Thanks for the clarifications, Jerry. My high school Spanish is not just rusty, it's also dusty and musty. I guess I put "she" in the chorus because of the feminine case of the noun, but I suppose that there really is no such thing as "el cucaracho". And the bit about tin foil makes good sense - I had no idea what hoja meant.

I did a search on the Mexican Revolution on the net and found a little more about Zapata. The convention mentioned is no doubt the constitutional convention of 1917. Zapata pushed for land reform. He was murdered by government agents in 1919. There is a current militant movement in Chiapas named after him and wanting the same things. As for Carranza, he became president of Mexico for a while. Pancho Villa was a bandit before the revolution and was always a loose cannon.

P.S. how do you put those accents on?