La Cucaracha

La Cucaracha (meaning "The Cockroach") is a traditional Spanish language folk song. It is unknown when the song came about. It is very popular in Mexico, and was especially so during the Mexican Revolution. Many alternative stanzas exist. The basic song describes a cockroach who cannot walk. The song has been performed widely.

The song consists of verse-and-refrain (strophe-antistrophe) pairs, with each half of each pair consisting of four lines featuring an ABCB rhyme scheme.

The song's earliest lyrics, from which its name is derived, concern a cockroach that has lost one of its six legs and is struggling to walk with the remaining five. The cockroach's uneven, five-legged gait is imitated by the song's original 5/4 meter, formed by removing one upbeat (corresponding to the missing sixth leg) from the second half of a 6/4 measure:

Many later versions of the song, especially those whose lyrics do not mention the cockroach's missing leg(s), extend the last syllable of each line to fit the more familiar 6/4 meter.

The song's verses fit a traditional melody separate from that of the refrain but sharing the refrain's meter (either 5/4 or 6/4 as discussed above). In other respects, they are highly variable, usually providing satirical commentary on contemporary political or social problems or disputes.

The origins of "La Cucaracha" are obscure. The refrain's lyrics make no explicit reference to historical events; it is difficult if not impossible therefore to date. Because verses are improvised according to the needs of the moment, however, they often enable a rough estimate of their age by mentioning contemporary social or political conditions (thus narrowing a version's possible time of origin to periods in which those conditions prevailed) and/or referring to specific current or past events (thus setting a maximum boundary for a version's age).

There exist several early (pre-Revolution) sets of lyrics referring to historical events.

Francisco Rodríguez Marín records in his book Cantos Populares Españoles several verses dealing with the Reconquista, which was completed in 1492 when the Moors surrendered the Alhambra to Spain:

Some early versions of the lyrics discuss events that took place during the conclusion of the Granada War in 1492.

One of the earliest written references to the song appears in Mexican writer and political journalist José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's 1819 novel La Quijotita y su Prima, where it is suggested that:

...
Wikipedia