La Cucaracha

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

I used to sing the song “Samonsindakit” with other children in Sangilo, where I grew up as a child. It is a joyful song which we sang and danced to on top of our voices, without understanding what it meant.

“Samonsindakit sinidana!

Samonsindakit sinino ay no

Samonsindakit sinidana

Iskamin da ol man jo!”

Since some of us spoke Ilocano, we thought someone ate (sinidana) someone else’s salmon (samon) and was being warned that the cook, Old Man Jo (ol man jo) is coming (iskamin) and will find out. I found out years later that the song is a child’s interpretation of “Someone’s in the kitchen with dinah”, a portion of the song entitled, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”, an American folk song, whose “first published version appeared as “Levee Song” in Carmina Princetonia, a book of Princeton University songs published in 1894. The earliest known recording is by the Sandhills Sixteen, released by Victor Records in 1927.”

Another song, which we sang correctly without revision, and also without understanding, is a portion of La Cucaracha:

“la cucaracha, la cucaracha

ya no puede caminar,

por que no tiene,

porque le faltan

las dos patitas de atrás”

I did not know that “La Cucaracha” means “The Cockroach” until I saw a video of Grupo RMX Especialistas en Control de Plagas on the timeline of Dick Malay to celebrate the anniversary of the 1910 Mexican Revolution with a classic revolutionary run of the song. It is a ballad about a cockroach that loses one of its legs, which made its movement strenuous.  “La Cucaracha” can also be found in writings about “Spain’s civil wars of the mid-1800s and France’s invasion of Mexico in 1861.” 

The song probably reached Philippine shores through the Manila Galleons (Spanish: Galeón de Manila; Filipino: Kalakalang Galyon ng Maynila at Acapulco), Spanish trading ships which sailed the Pacific for 250 years, until the Mexican War of Independence broke out in 1815. The trading activities between the Philippines and Mexico, made “one or two round-trip voyages per year between the ports of Acapulco and Manila, which were both part of New Spain.“ It also facilitated a cultural exchange that shaped the identities and culture of both countries.

When a cockroach ambled on the shoulders of President Duterte as he endorsed his candidates at a campaign rally for the May 2019 elections, the song somehow resurrected. It has taken on new lyrics depicting the social conditions and contemporary historical events of Philippine life. I have difficulty memorizing this Philippine corrido, as the old nursery rhyme is so very etched on my mind.

Surely, the songs we sing today will not be the songs we sing tomorrow, and these corridos have a way of getting into the psyche, stealthily, without being noticed. We live in a world whose dynamism is so fast, that we live each moment, before we comprehend what happened.

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