Mother’s superstitions

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Background Information: Eumin is a freshman at USC, and she speaks Konglish, or a mixture of Korean and English, with her mother at home. I interviewed her about some of the superstitions her mother has.

Ankita: Can you tell me about some of the superstitions your mom has?

Eumin: Ya so if I walk around the house without socks on, because um, if my feet are too cold for most of the time, um I won’t be able to get pregnant.

Ankita: Wow, really?

Eumin: Yeah. Or like, she really believes in herbal essences… Like, if I’m feeling sad or something… Like, last semester, like during finals, she shipped me this bottle of lavender extract, and she told me like, Eumin, you NEED to put two drops of this in your water.

Ankita: Is this something just your mom believes in, or is it a more common Korean thing too?

Eumin: A lot of it does stem from Korean things, and I think her being religious also, kind of amplifies her superstitions.

Ankita: What’s her religion?

Eumin: She’s Christian.

Ankita: Do you ever subconsciously find yourself following these or believing in them?

Eumin: Um… yeah. Like, my mom also told me to never write my name in red ink, because that means I’ll die, or like, something really bad’s gonna happen to me. So like, I never write my name in red ink, ever. I dunno, it’s just that’s she’s told me that since I was young, so I’ve kind of just never done it and probably never will.

Thoughts: It is interesting how superstitions guide the everyday lives and practices of many people. In Eumin’s mother’s case, she tries to make sure Eumin follows some of these as well, as a way of caring for her, and wanting to make sure she is healthy. It is also interesting how Eumin herself became subconsciously conditioned into following some of these

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”

Nationality: English and German
Age: 87
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Seal Beach, California
Performance Date: April 16, 2017
Primary Language: English

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

The informant was born in Atchinson, Kansas, but moved to California when she was seven, where she has lived ever since.

While the informant cannot remember a specific instance where she heard this saying, she explained that this was something that people would say over and over again. She considers her generation to have been homebodies and that their sayings simply reflected the way people were living. To her, these sayings came from people who were doing more manual work, like farming and housekeeping, rather than office work. She herself never had a job, but fulfilled her goal of becoming a mother and homemaker.

With this saying in particular, she was quick to point out that it didn’t say women. Because of this, she explained that it was great for a man, but didn’t apply to her necessarily. She went on to explain that she would get up early not because she liked to, but to have quiet time. However, she was never made wealthy or wise from it, with maybe only being healthier coming into play for her.

The informant relayed her folklore to me at my dining room table. I have known her my entire life as she is a close relative. I had already asked her about her folklore weeks before, but upon meeting on this day, she brought a list that she had written of all she could think of so that she would not forget when she told me. While she read the specific folklore off the sheet, the other details I got from her were not pre-determined.

As the informant herself was/is a homebody, it is natural that phrases that suited her lifestyle were the ones that she heard on a regular basis. Her friends were very similar to her and her husband as well. It was interesting though, that while she claimed it did not apply to her, she still woke up early. I believe that the folklore influenced her without her even knowing it.

Legend of the Cucuy

Nationality: Hispanic
Age: 35
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 6, 2017
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

I recently spent the day with my aunt. While we had lunch, she recounted a legend from her childhood in El Salvador:

E: “El cucuy es una criatura q vive debajo de la cama q se lleva a los niños q se portan mal, se dice que vive en armarios también. Nadie sabe la aparencia real del cucuy, pero muchos dicen q tiene las orejas como las de los murciélagos y los dientes afilados. Cuando los niños se portan mal, los padres le dicen a sus hijos que el cucuy llegará y los comerá. De niño a menudo se escucha a los los padres cantar una canción de cuna q dice: “Duermete mi niño, duérmete ya/Que viene el Coco y te comerá.” Practicamente es una historia q los padres inventaban para hacer q sus hijos se portaran bien, inculcándoles temor se ser castigados por un ser sobrenatural sino lo hacían”

E: “The Cucuy is a creature who lives under beds and kidnaps misbehaved children, it is said that he lives in closets as well. Nobody knows the Cucuy’s real appearance, but many say he has the ears of a bat and sharpened teeth. When children misbehave, their parents tell them that the cucuy is going to come and eat them. As a child, the parents are often heard singing a lullaby that says, “Sleep, my child, go to sleep, and the Cucuy will come and eat you.” It is practically a story that the parents invented to make their children behave well, instilling fear of being punished by a supernatural being if the children didn’t behave.”

Collector Analysis:

My aunt heard this story from her mother, who would sing the lullaby to her. However, the legend of the Cucuy was not a very memorable legend for my aunt. She couldn’t give as many details as she could for the legend of la Sihuanaba. The Cucuy is just the Salvadorean version of the boogieman. The legend helps parents ensure their children behave. The one thing I found fascinating was the Cucuy’s shared characteristics with a bat. In El Salvador, bats are a common occurrence. Just like in Los Angeles possums run free at night, in El Salvador bats own the night.

The Lady

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 41
Occupation: Principle
Residence: Sante Fe Springs, CA
Performance Date: March 12, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

So when I was in 5th grade there was this lady that we called her, “The Lady,” but really when I got older I found out she was only 16 but because we were in 5th grade at the time, she was older to us and she was scary so we called her “The Lady.” Umm… but when I was in 5th grade we had finished recess and we were all lined up getting ready to go back into class at umm… at St. Hilary and all of the sudden people started umm… Running into the classrooms and one of the teachers was like, “GET INSIDE HURRY UP RUN!” And they all swarmed to this one specific area like where the third grade class was lined up. But none of us really knew what was going on so it was like this mass chaos. We all just ran into the classrooms and I remember like we were in the classroom trying to barricade the door, there was no adult  inside and we were in 5th grade and umm… we were all scared and someone kept closing the doors um… “Hide, Hide, Hide!” Everyone, you know there was a lady on campus but we just were scared and we didn’t even know why and I remember specifically Anne-Marie Maizer was like, “I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE!” And so that made me scared because I was like okay something’s happening and I might die and so I just remember we kept closing the windows and stupid Marco Martinez kept opening them back up and we were like, “NO, MARCO NO!” and he… we would close them back up but to be a bunch of 5th grade kids in a classroom by ourselves without the teacher… well our teacher was one of the few male teachers on campus and he was one of the ones that told us “GET INSIDE” and ran over to “The Lady” and so come to find out there was a lady that the… the rumor was that there was a lady on campus who was a devil worshipper and umm… she was there to kill us and… because we were a Catholic school and so she wanted to kill the kids in the Catholic school. And she lived in the apartment building behind the Catholic school and so it was around the same time that Richard Ramirez was in the news so we were already scared of “the night stalker” who was also a… a satanic ritual kind of, you know, into that thing, yeah serial killer and so… I just remember being terrified like I literally would umm… she had… one of the teachers told us that he… she had said to him, “COVER YOUR CROSS!” Like she couldn’t look at his cross because it was too religious for her and she was a devil worshipper so it was like evil to her and so I walked around with a rosary because I wanted a cross with me at all times. And I kept it under my pillow along with like a kitchen knife because I was just terrified. I mean for that entire year even into our 6th grade year I remember people were like, “Oh the lady, we saw the lady, the lady’s coming on campus.” And instantly I would just like remember getting uh… so nervous about it and we were  terrified and we remember that like she was umm… there to kill us like we were scared about that, about “The Lady.” What’s interesting about that story though was that when I became an adult, I ended up working with Art, who was the teacher that was my teacher at the time. So I got to ask him as an adult like, “So what was going on with this lady, like the legend of the lady, and what really happened?” and he… come to find that… so she was… she did live in the apartments behind the school, she was 16 years old, she… she was high on PCP is what he said. She was definitely on some hallucination of her drug and she did umm… she did say stuff that was umm… that made her sound like a devil worshipper and that umm.. They had to call the police on her several times. I mean but the… the story was out of control, there was a story about her having a machete, a bazooka, and like you know, I’m sure kids embellish along the way, yeah definitely. But I just remember that he did say there was weird things that were happening in the church and that umm… that they ended up going to her apartment to like arrest her and that she had like a goat’s head altar and he was like, “No she was really a devil worshipper and on top of that she was on drugs.”

My informant experience this horror story firsthand and was quite traumatized by it. She never even found out “The Lady’s” real name. She told me this story, while everyone else of our family and friends were telling ghost and horror stories. This folk narrative was interesting to me because it consisted of several elements and genres of folklore. There was the “The Legend of the Lady,” that began as just a rumor but ultimately, as my informant found out later in life, turned out to be true. In the story my informant uses relics and objects that she believes will protect her from this “Lady,” such as a rosary or kitchen knife. There is also an element of children telling each other rumors and over exaggerating the truth and of course there is also belief in folk magic and rituals such as “The Lady” and her devil worship or belief in Catholicism in the story.

Loteria

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Information:

Yerik Macias is a student at the University of Southern California studying Aerospace Engineering. He comes from a Mexican background, and is originally from Santa Ana, CA.

Game:

“I play a game called Loteria on Christmas. So it’s a I think four by four cards they give you. Each box is a picture. it’s a bunch of different things. There’s random pictures of stuff. It could be a melon, watermelon in English, or something else. I’m not sure why they chose the pictures. The way we do it, a lot of families do it the same way but it depends, you get pinto beans and you put one on every square. Then you choose someone to read out the deck of cards, they shuffle it put it face down and then start taking cards out from it. Then they read off what it is. And then if you get it, you just take a bean off. You can win, my family doesn’t do this, but you can win by getting horizontal or vertical lines, but the way we do it once you completely clear the card, cause otherwise the games are too short. We usually play it with money, so not much money but we get like quarters or dimes and put a different buy in each cents. Whoever wins takes it all. That’s pretty much it, I think.”

Q: Would you say that the way you play Loteria is standard?

“Yeah, there’s little nitpicky stuff, everyone has their house rules but you know, that’s the way you play it.”

Analysis:

The informant’s way of playing was somewhat different than the traditional way of playing. The informant mentions that his family reads off a card and whoever has that card takes a bean off. In the traditional game, there is no mention of pinto beans being used, and the person who reads off the card usually tells a riddle in order to make the card discrete to the other players. The fifty four Loteria cards the informant uses, along with the general way of playing remain true to the traditional game.