What is cucuy

You are self-reliant, confident, and energetic. You are exceedingly domestic. You love your home and family and work hard to make both comfortable and secure. Your love for family and friends is a major source of your happiness and sometimes unhappiness.

Your desire to help others is so strong that you often find yourself sacrificing your own personal needs for someone else's. You can overdo it, becoming too deeply involved in other people's lives. People trust you and feel secure with your judgment. You are seen as a cornerstone of a business and are relied upon to do your work efficiently and expertly. You have strength and respectability.

You tend to dress in a utilitarian manner, concerned mostly with convention, practicality, durability, and price. You present yourself as someone who values correctness, control, and precision.

I'm not convinced that such a thing exists. But I do want to honestly represent the pain and guilt of feeling like you just haven't done enough.

The Cucuy in this play represents those inescapable feelings and how they can really eat away at a person. JS: Sort of. Mexican culture is irrevocably tied to colonization, and I kind of just have to accept that every now and then. When this idea first showed up it was essentially "what if the Cucuy was a real, person-like entity that just showed up at some brown guy's house and said you're a bad child and I'm gonna eat you now.

I'm surprised that I was surprised to find out that the Cucuy is probably an inheritance of colonization. But that doesn't make it any less real to the people who invoke it. And it doesn't make everything that the Cucuy represents in this play any less real or any less distinctly Mexican-American. Rey is an ambitious brown millennial from a family in which every previous generation has stayed in south Texas, gotten married, and had children in their early twenties.

The Cucuy is the insecurity about not doing those things that so many Latinx millennials feel. That understanding made me feel more ownership of the concept even if it did turn out to originate in Europe. JS: I hope so! Parents use El Cucuy as a way to scare children into obedience by telling them that if they are bad, El Cucuy will get them. It is thought the name El Cucuy comes from the sound that the creature makes.

The sound, though, is not only the frightening noise that lets children know that El Cucuy is near, but is also a signal of danger. They had heard of this creature before. It was described as being tall and furry with red eyes and a peculiar red ear that was bigger than its normal ear. It was with this big red ear that the creature could hear misbehaving children, some said from a distance of miles. This snarling creature would abduct bad children, take them to his cave in the mountains and eventually eat them, and this served as a lesson to the young children.

This made the two older girls even more irreverent and they continued to make fun of the situation and torment their younger sister. Then, townsfolk reported seeing a large upright hairy creature enter their little village. The creature made a beeline to the house of the widower and snatched the two older girls.

The Cucuy swiftly took the girls to his mountain hideaway, a dark cave with a deep pit. He put the girls in the pit and fed them one tortilla per day, enough to barely keep them alive.

After about a week, a goatherd tending his flock on the mountain went to rescue a goat of his that had its hoof stuck between two rocks. After the goat was freed and finished bleating for help, the goatherd heard the wailing sounds of the two girls inside the pit. The goatherd entered the cave and rescued the two, taking them down the mountain and back into town. The disobedient daughters were reunited with their father and little sister and begged the man never to call the Cucuy on them again.

The father never did because the girls never gave him reason to. From then on, the girls helped out around the house and stopped being mean to their little sister.

As a postscript to this story, all three girls eventually married and had families of their own, never leaving the area. Today, that little Mexican town is home to the great-great-great grandchildren of the three sisters and it is known throughout Mexico for having the most polite and well-behaved children anywhere in the country because no one wants the Cucuy to return. There are many variations to this story and in various versions of the legends the Cucuy can be a hairy wolfman-like creature — as in the Joe Hayes retelling — or an old man, a ghost or a large reptilian being.