Author Archives: attias@usc.edu

“A quien madura Dios lo ayuda,” Mexico

This proverb was collected from a friend, who was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico and is 21 years old. The proverb “a quien madruga Dios lo ayuda” translates into English literally as “God helps early risers.”

 

This is something her dad used to say to her to get her to wake up for school. She has noticed that it is often the older people tell to the young, like it also often happens with proverbs in general. She thinks it highlights the fact that Latin Americans are notorious for being lazy and need to be encouraged to break that habit.

 

I actually grew up hearing what seems to be this proverb’s opposite, “no por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano.” It translates to “no matter how early you get up, you can’t make the sun rise any sooner.” I thought it sounded discouraging at first, but when I thought about it, I concluded that it spoke to a similar idea; it is saying that one should not make rushed decisions, to take the time to do things right.

“Agua pasa por mi casa, cate de mi corazón, lleva un vestido verde, y amarillo el corazón,” Mexico

This riddle was collected from a friend, who was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico and is 21 years old. The riddle “agua pasa por mi casa, cate de mi corazón, lleva un vestido verde, y amarillo el corazón” translates into English literally as “water passes through my house, cate from my heart, it wears a green dress, and has a yellow heart.” The answer is avocado, for the word in Spanish for it is aguacate, so if it is split in too it becomes “agua” (the word for water) and “cate,” which isn’t an actual word.

 

My friend says she used to hear it a lot around school as she was growing up. She says she isn’t surprised that avocados were made into a riddle since avocados are very common in Mexico, and she grew up eating them with every single meal.

 

This riddle is a variation of one I grew up with myself, and it is one of the most popular ones that I can remember from my childhood. It seems that Latin American riddles are a bit more symbolic in that they involved more imagery than American ones.

El chamuco, Mexico

This folk saying was collected from a friend, who was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico and is 20 years old. El chamuco is a Mexican folk saying mostly used to as a slang term referring to the devil. It often comes with religious undertones, and some versions are very detailed; for example, some people believe that his body is on fire, has one cat leg and one chicken leg, and smells strongly like copper.

 

It was used in her household in different ways. Her mother would often say things like, “go to sleep right now or el chamuco will eat you.” The hostile tone of that type of threat-like statement made her feel very scared as a child.

 

However, people also used it to refer to an evil or angry person. When her mother got angry, her father would say “if you get any angrier the chamuco is going to come out of you.” It soon became a running joke with her siblings to refer to their mother as el chamuco when they wanted to tease her. She would get really angry, which they just thought proved their point.

 

Even though I wasn’t familiar with el chamuco specifically, my parents had similar ways of getting me to listen to them, like el cuco, which was used in the same context as el chamuco and I would think could even be a variation of it. As I pay closer attention to Latin American sayings and legends, I am beginning to see that parents tend to scare their children into behaving, which is really interesting. I think Latin American parents are very strict and more religious than the average American, which is reflected in these folk sayings.

“Más vale solo que mal acompañado,” Mexico

This proverb was collected from a friend, who was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico and is 20 years old. The proverb “más vale solo que mal acompañado” translates into English literally as “it is better to be alone than in bad company.” It clearly comes from a place of experience, and it is about toxic people not being worth befriending just for the sake of having many friends.

 

Even though my friend had been hearing it all her life, specifically from her dad, she never really believed it. Like a lot of young kids, she believed that popularity was everything and surrounded herself with as many people as she could, even though some of them weren’t good for her. They were shallow and often mean, she says, which caused her to imitate that behavior as well just so she could “fit in.” However, when she left for college, all of those relationships immediately fell through. All her “friends” stopped talking to her, and it was hard for her to be alone at first, but her dad kept reminding her of that. She really got to know herself and learned to find peace on her own, and to be a better person. That saying has become really important to her, something that she constantly reminds herself, and she is very grateful to her dad for teaching her that lesson.

 

To me, this is also a very meaningful life lesson. I have also heard it since I was very young and I had very similar experiences to my friend’s. I think is a really powerful message that most of us forget as we let appearances and popularity define our behavior. Similarly to her, that reminder has gotten me through a lot and it has also made me learn to appreciate real friends, no matter how many of them I have.

“Camaroón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente,” Mexico

This proverb was collected from a friend, who was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico and is 20 years old. The proverb “camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente” translates into English literally as “a shrimp that falls asleep gets carried by the tide.” It is similar in meaning to the American saying “if you snooze, you lose.” It can be interpreted in terms of laziness, opportunity, or devotion, depending on the context it is used in, according to her.

 

My friend first related it to laziness. To her, the “tide” represented life since, it is always moving, and the shrimp represents lazy people who refuse to move with it. It is something that her mother always used to say to her and her siblings in order to motivate her to stay focused at school, and she thinks that it was very encouraging. As she grew up, she related it to opportunity when comparing the tide to an opportunity, and if you “sleep” on it you can miss it. It was her dad who gave it this meaning as he was encouraging her to apply to jobs and network as she got to college. When she had a bad experience with a close friend, another good friend said it to her comparing the tide to toxic people.

 

Even though I am from a Latin American country myself, I had never heard this before, but it is hardly surprising since Latin Americans have a reputation for being lazy so I could see why this would be popular. Like most proverbs, this one can be interpreted differently by different people depending on context, and I think it is really interesting how one person could use the experiences she was having at a certain time in her life to assign different meanings to a phrase she has been hearing since she was a child. It speaks to the universality and flexibility that some proverbs can have when looking at them from different perspectives.