about him right now.”
The association of U.S. Latinos as cockroaches of no consequence endures, however. John Leguizamo, for one, delights in mocking a third of Hispanic Americans who are Republicans: “Latin people for Republicans are like roaches for Raid.” Dehumanizing his fellow Latinos for the sake of a cheap laugh says much about the man. Leguizamo’s fearless self-loathing, moreover, was on full display on his short-lived Broadway show Latin History for Morons. That disaster had so many factual errors and omissions that a better title would have been Latin History by a Moron.
Between The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) and Latin History for Morons (2017), another commentator, Lalo Alcaraz, launched an initiative to capitalize on the non-Hispanic fear of Latinos: “spics” as cucarachas. In 1992, he created a satirical comic strip that focused on U.S. Latino culture, society, and politics. Its name? La Cucaracha, once again centering Hispanidad in the United States with pests — worthy of an immediate visit from an exterminator to prevent an infestation from taking hold. Alas, to read his cartoons is to understand how Latin cynicism masquerades as American satire. In the same way that Maureen Dowd and Ann Coulter have descended from political commentary to venom that poisons public discourse, Alcaraz offers La Cucaracha as a steady dose of bitterness, a reminder to (non-Hispanic) Americans that Latinos are not only forever outsiders but also pathetic.
Los asuntos de cucarachitas (The Affairs of Little Cockroaches)
For a time Carlos Fuentes, the renowned Mexican writer, taught at George Mason University. For him, it was thrilling to study the Mexican diaspora in the United States from that vantage point. He became convinced that acculturation would give way to assimilation as it had with Italian immigrants and their U.S.-born children. “For Mexicans it’s a slower process,” Fuentes said. “Italians had an entire ocean that separated them from Italy; Mexico is right next door. But the pull of English is stronger than the love of Spanish. It took Italian Americans two generations to forget Italian; Chicanos will take four or five generations before their Spanish is reduced to the names of items on a restaurant menu.”
When I showed him La Cucaracha comic strips they were new to him. He was surprised. He read through them and paused, forming his thoughts. It was obvious that he didn’t know what to say. Fuentes then spoke, “Solo un pueblo que ha sido destruido se desprecia semejantemente.” Only a people that has been destroyed denigrates itself in such fashion, he said. “Se llaman cucarachas a sí mismos,” he added, handing the comic strips back to me. “They call themselves cockroaches.”
This is La Cucaracha’s cruel shadow: U.S. Latino self-loathing.
Indeed, no people, apart from the Mexican-descendant Hispanic diaspora in the United States, refer to themselves as cockroaches. It’s what one does to denigrate others. The French and the Italian, for instance, call Gypsies, the nomadic itinerant people often accused of engaging in criminal activities, when they wander for a time into towns, cucarachas. It is done with disdain and contempt, one way of making it clear these outsiders are considered pests.
Fuentes dismissed the comic strip as “los asuntos de cucarachitas,” or “the affairs of little cockroaches.” He meant these were the concerns of small minds, a Mexican take on the aphorism that small people talk about others, average people talk about things, and great people talk about ideas. Decades later, the Mexican diplomat concurred, dismissing with a wave of his hand the entirety of social media. “Twitter and Instagram and the rest of it are all the realm for cucarachas and . . . los asuntos de cucarachitas. Decades from now Twitter will be a sweeping record of the vacuous manner in which this generation squandered their time on the frivolous. ‘Look at the tortillas in my freezer!’ ‘Can I get a cannoli delivered?’ These people are jokes. I mean, can you imagine what people a century from now reading Donald Trump’s tweets will think? They will be incredulous that the whole of his presidency was the pettiness of a small-minded idiot, nothing but . . . asuntos de cucarachitas.”
Moving away from La Cucaracha’s cruel shadow is a reminder of the long road ahead for U.S. Latinos if they hope to arrive at a place called self-respect.
