With the Mexican national holiday known as Cinco de Mayo comes an outpouring of traditional favorites such as tequila, guacamole ... and that catchy little folk ditty even the most monolingual of Anglos know as “La Cucaracha.”
Like the man upon which the song is inextricably linked, Pancho Villa, there is some controversy regarding “La Cucaracha.” An uncountable number of verses appear to exist for the song, and various sources alternatively claim a given verse’s subject to be Villa himself, his car, 19th-century female revolutionaries known as soldadera and pre-World War I Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, among myriad other explanations. One source posits that Villa wrote the song himself as a lampoon of the reactionary Huerta, and nineteenth-century Mexican author José Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi claimed that the tune itself goes back to the fifteenth century and actually came to Mexico from Spain via military men. References to buzzards and the “sexton’s mouse” are lost to history and subject to much interpretation.
Explanations of why “cockroach” was the epithet for whichever subject the singer chose also vary: “cucaracha” was a code word used to refer to the soldadera and usage of the slur to apply to Huerta speaks for itself. Perhaps the most interesting bit of myth here is why Villa would be referred to as the disgusting insect.
The story goes as follows. Villa, like a good revolutionary general, worked hard, fought hard and played hard. As it turns out, the future hero of Cinco de Mayo drank hard, too. So hard, in fact, that he’d often have to crawl back to his tent when troops were encamped. His large frame and thin wispy Dali-like handlebar moustache (maybe surreal Salvador pinched the idea) caused him to resemble a cockroach when staggering about on all fours.
One of today’s favored verses (see the second cited below) is most likely a parody of Huerta, who bore quite the reputation for certain recreational substances, a bad guy mostly reviled when remembered at all.