Sordid Meditations of a Cyborg/Rasquacha Muchacha Cucaracha

In the end there was La Cucaracha and she was pronounced dead: dead and alive–alive and dead with a bud light. (response to Guillermo Nericcio Garcia’s birth of a Latina Bombshell)

Everyone has dealt with at least one in their space and some of us have had to deal with being called a roach, a cucaracha, vermin. Rumors of Mexicans and other unwanted pests, infesting and infecting, scurry across the dreams of many Americans.  La cucaracha is duplicitous, brown, reviled, feared disastrous, lazy, disgusting, takes up too much space, crosses your borders, has too many children, steals your job and your husband, queers your wife and will outnumber your population (cue Conan O’Brien’s sketch about the future here) in the year 3000.

I guess being a roach is not as bad as you think. Even as we anticipate your shoe sole, deportation, extermination, poison, genocidal tecnicos and death, there exist rumors of our famed immortality. Like the vampir@s we live long after humanity, like aliens we resist nuclear bombas, like chickens we live with our cabezas cut off and like las movies de horror we return again and again ready to spring into action.

And as such, like the revolutionaries of the Mexican Revolution, we accept our place…dead on the lawn with a bud light surrounded by four eagles and a church rat.

Cuca Epigraphs

Vermin or Cucaracha is a taxonomic term often employed by haters in describing unwanted people.

-La Chica Boom

Vermin is a species regarded as pest or nuisance, those associated with the carrying of disease…especially those that injure …[the] game.”

-OED

A hippie is like a cockroach. So are the beatniks. So are the Chicanos. We’re all around, Judge. And judges do not pick us to serve on Grand Juries.

-Oscar Zeta Acosta

The city swarms with these vermin, particularly those who profess the tenets of Diogenes, Antisthenes, and Crates.

–A. D. 165 Lucian from Parrhesiasts-Diogene,: The Cynic Philosophers and Their Techniques [excerpt from seminar given by Foucault in 1983)

Appeals to racial identities to ground the elimination of other groups needed no justification in the truth discourse of biology. While, in Rwanda, Hutus referred to Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’, such epithets were hardly elements in a political rationality drawing on biological understandings of racial difference.

–Paul Rainbow and Nikolas Rose

I understand how bad things are in Mexico that people feel they need to leave to better themselves but doesn’t it make sense that when you come here you should change the trashy ass dirty ways you live; take a fucking class to learn English; and just flat out strive to be better? But instead you have decided to stay dumb, not learn English, and make what money you can then send it back to your shitty country; in turn making our country start on the path of being just as shitty as the one you came from. I’m sorry but life was so much better in Washington without you fuckers… I would go back but just like a cockroach your invading that state a well!!

-Written on the thread of comments on Gustavo Arellano’s “Ask a Mexican”

As a spaniard I apologize for my ancestors creating such a horrible, disgusting, moronic race know as “mexicans” hopefully someone rises up in opposition to their lowlife, corrupt ways. All you nasty messyskins need to get the fuck out or be exterminated.

-Written on the thread of comments on Gustavo Arellano’s “Ask a Mexican”

The song La Cucaracha (below) is well known among many Mexican’ts and it was one of the most popular corridos sung by soldiers during the Mexican Revolution.

The cockroach, the cockroachcannot walk any moreas he has no moremarijuana to smoke.The Carrancistas are leavingthey are leaving with empty stomachfor the Villistas saythey are going to die of hunger.Poor cockroachis bitterly complainingthat he has no ironed clothesbecause of the lack of carbon.(Choir)Poor Madero is leftby almost everyoneHuerta, the drunken banditis only good for an ox to plough. We take unstarched clothes day after day and without such chic we are considered blockheads.   (Choir)   Everyone is fighting for the chair which is the source of much money Pancho Villa at the North and at the South viva Zapata!   I am excited to laugh at one thing: to see Pancho Villa without a shirt and I am terrified by one thing: to see the vile Huerta in a shirt.   (Choir)   I need a good Ford to arrive to the place where the Convention was sent by Zapata.   A colorful parrot says to a mottled one whoever jokes with my country let him be taken by the …   (Choir)   Some plunder a lot and then are hidden far away protected by the law while we are considered guilty.   (Choir)   How beautiful are the camp-followers when dancing the fandango Viva Pánfilo Natera the pride of Durango.   The cockroach is already dead he is taken to be buried he is followed by four eagles and by the mouse of the church.

La Cucaracha, la cucaracha,ya no puede caminar,porque no tiene, porque le falta,marihuana que fumar.Ya se van los carrancistas,ya se van por el alambre,porque dicen los villistas,que se estarán muriendo de hambre.Pobre de la Cucaracha,se queja con decepción,de no usar ropa planchada,por la escasez de carbón.(Coro)Pobrecito de Madero,casi todos le han fallado,Huerta el ebrio bandolero,es un buey para el arado. La ropa sin almidón, se pone todos los días; y sin esas boberías, se me figura melón.   (Coro)   ¡Todos se pelean la silla que les deja mucha plata; en el Norte Pancho Villa, y en el Sur Viva Zapata!   Una cosa me da risa: Pancho Villa sin camisa, otra cosa me da horror, al vil Huerta en camisón.   (Coro)   Necesito algún “fortingo” para hacer la caminata, al lugar donde mandó a la convención, Zapata.   Una guacamaya pinta le dijo a una colorada, quien se meta con mi patria, se lo carga la…   (Coro)   Hay unos que roban mucho, y luego huyen muy lejos, validos de fuero y mando y de que nos creen pen…itentes.   (Coro)   Qué bonitas soldaderas cuando bailan el fandango. Viva Pánfilo Natera, el orgullo de Durango.   Ya murió la Cucaracha ya la llevan a enterrar, entre cuatro zopilotes y un ratón de sacristán.