natural disasters

I’ve been listening to Latin music all my life, especially Mexican music. So it’s not every day that I discover a whole new genre, with its own special history. But that’s just what happened recently while I was researching disaster songs in the Frontera Collection. The genre I discovered completely by chance is called La Chilena. And though it’s named for the country in South America, the song and dance style actually come from the coastal area of southern Mexico known as La Costa Chica, along the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca.

As its name suggests, the genre traces its roots to the signature style of folk music from Chile, called la cueca.  In Mexico, it has evolved as a distinctive native form, fusing with local styles, as we shall see in a moment. It can be jarring to find a musical form transplanted in an unexpected place. So how did it happen in this case?

History tells us that the style was brought to southern Mexico by sailors from Chile starting in the early 1800s. The arrival of the Chileans and their culture on Mexico’s southern shores is traced to the ship Araucano, which docked in Acapulco in December of 1821, according to one account attributed to Chilean author Pablo Garrido in his 1979 book Historial de la Cueca. The Araucano was the advance ship in a fleet sent by Chilean liberator Bernardo O´Higgins (1778-1842) to assist the Mexicans in their revolt against Spain. But by the time the ship got there, independence and already been won. So the Chilean sailors joined in the celebration the best way they knew how, singing and dancing the traditional cueca on the streets with their jubilant Mexican hosts.

The influx of ships from Chile intensified during the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. Heading north in search of riches, Chilean vessels full of miners and prospectors stopped along the way at Mexican ports from Acapulco in Guerrero to Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca. Many decided to stay, adding another infusion of Chilean culture to the Costa Chica.

A brief recap of this history is contained in this YouTube video from TV Chile, entitled “La Chilena Mexicana.” At the beginning, a young man speaking in rhyme makes this proclamation: “Saludos de Pinotepa, donde nació la chilena” (Greetings from Pinotepa, where the chilena was born).

He’s referring to the city officially named Santiago Pinotepa Nacional. But his claim is debatable, as some sources say another town, Santiago Jamiltepec, site of an annual festival of the music, is the real cradle of the chilena. Be that as it may, it was in reading about Pinotepa that I discovered the genre. In my last blog on disaster songs, I wrote about the song “Cataclismo En Pinotepa,” which describes a public panic that gripped the residents of Pinotepa in 1977 following earthquake predictions made by scientists in the United States. The song was written by the late Higinio Peláez Ramos, a composer and performer with deep family roots in the Costa Chica. While researching his background, I learned he was devoted to the preservation and promotion of the region’s rich folkloric music, including la chilena. And that was the first I had heard of the transplanted genre.

Taking root in Mexico, the chilena has evolved into a distinctive native form, quite apart from the original cueca. Today, the remaining Andean vestiges in the Mexican style are basically the cueca’s the rhythmic beat, the 6/8 time and the dancers’ use of the handkerchief, according to the article “La ‘Chilena’ en Guerrero” from an excellent instructional website from Chile.

“Once in the lands of Guerrero and Oaxaca, the chilena began absorbing diverse influences until it became a variant of the Mexican son, with which it shares musical and chorographical traits,” states the article. “Danced by indigenous people, blacks and mestizos, the chilena has evolved with it its own regional characteristics.”

Musically, the chilena is a lyrical style performed within a variety of instrumental formats. Originally, it was played with string ensemble including violins and harp. During the mid-1900s, many popular trios played chilenas, dropping the violins for guitars and requintos. Mexican composer Alvaro Carrillo, author of many famous boleros of the era, is also known for penning several chilenas, including one that is appropriately titled “Pinotepa.”  Today, chilenas are popularly played by bandas with driving percussion and brash horn and wind sections, as can be heard in this very different version of the same Carrillo song, performed by Pepe Ramos, known as “Rey de las Chilenas.”

Mexicans also gave their sown stamp to the dance steps, derived from the folkloric style of the Chilean cueca. The Mexican chilena borrows the cueca’s hopping, prancing steps and the dancers still use handkerchiefs waved in circular motions above their heads. Like the music, however, the dance for the chilena was also Mexicanized, as shown in this video, with a brief English introduction.

The Frontera Collection contains several examples of the Mexican chilena, as well as the original Chilean cueca. Most of the cueca recordings are on 78-rpm discs. They reflect a traditional style with string or orchestral accompaniment, such as “Viva Chile” by Los Huasos de Chincolco, or the courtly accompaniment for Spanish baritone Juan Pulido singing the Ernesto Lecuona composition, “Chilena Gentil.” (The Chilena of this title refers to a woman, not the genre.) There’s also more recent cuecas, such as “Los 60 Granaderos” by Mexico’s Trio Los Panchos and “La Espiga” by ranchera singer Lola Beltran, in a huapango-style arrangement by Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, a total Mexican adaptation of the style.

The search for chilenas by genre, however, can be slightly misleading. For example, the results yield one 78-rpm recording, “Corazones Partidos” by Dúo Cornejo-Cáceres, which is actually a traditional cueca but isidentified as a “cueca chilena,” meaning from Chile, not the genre from Mexico. The genre search also shows just one version of what is considered the epitome of the Mexican chilena, “La Sanmarqueña,” an ode to the women of San Marcos, Guerrero. But a search by the song title, on the other hand, gives us three other versions of “La Sanmarqueña,” not identified specifically as chilenas. That’s because genres are only noted in the database when the genre name appears on the record label itself. (Curiously, the one song identified under the genre search, by Los Cancioneros Del Sur on Columbia records, does not appear under title search because it is spelled as two words, San Marqueña, rather than the usual one-word title.) The lesson is, keep digging!

“La Sanmarqueña” is considered such a cornerstone of the music that there’s even a 25-minute mini documentary exploring the history of the song. The narrator explores an issue over the authorship, often credited to Agustín Ramirez, as it is on two of the Frontera recordings.  However, the video establishes through interviews that it was actually written by an Afro-Mexican priest named Emilio Vázquez Jiménez, who reportedly had an eye for the region’s beautiful women. The narrator even identifies the subject of the priest’s inspiration: the Sanmarqueña Doña Rosa Baltazar. But the woman’s indentity is also debated. The video acknowledges that the subject of the song is a different young woman, Eleuteria Genchi, nicknamed affectionately “la Cumanchín.”

“La Sanmarqueña” was elevated to classical status in a symphonic arrangement by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Acapaulco. The song was also memorialized in the 1952 film Subida al Cielo by celebrated director Luis Buñuel and entered that year in the Cannes Film Fesitval. Known in English as “Mexican Bus Ride,” the film features the voluptious Lilia Prado perforing “La Sanmarqueña,” but as a retort to the small-town bragging by a woman from a different place.

The chilena has become so versatile it moves easily from the symphony hall to the dancehall to the streets. “Everyone dances the chilena, without regard to social class,” states the Chilean instructional website. “In the coastal fandangos, the music has no barriers and brings everyone together as equals.” There’s even a variant known as chilenas mixtecas, sung in the native language of the Mixtec Indians of the region. Stylistically, it sounds like a distant cousin of the chilena, played simply like a pared-down cumbia and danced even more simply with a side-to-side step, arms held stiffly to the sides.

The Mexican chilena also reflects the region’s strong African elements, a distinctive part of the culture of the Costa Chica. As an ethnic group, Black Mexicans emerged when the descendants of slaves intermarried with the indigenous population. Recently, they have started to assert their identity which in the past had been largely subsumed into the larger culture. One documentary, still in production, explores the Afro-Mexican heritage of the Costa Chica, with a tag line that says: “Nunca más un México sin afromexicanos” (Never again a Mexico without Afro-Mexicans). Another documentary in the works, this one a French-Mexican production, is a sign of the growing interest in the subject.

 And so, one discovery leads to another. That is the beauty of the Frontera Collection. It’s like a musical river, and as you meander through its tributaries, you never know what you will find.

            – Agustín Gurza

In my last blog, I looked at the history of disaster songs and cited some examples from the Frontera Collection. But, as it turns out, one of the most original and provocative songs of this genre is about a disaster that never happened.

“Cataclismo En Pinotepa” by Los Andariegos (Alborada AB-00301) is a song about the public panic that gripped the town of Pinotepa Nacional, southeast of Acapulco, in 1977 after newspapers reported scientific predictions of an impending earthquake. That controversial prediction was based on a published study by seismologists in the United States who noted a long-time gap between major quakes in the state of Oaxaca along the coast of southern Mexico, one of the most seismically active areas on Earth. “A firm prediction of the occurrence time is not attempted,” states the report by an international team based at the Geophysics Laboratory of the University of Texas in Galveston. “However, a resumption of seismic activity in the Oaxaca region may precede a main shock.”

Clearly, the researchers were reluctant to pinpoint a specific date for the quake, but the press and the local rumor mill quickly supplied one. Soon enough, warnings of an imminent earthquake led to a hard-and-fast conclusion that it would hit Pinotepa on Sunday, April 23, 1978. The doomed region would also be swamped by a subsequent tsunami, according to the sensationalized forecasts.

That was enough to set off a significant exodus. Panicked residents sold off their homes and belongings at a loss, then fled for their lives. "The psychosis caused by the alarming news has induced them to sell their properties to the highest bidder,” wrote two professors of geophysics from the University of Mexico, Tomás Garza and Cinna Lomnitz. “One wonders: Who are these people picking up cheap real estate along the Oaxaca coast?"

The yellow press promptly provided some wild answers to that question. One Acapulco newspaper reported that “a foreign power” had embedded nuclear charges within the quake fault off the Oaxaca coast and planned to detonate them on April 23 by remote control from a passing plane. Most people dismissed that account as too bizarre to be believed. But many residents were convinced that oil or uranium reserves had been discovered in the area, and that foreign nationals were fueling the rumors to snap up cheap land leases.

Although the predicted quake did not hit on that day, the panic itself became the disaster. Property losses from the sell-off “were comparable to those sustained from an actual earthquake,” concluded Garza and Lomnitz in their study, The Oaxaca Gap: A Case History.

These “aftershocks” were primarily psychological. In the song by Los Andariegos, the lyric unleashes a bitter and blistering denunciation of the “idiot wise men” who misuse their knowledge, and the sensational press that traffics in gossip. The song, with guitar accompaniment and a mournful melody typical of the folk music of Oaxaca, opens with a blast at the “damned Yankees who announced in capital letters that Pinotepa would perish.”

Pongan cuidado, señores, lo que pasa en estos tiempos.

El ignorante la riega por su falta de talento.

Pero hay sabios que de plano son brutos de nacimiento.

Año del ’78, para que el mundo lo sepa,

Unos desgraciados yanquis anuncian con grandes letras

Que el día 23 de abril, se perderá Pinotepa.

The song was written by the late Higinio Peláez Ramos, a respected composer and interpreter of the stirring and haunting folkloric music of the area. Peláez founded Los Andariegos and often sang accompanied by Fide Vera (born Fidela Vera Rodríguez), his wife and faithful musical partner. The two met in Pinotepa Nacional but had to elope to get married, slipping out of town in disguise to avoid the wrath of the bride’s father. They had several children, also musicians. Two of their daughters, Rodolfina and Fidela, are credited on the song about Pinotepa, identified in the Frontera database as “Rodi Y Fide Peláez Vera.”

The composer mercilessly skewers the press in his song, presaging the current climate of utter contempt for the media. He portrays reporters as backyard gossips who enjoy the sight of people suffering. He blames their “criminal” reporting – “without a modicum of conscience” – for driving people mad and leaving them destitute (“en la miseria”) after selling off their belongings. One verse paints a picture of mass hysteria: When the date arrived, the people were so traumatized by the spread of “exaggerated news” that even the buzzing of a fly made them nervous wrecks.

Y como si ver sufrir fuera una cosa bonita,

Los medios de difusión jugando a las comadritas

Anuncian que un maremoto se puntara a Costa Chica.

Esta criminal noticia, sin la mínima conciencia,

Provoca que mucha gente casi rayen en la demencia,

Y se queden en la miseria al vender sus pertenencias

Cuando la fecha llego, la gente traumatizada,

Hasta el zumbar de la mosca los nervios les destrozaba.

Esto hace la difusión de notas exageradas.

The composer’s parting shot carries a hint of anti-intellectualism, slamming “those who study” only to provoke unpleasantness. “I prefer being ignorant,” writes Peláez, “but not be a stupid wise man.”

En fin aquí me despido, atrás de este conducto,

Y maldigo a los que estudian para provocar disgustos.

Prefiero ser ignorante, pero no ser sabio bruto.

It turns out, however, that the songwriter, as well as other Mexican critics, would have to eat their words to some degree. A major earthquake did in fact hit the Oaxaca region, but not on the day determined by unscientific speculation. A 7.5 magnitude quake came seven months later, on November 29, 1978. Fortunately, it caused relatively little damage. A team of seismologists from Caltech and the University of Mexico heeded that forecast and set up a system of sensors that were ready when it struck. They called it “Trapping an Earthquake.”

It was a unique opportunity for measuring a quake in real time, but it came with a warning about the still developing science of earthquake predictions. “What happened to the people of that area of Mexico as a result not only of this carefully evaluated scientific prediction but also of a widely publicized non-scientific prophecy related to it, could well be the script for what could happen under similar circumstances in, for example, southern California,” wrote the late Karen McNally, noted seismologist and former director of the Richter Seismological Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz. She also noted that this case led scientists to urge the public “to prepare for handling earthquake predictions as well as actual earthquakes.”

A decade later, McNally accurately predicted the devastating Loma Prieta quake of 1989 in Northern California, which killed 57 people. McNally was ready for that one too. Instruments were installed along the San Andreas Fault when the quake hit, so the resulting recordings were the best that had been obtained to date, providing valuable information about the faults and how they behave.

As you might expect, the Frontera Collection has songs about that disaster, too. “La Tragedia De San Francisco” by Los Rebeldes del Bravo de Moises Contreras (Joey 3184) refers to the moment that the Loma Prieta quake hit on October 17 at 5:04 p.m., just as Game 3 of the World Series was about to get underway. As luck would have it, the series pitted two teams from the hard-hit Bay Area, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. (Toda la atención estaba a ver quien iba a ganar / Entre Oakland y San Francisco en esa serie mundial.) Suddenly, the earthquake arose “from the bowels of the Devil (de la entrañas del Diablo),” as the song vividly describes.

As I mentioned last time, the Loma Prieta quake is also the subject of a song, “El Temblor De San Francisco,” by Tex-Mex artist Steve Jordan, who was on his way from Corpus Christi, Texas, to a concert in San Francisco when the quake hit, flattening the 880 freeway “like a tortilla,” and of course cancelling the tour.

The Frontera Collection also includes songs about quakes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the devastating Mexico City temblor of 1985. But searching for tunes about temblors is almost as complicated as predicting them. There are at least two ways to say earthquake in Spanish. A search under the term “temblor” produces ten separate recordings, and a search by the word “terremoto” yields another five.

The results include a few two-part corridos on 78-rpm discs. However, a close listen reveals that two of those are actually the same song about the same disaster, even though they have different titles. They are “Los Temblores De Oaxaca” (Brunswick 41287, parts 1 and 2) and “Los Temblores En Mexico” (Columbia 4441-X, parts 1 and 2), written by L. M. Bañuelos and both performed by Hermanos Bañuelos (identified on the Columbia label as “Bolaños”). But which earthquakes are they singing about? Like all good corridos, the lyrics provide a clue by giving the date: January 14. However, unlike other narrative ballads, this one does not give the year. By checking a Wikipedia list of earthquakes from the first half of the 20th century, when 78s were popular, we can deduce the song is referring to the 7.8 quake that hit Oaxaca on January 15, 1931.

Some quake songs do not appear under the common search terms because those terms, like temblor and terremoto, are not in all of the titles. But these other disaster songs show up when searching the word “earthquake” in English, because it appears in the explanatory notes for some songs. So the English search gives us titles like “Tragedia De Nicaragua,” “Dolor Y Tristesa (sic) En Mexico” and “Corrido De Guatemala.”

Still, you can’t judge every disaster song by its title. There’s one called “Earthquake” that won’t even shake up the dance floor. It’s a smooth, slow-tempo instrumental by Nuyorican bandleader Tito Rodriguez, arranged by famed Cuban musician Chico O’Farrill.

Then there’s the group called California Earthquakes, which have nothing to do with natural disasters, though musically they come close. Their bilingual novelty tune “Mexican Dinner,” for example, opens with the sound of a jet engine and a narrator announcing the destination. (“Y nos vamos a la Placita Olvera a Los Angeles, California.”) The tune, a blend of Tex-Mex and ’50s rock, quickly devolves into cornball food references, including double entendres about tamales and burritos. (“Hey, gringo, de veras you like Mexican dinner?”) One verse includes a not-so-veiled threat of violence if the “Mexican Dinner” is not served up pronto.

Si tu no me das Mexican Dinner,

Me pongo muy furioso,

Y no va ser curioso.

Yo voy a enloquecer,

Si no hay Mexican Dinner.

That may not be a disaster song. But it certainly qualifies as a catastrophe.

-Agustín Gurza

Most people know that the worst natural disaster in California history was the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. But which calamity ranks No. 2? That happened in Los Angeles in 1932: a catastrophic dam break that killed 600 people, wiped out neighborhoods all the way to the ocean near Ventura, and ended the career of William Mulholland, the famed engineer who had designed the water system for the new metropolis blooming in the Southern California desert.

The midnight collapse of St. Francis Dam may have faded from memory. But it is recounted in detail in two 78-rpm recordings contained in the Frontera Collection.  One of the songs, La Inundacion de California by Cancioneros Acosta, gives a dramatic overview of the disaster. The other recording, La Inundación De Santa Paula by Esparza y Camacho, tells the terror of people downstream who were awoken as the wall of water hit the low-lying town along the flood’s 54-mile path to the Pacific.

I have lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles, but I admit I was not aware of this historic event until I found these songs in the archive. In fact, there are dozens of so-called disaster songs in the Frontera database. Consider them musical newsreels of sorts, with many told as eyewitness accounts of havoc wreaked by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

The disaster song has a long tradition in many cultures, pre-dating recorded sound by centuries. Since the 1600s in Europe, news of catastrophes spread through broadside ballads, with verses printed on single sheets of paper and sung by travelling troubadours. That tradition can be traced straight through to the terror attacks of 9/11 in the United States, which sparked a wave of new disaster songs around the world, “proving the genre’s continued social function and relevance,” according to ethnomusicologist Revell Carr.

In his essay, “We Will Never Forget,” published in 2004 by Voices, the Journal of New York Folklore, Carr explains why people love to write and hear songs about disasters, even today when news can be obtained instantly. He cites the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as the first “globally mediated” disaster, spurring composers in the U.S. to copyright more than 100 songs within the first eight months following the tragedy.

Disaster songs “serve as catalysts for communitas and help heal psychic wounds in the disaster’s aftermath, and they capitalize upon the common human urge to bear witness—all part of the same process of coping with the chaos and confusion of traumatic social dramas,” writes Carr, now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “Disaster songs function as redressive action, communicating shared sentiments and emotions, through which a social bond with others can be solidified in the days and weeks following a disaster.”

After studying more than 200 such songs, Carr came up with six characteristics that define the genre: a true event with significant loss of life, citing of the date, empathy for the victims, a tabloid, sensationalistic style, and themes such as “unheeded warnings, human culpability, and divine retribution.” The criteria reminded me of the essay defining the characteristic of the Mexican corrido, written by the late Guillermo Hernández, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, who led the effort to bring the Frontera Collection to UCLA.  (Hernandez’s essay, “What is a Corrido?” is reprinted in my book about the Frontera Collection.) 

Many of the corrido characteristics described by Hernández overlap with Carr’s descriptions.  So, it’s no surprise that many disaster songs in Spanish are corridos. One classic example, “Corrido De Las Inundaciones” by Dueto Ray Y Lupita, fits several of the characteristics for both genres:

          Real event:                      Hurricane Hilda  

Time and Place:              September 1955, 
                                      Tampico on Mexico’s Gulf coast

          Heavy Casualties:           Sufrieron pobres y ricos
                                                Por donde pasó el ciclón
                                                Pobre el puerto de Tampico
                                                Casi todo lo arrasó.

          Human Culpability:           Todos estos sinsabores
                                                Que sufre nuestra nación
                                                Son causa de los errores
                                                Y tanta equivocación

          Divine Retribution:          ¿No creen ustedes, señores,
                                                Que es un castigo de Dios?

          Creating Community:     Aquí terminó el corrido,
                                              Y gracias por su atención.
                                              Dios quiera que lo ocurrido
                                              Nos sirva como lección,
                                              Que el mexicano este unido
                                              En la alegría y el dolor.

When I was listening to several of these calamitous corridos, I was struck by the vivid images created by the composers—not merely descriptions of the destruction, but the aftermath and human toll. The power of the word preceded the images we now see ubiquitously on TV, mobile phones, and computer screens.

As Mexican corrido expert Vicente T. Mendoza once wrote: “It’s in these cases when the corridista contributes his powers of observation, since he does not leave out the most minor detail, painting tableaus that are surprising for their realism and accuracy with the very horrors of our collective misfortune.” 

Mendoza is quoted in the web page “Corridos de Desastres,” created for students by the late professor James Nicolopulos, a close collaborator of Frontera founder Chris Strachwitz. Mendoza points to a 19th century broadside ballad about a train derailment, “El Descarrilamiento de Temamatla,” as the prototype of the Mexican disaster corrido. (This broadside, and others about Mexico train mishaps that are included in a collection of the University of Texas at Austin, are by famed Mexican printer and engraver José Guadalupe Posada.)

For personal reasons, one of my favorite disaster songs in the Frontera Collection tells of the sudden eruption of a volcano in a cornfield in Michaocán in February 1943. The song “Paricutin,” named for the volcano, starts with the true story of the farmer who was out in his field when the earth started rumbling and spewing smoke and sulphuric gases, smelling like rotten eggs. Terrified, he ran into town – “sin sombrero” – to tell his neighbors the news.

The world’s scientists and the media flooded the location, near the city of Uruapan, to document the eruption. The reporters on hand included my uncle, Luis Gurza Villareal, who filmed a newsreel of the event. The footage, which I saw in Mexico City, shows him barely escaping steaming chunks of lava falling all around him.

Not all disaster songs involve eyewitness accounts or daring close calls. Tex-Mex artist Steve Jordan and his band were on their way from Corpus Christi, Texas, to a concert in San Francisco when they heard the news about the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, which hit the San Francisco Bay Area. As the singer recounts in “El Temblor De San Francisco,” they got as far as Houston when they heard the news that the quake had flattened the two-level, 880 freeway “like a tortilla.”

In some songs, the disasters are exclusively personal. In “Centella Maldita,” Los Cardenales del Valle lament the time their mother was struck and killed by lightening. Sad, but one victim does not a disaster genre song make.

And beware the song with the deceptively disastrous title. “El Huracan,” by (you guessed it) Los Huracanes, is not about a lethal weather event. It’s a complaint about someone who blows through life like a hurricane, “spreading destruction wherever it passes.”

The Frontera Collection contains a significant share of songs about disasters in Texas; understandably so, since it specializes in Tex-Mex music of the border region. There are more than a dozen songs about Hurricane Beulah, the strongest storm to hit the Atlantic coast in 1967, making landfall just north of the mouth of the Rio Grande River, spawning a record 115 tornadoes across Texas, causing major floods and claiming almost 700 lives. There are also half a dozen recordings about Hurricane Celia, which slammed into Texas on August 3, 1970, with winds as high as 180 mph in Nueces County, leaving 28 dead in its wake and almost every single building damaged in downtown Corpus Christi.

And since there are also many small, independent labels represented in the collection, we find several songs about correspondingly local disasters that may not otherwise have been recorded. A flurry of Texas labels scrambled to record corridos about a tornado that hit Lubbock, Texas, in May of 1970, three months before Celia. These include two record companies – Jilguero and Shalovo – located in or around Lubbock itself.

Two other local examples: “La Tragedia de Teton,” about the deadly collapse of a dam on the Teton River in Idaho, was released by Don Pepe Records based in Pocatello, Idaho. And “La Tragedia Del Big Thompson” by Los Petroleros Del Norte, a corrido about the deadliest flash flood in the history of Colorado, is on the Alvarado label based in Brighton, Colorado.

But when it comes to colorful description and empathy with the victims, few disaster song match the quality of Cancioneros Acosta’s take on the Los Angeles dam collapse. I looked and looked for the lyrics online, because the vocals on the scratchy 78 rpm in the collection are hard to discern I found one web page devoted exclusively to this song, which was written shortly after the St. Francis Dam burst 88 years ago. It’s on a music website provocatively called “Modernidad y Obsolescencia” (Modernity and Obsolescence).

The last four verses describe the horrors of the 10-foot wall of rushing water crashing into sleeping communities, including a nearby camp of itinerant farmworkers, in the middle of the night. The flood caused power outages and forced residents to flee for their lives in the dark. These lyrics bring home the enormity of the tragedy.

Por el poder infinito estaba ya destinado
el que tantos inocentes debían de morir ahogados.
En menos que te lo cuento, el valle era una laguna,
y la corriente arrastraba sin dejar casa ninguna.

La gente dice familias luchaban desesperadas
cargando a todos sus hijos y sus cosas más amadas.
Se oía quejar lastimero a gente horrorizado 
Auxilio pedía a gritos. ¿Cómo ayudarlos? Dios Santo.

Madre mía no me dejes, decía un infortunado
que si me dejas solito me voy a morir ahogado.
Era una lástima oír a las madres que lloraban
y de dolor angustiadas por sus hijos preguntaban.

Una niña de tres años lloraba inocentemente
al ver que sus padres iban ahogados en la corriente.
Cadáveres se encontraban; era una lástima verlos
Supervivientes ya nunca pudieron reconocerlos.

Next time we’ll look at earthquake songs, including tunes about relatively recent temblors in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

-Agustín Gurza