Tag Archives: children

A La Rorro Niño – Lullaby

Nationality: United States
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Orange County, CA
Performance Date: 4/30/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant: this is a song my mom used to sing me when I was little:

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor;

a la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, que viniste al mundo sólo por mi amor.

Esos tus ojitos ya los vas cerrando,

pero estás mirando todos mis delitos.

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor;

a la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, que viniste al mundo sólo por mi amor.

Por cuna te ofrezco mi fiel corazón,

pues no lo merezco, te pido perdón.

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor;

a la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, que viniste al mundo sólo por mi amor.

Quisiste por nombre llamarte Jesús,

como padre amante tú me diste luz.

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor;

a la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, que viniste al mundo sólo por mi amor.

En el crudo invierno Mi Dios y Señor,

que sufres alegre del frío y su rigor.

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor;

a la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, que viniste al mundo sólo por mi amor.

La gloria te cantan angélicas voces,

para que te duermas y del sueño goces.

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor;

a la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, que viniste al mundo sólo por mi amor.

A la rorro Niño, a la rorro ro, duérmete Mi Niño, duérmete mi amor.

Interviewer: What does it mean?

JH: that’s the thing…I don’t know how to even translate it. But it’s sorta like when you swing a baby to sleep, you know what I mean? It’s one of those things that’s just really hard to translate, so it probably doesn’t have a translation. But generally, it’s talking about religion 

Context:

JH was born in America, and her parents are from Mexico. JH is very fond of this song because her mother used to sing it to her when she was a child. This story was collected over a phone call.

Thoughts:

This song goes to show how religion can be a great source of comfort. Listening to the song, it has such a sweet quality that is, of course, reminiscent of a lullaby; it’s interesting that across cultures, lullabies always have a similar quality, no matter the content. They are always happy and light. I think that this is important because it speaks to the fact that the moods that music elicit are similar no matter who you are or where you are––as people often say, music the universal language.

(To hear the song, please see this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12aiZ42gV2Y&t=49s)

The Aswang – Filipino Demon

Nationality: United States
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: El Cerrito, CA
Performance Date: 4/29/20
Primary Language: English

Main piece:

BR: My grandmother is very religious and even more superstitious, and she was raised in the northern part of the Philippines. And one bit of folklore that she always talked about when I was a kid was the concept of the Aswang, a creature who appears human during the day but becomes a hideous beast during the night. And the Aswang brings bad luck and death wherever it goes, and is considered to be one of the stealthiest demons in Filipino culture, cause it can shapeshift, and usually slips by unnoticed. So my grandma always brought up the Aswang whenever anything bad happened, and it terrified me because she seemed dead serious about it. 

Context:

The informant, BR, was born and raised in the Bay Area. His father is from Hawaii, and their family immigrated there when he was very little from the Philippines. BR was always scared by this story when he was little, and even to this day he is still afraid of the dark. This story was collected over a phone call.

Thoughts:

We talked about in class how there are always a lot of stories that are meant for scaring children, and I think this one is interesting because it appears human during the day as a normal human. This not only encourages children to be on their best behavior (as most other children’s tales that we talked about) but also brings into question your relationships with other people, which is very important. It kind of seems like a metaphor for if you’re in a toxic relationship, or someone is giving you trouble. And that’s an important thing to be scared of, and so it makes all the more sense to scare children of that when they are young because young children have those same issues.

Chinese Children’s-Made Tops

Performance Date: 2020

Piece
You put a nail into a piece of wood to make a top. A round piece of wood. You need it to be a little circle. And then use a piece of thread to kind of… circle… around the wood. Then you twist, and twist and then do this throwing thing [mimes a light toss] so it would unspin and shoot off so it would spin away. I didn’t get to make tops though, boys did that kind of thing.
Context
The informant watched the boys in her poor neighborhood in Taiwan make these tops and play with them. The older boys would teach the younger ones to keep the activity going. The girls would watch or play other games instead.
This story was shared when the informant was asked what they used to do as children by the informant’s grandchildren looking for something to do or play.
My Thoughts
This toy reminded me of Beyblades, small, customizable plastic tops that you could attach to a little launcher which, when pulled, would set the top spinning extremely quickly into a “stadium”. I have seen a number of young boys do battle to see who’s tops would keep spinning the longest. The informant’s description of how boys in her childhood town would use string to create the same effect amazes me as it is a much cheaper method!

Llama Song

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Thousand Oaks, California
Performance Date: 4/20/2020
Primary Language: English

Background: The performer is my college roommate and friend. She spent the first fifteen years of her life in Minneapolis, Minnesota before moving to Thousand Oaks, California for high school. She is currently in her twenties and attends school at the University of Southern California.

Main Text:

“Happy llama

Sad llama

Totally rad llama

Super llama

Drama llama

Don’t forget Barack-a-llama”

Context: The llama song was traditionally performed around age eight and stopped around age eleven. The performer cannot recall any particular reasons for starting it up, it was just the sort of thing chanted on the playground when bored. The llama hand motion (ring and middle finger touching thumb and pinky and index pointing up to form a llama head) was essential to performance.

Thoughts: I am familiar with the llama song, despite growing up in a different state than the performer. Her version has slightly different, more appropriate lyrics, despite the rhythm and the hand motions being the same. The part that surprised me the most was the final line “don’t forget Barack-a-llama,” because it specifically dates the song around the year 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected as President of the United States. Contextually, I think that this reference is an interesting measure of what children pay attention to—most elementary school-aged children would not be aware of politics before the 2008 election, but the event was memorable enough that proper nouns stripped of all political or historical meaning would work their way into children’s playground folk culture. The preoccupation with llamas is something else I’ve always wondered about, because I recall other childhood songs and jokes about them. I think it’s a combination of the unique spelling (the double “ll” is not common for English speakers), the inner rhyme of the word “llama,” and the fact that llamas were a rarer animal than, say, dogs or horses. For young children just getting familiar with the English language, the word “llama” is both easy to rhyme and funny to describe, as demonstrated with this song.

The Tooth Fairy

Nationality: White American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Orrinda, California
Performance Date: 4/24/2020
Primary Language: English

Context:

JA is a 20-year-old student from Orinda, California. She recalled this story in an interview.

Text:

JA: I don’t remember when I first learned of it… but the tooth fairy comes to your house the night after you lose a tooth when you’re a kid. You put your baby tooth under your pillow at night and while you’re asleep, the tooth fairy takes it and replaces it with a gift. So, like, in reality, your parents took your tooth and put something there.

But, anyhow, most people use money as the tooth fairy gift, but my parents always gave us these little toys. I think I got a nice marker once. Little toys like that. And I believed it when I was a little kid but I lost my teeth really slowly so by the time I lost my last baby teeth I was pretty old and had my suspicions (laughs.) And then when I lost my last baby tooth that night I felt my dad’s giant hand putting something under my pillow.

I don’t really know what to make of the whole thing, just that it’s a fun game to play to reward your child for the milestone of getting adult teeth. I remember talking about the tooth fairy with my friends in elementary school.

Thoughts:

The tooth fairy is a common legend in America. It is a tradition that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood through the changing of a person’s physiology. As the body changes, the child is rewarded, maybe to allay what Freud calls castration anxiety, or a fear of becoming disincorporated, a fear of alterations in the physical body. The tooth fairy is a way of transitioning kids through that process, celebrating it, and marking it as a significant and positive moment in the life of a child. I remember that my own parents gave me a homemade card for when I had learned how to cut my own nails. This gesture follows the same basic function that the tooth fairy does which is to mark a time of physiological change with a ritual designed to acknowledge mental and spiritual change, to allay the fear of the body being picked apart and to redirect that fear, sublimate it, toward a positive feeling of pride in maturation.