Tag Archives: Mexican

Cure for Bad Dreams

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Antonio, TX
Performance Date: 4/16/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

A friend, CB, was visiting me from Texas, and heard me talking with my roommate about the bad dreams she had been having. Camila jokingly proposed that my roommate try this remedy that her mom always made her and her sister do whenever they had nightmares. It is used to remove bad spirits. CB’s mom is very spiritual and uses folk remedies and prayers often.

“So you need an egg and a glass of water and you say a prayer and then rub the egg all over your body in cross motions. After that you crack the egg in the water, put the egg under your bed or near your bed, and sleep. When you wake up the egg has collected all the bad energy and dreams around you and you have to flush it down the toilet to remove the energy.”

It’s interesting that an egg is chosen to soak up the negativity. From reading other sources it seems that the egg would start to smell after some time and the bad smell represented the bad energy that you would throw away. Another blogger mentioned that when it dries it leaves circles that look like the evil eye. I’d be curious to see if any more reasons behind it exist or if there’s anything that has to do with fertility.

Crea fama y Echate a Dormir

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 21 2016
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Title: Crea fama y echate a dormir

Interviewee: Armando Vildosola

Ethnicity: Mexican-American

Age: 21

Situation (Location, ambience, gathering of people?): Just me and my older brother Armando, as I asked him to share his most important pieces of wisdom that our family has shared throughout the generations. We do this every so often as some way to strengthen the bonds that we have as brothers, something of a brother meeting or a brotherly bonding session. We are sitting in our home in San Diego around our dinner table, having just finished dinner. Out house is full of family walking about visiting from Mexico. We are both on spring break from school at USC.

Piece of Folklore:

Interviewee- “Crea fama y echate a dormer”

Interviewer- “What is the English translation of that?”

Interviewee- “I guess it would be make fame and go to sleep.”

Interviewer- “I assume there is more to it than just the words? They don’t make much sense.”

Interviewee- “It means that people should make their fame, and in that sense, well… hold on.”

(A minute or so goes by)

Interviewee- “Ok so it means that when someone goes out and meets people, you should make the kind of impression that you want them to remember you by. And in that sense, you should become famous and have people remember you the way you want to remember. Because when you become famous because of something, people remember you for it. And as the saying goes, in reality, once you are famous for something and people will remember you for it, you can, basically, take a nap. And I guess what that means is that you can relax. You have made your fame and people will remember you for something, and you can relax and take it easy. You did your job, and now you can sleep! I love sleeping.”

Interviewer- “Where did you first hear this saying? Do you remember?”

Interviewee- “Of course. I first heard it from our dad, some time ago. It just made sense to me since I always dreamed of being famous, and he always wanted me to work hard. He uses it to motivate me.”

Interviewer- “Why do you still use it?”

Interviewee- “Well its meaning hasn’t left me, and I guess it helps me remember my dad and that I should do great things with my life. It helps me remember home and remember who I am as a person.”

Analyzation:

This is a proverb that makes sense, but at the same time, it is very Mexican in the sense that when it is translated into English, some of the meaning is lost in the words. The true meaning is only understood within the Mexican culture, but some of it transfers. This is all about first impressions, and those impressions are important in Mexican culture as well as American culture. We always hear of getting off on the right foot, and things of that nature.

Tags: Proverb, Mexican, Fame

Las Mananitas

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Texas
Performance Date: April 19th, 2016
Primary Language: English

Las Mañanitas

Instead of the english birthday song, every time it was a kid’s birthday in my elementary school class we would sing Las Mañanitas before taking turns hitting a piñata. It’s a traditional mexican birthday song sung at parties. YOu usually replace “mi bien” with the person’s name.

 

Lyrics:

Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David.

Hoy por ser día de tu santo, te las cantamos a ti.

 

Despierta mi bien, despierta, mira que ya amaneció

ya los pajarillos cantan la luna ya se metió.

 

Qué linda está la mañana en que vengo a saludarte

venimos todos con gusto y placer a felicitarte.

 

El día en que tu naciste nacieron todas las flores

y en la pila del bautismo cantaron los ruiseñores.

 

Ya viene amaneciendo, ya la luz del día nos dio.

Levántate de mañana mira que ya amaneció.

Translation:

 

This is the morning song that King David used to sing.

Today being the day of your saint, we sing it to you.

 

Wake up my dearest, wake up, see now that the day has dawned

the sparrows are singing, the moon has finally set.

 

How lovely is this morning, when I come to greet you

we all come with joy and pleasure to congratulate you.

 

The very day you were born all the flowers first bloomed

and in the baptismal font all the nightingales sang.

 

The dawn has come my darling, and the sunlight is here for us.

Rise up and shine with the morning and you’ll see that here’s the dawn.

I do know of similar things before, as where I went to for middle school in San Antonio, Texas also had similar traditions where they sang long spanish birthday songs. Having never learnt Spanish however, I never knew what the lyrics meant.

The Lazo and Arras in Mexican Wedding Tradition

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 67
Occupation: Reverend
Residence: Houston, TX
Performance Date: April 10, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant is a 67-year-old Mexican-American woman who is a reverend. She is known for tailoring wedding receptions to couples from different cultural backgrounds, and in her words “taking old traditions and giving them new meaning.” Many consider her to be the “guru of new wedding traditions.”

When out to breakfast with the informant while she was visiting me in Los Angeles, I asked her if there were any Mexican rituals or traditions that she often incorporated in her weddings. She responded,

“Oh yes. The lazo and arras ceremony. Before the couple takes their vows, the maid of honor and the best man take a lazo (a rope) and wrap it around the bride and groom. This symbolizes to the community that the bride and groom are now one. The arras is 13 coins representing Jesus and the 12 apostles. I bless the coins and pour them into the groom’s hands. He then pours these into the bride’s hands. This symbolizes to the community that he will take care of her. Nowadays, because women want to be viewed as equals, often times the groom will pour las arras into the bride’s hands, and the bride will then pour them back into the groom’s hands, showing that she will take care of him, just as he will her, spiritually, emotionally, and financially.”

This ritual, which the informant often performs when marrying an individual with a Mexican cultural background to someone without this background, is symbolic of the spiritual, emotional, and physical commitments that come with marriage. It is typically performed at weddings where one or both partners practice the Christian faith, because of the parallel between the thirteen coins and Jesus and the 12 apostles. However, the informant stated that the ceremony is still sometimes conducted during secular weddings due to family tradition. It is interesting to examine how this form of folklore has evolved over time to reflect the cultural norms in which it is performed, as it was once held that the man is entirely responsible for taking care of his bride, but with the recent push for gender equality across all spectra of life it is now also important for the woman to show she will take care of her groom. The lazo is a public display of a couple’s commitment to one another, and highlights the permanent merging of two individual’s lives as a result of their marriage.

What’s Done is Done

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 57
Residence: Miami, FL
Performance Date: 3/14/16
Primary Language: Spanish

Original Text: “No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano.”

Transliteration: “Not for much waking early dawns more early.”

Translation: “No matter how early you wake up, the sun still rises at the same time.”

 

According to the source, this proverb is similar to the proverbs “What’s done is done,” and “You can’t change the past.” To put this proverb in simpler terms, it means that it doesn’t matter what you do. The sun will always rise at dawn, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. The source says he uses it when people are worried about things they’ve done that can no longer be corrected. He couldn’t remember specifically when or where he’d first heard it, but he remembered his mother using it when he was young. He’d go to her crying about something that he’d done poorly in school, and she’d tell him not to cry because it’s in the past, and there’s nothing he could do about it anyway.

This collection particularly interests me because of the source’s interpretation. The proverb is stated in terms of something that will happen in the future (i.e. the sunrise), but when he explained how he understood it, he explained it in terms of the past (i.e. “You can’t change the past.”). When I first heard the proverb, I understood it to be making a statement on destiny. I understood it as being, “No matter what you do, you can’t change the rules of the world. The sun is still gonna rise at x time. So and so is still going to die. Etc, etc.” The source, however, makes it sound like a statement on regret. We shouldn’t worry ourselves about things that have already happened because the past can’t be corrected.

In either case, the proverb is understood as making a statement on how people can’t change things. But why did he and I understand it differently? Personally, I hate the idea of destiny very much, which might be why I jumped to that conclusion, ready to tear apart this proverb. When I asked him why he saw it as a statement about regret, he said he thinks it’s because that’s how his mother always used it, so he kind of inherited her view and never quite thought of it any other way. He understood my view, though, and wondered if maybe he’d start to see the proverb that way, too.