Last Mother’s Day, we explored songs in the Frontera Collection
dedicated to mothers, especially in Mexican music. The sheer number of popular tunes expressing reverence and devotion to
las madrecitas revealed what could be called a cult of motherhood in Mexican culture.
The archives also contain a large body of work that explores another side of that close family bond – songs about sons. A search of the Frontera database yields hundreds of compositions whose titles include the word “hijo,” Spanish for son. Not to be discriminatory, but the focus of this blog is on the masculine gender, not daughters. (Indeed, the collection has far fewer songs about female offspring, just
57 titles with the word “hija,” or daughter, compared to
more than 300 titles with “hijo.”) In this case, though, excluding women may be a good thing. As we shall see, songs about sons often deal with boys, or their fathers, behaving badly.
We’ve all heard the parable of the prodigal son, the one who takes his father’s inheritance and leaves home only to return destitute and begging for forgiveness. The story appears rather regularly in English-language pop music, with versions by acts from the Rolling Stones to Kid Rock and U2. In the Frontera Collection, the prodigal theme – and its many variants – are amply represented. As of this writing, there are 15 recordings specifically titled “El Hijo Prodigo,” based pretty faithfully on the biblical story.
In Anglo pop culture, however, we don’t find the same widespread obsession with dissecting family ties and asserting the values that define the parent/child relationship. In Mexican songs, on the other hand, the often conflicted, tragic relationship between the wayward son and his parents is examined from many different angles. There is not only the prodigal son, but the disobedient son (
El Hijo Desobediente), the wicked son (
El Hijo Malvado), the bad son (
El Hijo Malo), the ungrateful son (
El Hijo Ingrato), the infamous son (
El Hijo Infame), and the sorry son, the one who repents (
El Hijo Arrepentido).
Many of these tales have a twist that makes them even more Mexican in nature. In the gospel, it’s the good brother, the one who stayed home, who is taught a lesson by his father’s generosity in welcoming back his errant sibling. In the Mexican version, the prodigal son himself learns the harsh lessons of life. The ambitious child doesn’t simply go off and find failure. After ignoring his parents’ wise advice, he often chooses a dissolute life of womanizing and barhopping, then turns to drugs, begging, or thievery when the money runs out.
Add to that the tragic twist. In Mexican music, the prodigal son almost always comes home to find his dear old mother dead. This sets up a new moral at the end of the story, somewhat different in the corrido than in the Bible. Fatherly forgiveness is no longer the point. Instead, it’s a warning to other sons not to make the same mistake; that is, sons must treasure their mothers while they’re still alive. Thus, the corrido’s cautionary tale still has a biblical ring: Repent before it’s too late.
In the collection’s corrido renditions of
“El Hijo Pródigo” – by top artists such as Los Alegres de Terán, Carlos y José, and Lydia Mendoza – the son heartlessly turns his back on his parents, only to return to find them both dead. In his grief, he becomes a thief (
En mi mayor aflicción/Quise enseñarme a robar), then gets arrested and goes to jail. From behind bars, he warns his friends to avoid the same fate:
Yo les digo a mis amigos/Todos los que están aquí/Que no abandonen a sus padres/Y les pase lo que a mi.
Other similar songs offer an extreme variation on the theme. In
“El Hijo Malvado” by Los Artisticos De Jr. Farias, the malevolent son is confronted in a bar by his mother who urges him to leave the booze and the ladies of the night. Instead, “like a rabid dog,” the son drags his old lady out of the cantina by her silver hair. When he returns to the bar, he finds the object of his desires has left him for a friend. And when he returns home, he finds his mother dead “of a broken heart.”
Yet, there are worse fates for ungrateful boys. In
“El Hijo Malcriado” by Los Madrugadores, the misbegotten son gets a gruesome comeuppance. He arrogantly snubs his mother’s offer of breakfast and invitation to church to ask for God’s help. When he tells the caring old woman that he doesn’t want anybody’s help, she says his heart is cold and should be torn out. The prophecy comes true when the son is trampled by a horse that rips out his “miserable heart.” In the final verse, the townsfolk pick up the pieces and then rush to tell his mother what happened.
Of course, there are two sides to every relationship. In many of these songs, blame also goes to the adults for being bad parents. These stories are often told in the first person by the abandoned son, who is wounded, bitter, and incensed. The classic case is
“El Hijo Abandonado,” the pitiful tale of a forgotten boy who wants to find his irresponsible parents and ask them why they left him. Underscoring the lifelong stigma of being unwanted, the boy says he’s taunted in his town and, without parents, he can’t even be sure he was baptized.
The moral is delivered in raw and blunt language: People blame the bastard, the lyric says, when the fault lies with couples who engender “the fruit of their sin,” only to kill it or give it away.
Muchos culpan a aquel hijo que es bastardo,
No a los padres que lo dejan engendrado.
Aquel hijo es solo fruto de un pecado,
Y lo matan o lo dejan regalado.
There are also songs of moral outrage against parents whose immoral behavior sets in motion tragic consequences. In
“El Hijo de Nadie” (“Nobody’s Child”), for example, two young people fall in love without knowing they are siblings, because neither of them knew their absent father. When they realize “destiny’s criminal error” (
error criminal del destino), they enter a suicide pact to end their state of sin. The narrator’s outrage is personal because, as the song explains, he too was abandoned by his father and can be called “hijo de nadie."
Son culpables los padres más crueles
Que jamás merecieron ser hombres.
Van por allí engañando mujeres,
Y negando a sus hijos el nombre.
Yo no entiendo porque no se mueren
Antes que hagan maldad y traiciones.
Many Spanish-language telenovelas are built on this melodramatic concept of family members unwittingly finding each other after being separated in childhood. There’s always a tragic destiny at work. The plot is much the same in some of these songs. In the appropriately titled “Hijo, El Señor Es Tu Padre” (“Son, That Man is Your Father”), by Tex-Mex conjunto king Tony De La Rosa, a grown son runs into a grizzled old veteran who shows him a picture of a woman he’s been searching for: the wife he hasn’t seen since he went to war. Inevitably, the woman in the photo is none other than the young man’s mother. In “Hijo Sin Padre” (“Son With No Father”), a song about another chance encounter, a scoundrel who abandoned his wife during her pregnancy feels remorse when he later spots her “looking prettier than ever” on the street with their son. He approaches, wracked with guilt, and asks the boy’s name. Instead, he gets a verbal slap in the face from his ex. The boy “has your first name but not your surname,” the jilted woman says, “because he only has a mother and never had a father.” (Me dijo, “Lleva tu nombre/Mas no lleva tu apellido/Porque el solo tiene madre/Pues padre, nunca ha tenido.”)
The variations on the “hijo” theme are endless. There are many songs to irresponsible, dead-beat fathers. There are father-and-son dialogues. There are “son of” sequels to fabled stories, like the follow-ups to the famous corrido,
“El Hijo de Juan Charrasquedo.” And of course there are songs that use the word “son” metaphorically, to indicate the legacy of a certain place or tradition, such as
“Hijo del Palenque” (“Son of the Cockfights”), or the José Alfredo Jiménez classic
“El Hijo del Pueblo” (“The Son of the People”).
Last but not least, let’s not forget the uplifting songs about good sons, featuring happy parents. Yes, they exist!
Read on for more examples of the many ways that sons and their parents are featured in the songs of the Frontera Collection.
-Agustín Gurza
Bad Dads, Bad Moms, and Bad Kids
1. “Plegaria De Un Hijo” by Pepito Gutierrez
(America 109-A)
The innocent title, “A Son’s Prayer,” disguises this song’s rather sinister storyline. Interestingly, it’s done with a sweet guitar trio as a tango, a genre which shares some of the more melodramatic passions of the Mexican corridos.
In this case, the narrator is a decent family man who comes home from work one day, with gifts for his son and beloved wife, only to find her in bed with another man. When he stabs them both to death, his boy wakes up and instead of being horrified, tries to reassure his murderous papa. “Don’t be afraid, Daddy,” the boy says. “You’ll be okay. I’ll go live with grandma and we’ll pray every day so that God will let you come back home soon.”
Me dio pena con el nene que despertó y me decía,
“No te acobardes, Papito, que nada te va a pasar.
Yo me voy con abuelita, rezaremos noche y día
Para que pronto, Papito, Dios te deje regresar.
That doesn’t sound like a boy whose dad just murdered his mom. But the father was so moved that he openly confessed to police, which is how we know what happened in the song’s opening verse.
(Island RVLP-516)
In this song, Mom is the bad guy. She’s been out drinking and barhopping on the arms of other men. The narrator is her broken-hearted husband who pleads for her, as the title says, to come back “for the sake of our son.” Mom has been gone a long time and the boy keeps asking for her, the father says. He has told the child a white lie: that Mommy has “gone with a girlfriend to buy you a toy, and she’ll be back soon.” We don’t know if the kid buys the excuse, since that would be the longest shopping trip in the history of Toys R Us.
In a gesture of forgiveness and selflessness, the husband says he holds no anger for her drinking and her betrayal, “staining my name.” But their child (the “son of our soul”) is not to blame, he explains, and he begs her by God to return to the boy’s beside.
No te guardo rencor por lo que tu hiciste,
Que manchaste mi nombre por causa del licor.
Nuestro hijo del alma, el no tiene la culpa;
Vuelve hasta su camita, te lo ruego por Dios.
So far, so good. But then the man adds that he wants her back to cuddle their boy in her arms and show him a mother’s love – “even if you keep on drinking your damned liquor.” The father then volunteers to go far away as a sacrifice, for the good of their son, though his heart bleeds. Then he tells the Mom that, if the boy asks for his father, she should tell him another white lie: that he is dead.
Now the plan doesn’t sound so good.
The music, however, is excellent, performed in a tropical style by the famed Puerto Rican orchestra of Canario y Su Grupo.
(DLV 260)
In this traditional narco-corrido, the protagonist more than lives up to the title “The Evil Son.” It’s the story of an honest man who lives near the border and works the land to raise his family. But he dreams of more, of buying a lovely house for his “adored wife,” and sending his son to college to become a doctor or a famous lawyer. So he turns to dealing drugs and starts seeing his dreams come true.
But wicked fate (“el destino malvado”) turns on him when his son starts doing drugs and gets kicked out of school for “moral lapses.” The man is comforted by his long-suffering wife (“esposa abnegada”), who carries her wounds in silence.
The son’s evil side really comes out when his dad decides to cut off the money. The ungrateful kid fingers his father, who gets sentenced to prison for trafficking.
While behind bars, he tells us, his “noble wife finally stopped suffering” – because the evil son took her life.
And that is tragedy of Greek proportions.
Bad Role Models
(D.L.B. 807-B)
In light of the recent scandal surrounding the repeated prison escapes by Mexico’s notorious drug lord El Chapo, this song, written by Salomé Gutierrez, reminds us that there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s a corrido about “The Black Cat,” a drug dealer wo always gets away from authorities, even when they have him trapped. The twist here is that the story is told by the son of the Black Cat, who grows up to be a federal drug agent, “always battling against drugs and protecting society.”
The first verses are narrated by the son as a young boy, with a hint of admiration for his old man, a notorious outlaw who loved to test his luck with “the sheriffs of immigration.” The boy “well remembers him” coming home at dawn, “dressed all in black, scarf around his neck,” sporting a pistol.
But the boy also remembers how his mother suffered when his father was taken prisoner. So, he “swore before the Virgin to be good and not cause her any pain,” a vow that presumably led him to join law enforcement.
However, the song has an ambiguous conclusion. As fate would have it, his team pursued and cornered the feared Black Cat Gang and following a “hellfire of machine guns” seized the drugs. There were casualties on both sides, but “my father was very astute, and the Black Cat once again escaped.”
Did the son let him get away? The song doesn’t say. But the admiration is still there. And don’t forget: He vowed to never cause his mother pain again.
(Miami Records 9083-A)
Talk about a chip off the old block.
This song, “The Son of the Married Man” by Ernesto Rau Diaz, is about a self-described Casanova who makes no apologies for his womanizing ways – because he inherited them from his father!
The son admires the old man as “a gentleman, very gallant with the ladies, who spends his money to enjoy life’s pleasures.” So, he puts out the word that he’s looking for a wife who will understand him, because “freedom is lovely.”
Ahora yo quiero casarme y me busco una señorita,
Que sepa consecuentarme, pues la libertad es bonita.
As a singles ad, this song is shameless. The man offers “his loving and his good name,” but he reserves the right “to still be a man with other women.”
Yo le doy con mis quereres el respeto de mi nombre,
Pero con otras mujeres no dejaré de ser hombre.
Then comes the rationalization: What you see is what you get. Since he’s forewarning the potential spouse, she can never be deceived. Why lie? There are times when a man “must be sincere.” To the woman who accepts his deal, he says, “I’ll love you more than all the others” and “you’ll always be my wife, just like on the day we got married.”
Te he de querer mas que a todas.
Tu siempre serás mi esposa.
Igual que el día de la boda,
Así seguirá la cosa.
The morality is mystifying – to everybody but the father.
The Son Dialogs
(Columbia 10219)
There are at least two different versions of the song “A Child’s Prayer.” Both are told at least partly from the child’s point of view, but their pleas are totally different. In one, a son begs for his mother’s love. In the other, he begs his father to come home after a divorce.
The first recording by Chavita, presumably a child star, milks the melodrama for all its worth. (The fine musical accompaniment is by the accomplished Mariachi Tenochtitlán de Heriberto Aceves.) The narrator is a boy who pleads for a little positive attention from his mother, whom he addresses as “Mamita,” the affectionate diminutive that shows he still loves her despite her cruel treatment and neglect. But to make the situation even more dastardly, the boy asks why she treats him so differently from his siblings. Pitifully, he pleads, “Mamita, why do you give my brothers so many kisses, and you treat me so wrong?” (“Mamita, por qué a mis hermanitos les das muchos besitos, y a mi me tratas mal?”) If listeners aren’t crying yet, he begs his mom to take him for walks with his brothers and sisters, so all the people can see them walking hand-in-hand.
The collection features at least two other versions of this bolero written by Basilio Villarreal – by the norteño group
Hnos. Moreno (Cima 298), and by
Gracielita Ayala, another child singer (ZaZ 175) – but both are of much lesser quality than Chavita’s.
(Cima 232)
In this second version of the song with an entirely different theme, a son sets up a dialog with his absent father. Also using the diminutive to address his dad, the boy says, “Papito, come over here. I want to talk to you. I want to know the reason that you haven’t come to see Mom.” Obviously, the parents are separated and the tender boy tells his dad that he hates to see his mother suffer.
The plea gets no compassion from the wounded father. Instead, the boy gets a lecture, then a guilt trip. “Son of my heart, you don’t understand these things,” he tells the boy. “Your mother may have been my wife, but I plan to forget her.”
Ouch! That hurt. And then the self-centered father twists the knife: “Leave me with my pain, don’t make my wound any bigger. If she’s been good to you, for me she was a no-good love.”
Déjame con mi dolor,
No hagas mas grande mi pena.
Si contigo ha sido buena,
Para mi fue un mal amor.
You would think that such a cold response would discourage the poor boy. But the song ends with the son’s same sad “súplica,” the plea that fell on deaf ears:
“Daddy, come over here.”
This version, with vocals by Lucio Treviño, is also on the San Jose-based Cima label. Another recording with the same lyric, by
Lalo Ledesma on San Jose’s Fama records, features a jazzy sax from backing band, Juan Zuñiga y Su Combo.
Novelty Songs to Sons of …
This is the novelty son song par excellence, playing off the well-known Spanish-language insult that starts with the words “El Hijo de …” (“Son of a … ”). To avoid saying the profanity, the composer, Juan Resendez, uses wordplay with the English-language name for a girl named Sue, a homophone for the Spanish preposition “su,” which means “of.” There are a dozen recordings of the song in the collection, all by the same author but with slight variations in the title: longer, as in
“El Hijo De Susana,” or shorter,
“El Hijo de Su … .”
They all describe the same guy: a loafer who sleeps late, steals from his friends, likes to spend money but never works, and likes girls but never bathes. The song is strictly a Tex-Mex phenomenon, recorded by U.S.-based labels with mostly conjunto or norteño accompaniment.
Two versions are noteworthy: one by a young
Freddy Fender on the Corpus Christi-based Hacienda label, featuring a twangy guitar; the other, with an even stronger country-and-western sound, is by the songwriter himself. As composer, Resendez has only
four other songs in the Frontera collection, mostly in a humorous style.
(Luna L-216)
This song takes me back to my days as a record storeowner in East Los Angeles in the 1980s. One of the biggest single hits was a novelty tune called
“La Musiquera,” which means “The Groupie.” It’s about a guy who dumps his girlfriend after he realizes that she’s been flirting with a galaxy of big stars. Depending on the version, the type of celebrity she’s attracted to changes, along with the genre of music. In the recording by
Los Marianos of Arizona, the musiquera is rumored to be with a string of dreamy pop singers, from Jose Jose to Camilo Sesto and Alberto Cortez. But in the rendition by
Los Huracanes del Norte, on the San Jose-based Luna records, she’s seen hanging out with norteño and grupero artists, from Ramon Ayala to Jorge Hernandez of Los Tigres del Norte. In this case, the hapless boyfriend hears the rumors from well-known deejays and promoters in different towns, who are mentioned by name. And here’s an interesting L.A. side note: there’s a reference to downtown’s Alexandria Hotel, site of many Latin dances in the 1970s and ’80s, where the musiquera was seen carrying on with the guys from Los Freddys, a popular group from Guadalajara.
The sequel to the song, “Son of the Groupie,” is also by Los Huracanes, who like Los Tigres are from San Jose. Now, the deejays are gossiping that the musiquera has a kid, which the song suggests was bound to happen. Again, a long list of potential fathers is listed – maybe somebody from La Sonora Santanera or Los Babys. The joke at the end – possibly in bad taste – reveals that the father is actually Juan Gabriel, know for his gay stage persona. The final verse declares that since the father came forward, she’s now “a decent woman” and no longer a musiquera.
El padre ya aperció
Del chavito de la guera.
Ahora ya es mujer decente,
Y no anda de musiquera.
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