“La Cigarra (The Cicada)” turns heartbreak into song – a reminder that sometimes the only dignified way to endure pain is to keep singing anyway.
The most important context comes first: Linda Ronstadt’s “La Cigarra (The Cicada)” is not a pop single built for quick radio rotation. It is a centerpiece performance on her all-Spanish mariachi landmark Canciones de Mi Padre—an album that entered the Billboard 200 the week of December 12, 1987 at No. 103 (a NEW entry), before steadily climbing to a peak of No. 42. That slow rise tells you something essential about this project: it didn’t burst in like a trend—it moved like memory does, gathering strength as more listeners recognized themselves inside it.
On the album’s track list, “La Cigarra” sits at track 4, and its authorship is credited to Raymundo Pérez y Soto. In the mariachi tradition, the song is widely regarded as a huapango—a form that can feel like joy and sorrow braided together, dancing on the edge of a cliff. The lyric’s core image is devastatingly simple: the cicada sings even as life runs out, and the singer—wounded, weary—declares a desire to meet the same fate: to “die singing.”
The story behind Ronstadt recording it is, in its own way, as moving as the song. Canciones de Mi Padre was her deliberate return to the music of her childhood and family life—songs carried from Sonora and the Mexican North into the Ronstadt home, treated not as “exotic material,” but as belonging. She invested serious work into doing it properly—down to sharpening pronunciation and honoring style—because reverence, in this kind of music, is audible. And she didn’t do it alone: the album was guided musically by composer/arranger Rubén Fuentes, with Peter Asher also producing—names that signaled this wasn’t a side project, but a fully lit, front-stage statement.
The payoff was historic. The Recording Academy has noted that the album went double platinum, and at the 31st GRAMMY Awards it won Best Mexican-American Performance—a remarkable mainstream recognition for a record sung entirely in Spanish and rooted in traditional repertoire.
So where does “La Cigarra” fit inside that larger triumph?
It’s the moment the album stops being simply beautiful and becomes almost elemental. Ronstadt’s voice—famous for clarity—leans here into something older than clarity: testimony. “La Cigarra” is not heartbreak as a private diary entry. It’s heartbreak as folklore—personal pain shaped into a melody sturdy enough to be sung by many, across many years. In that sense, the cicada isn’t merely an insect; it’s a metaphor for the human voice under pressure. We sing when we’re happy, yes—but we also sing to prove we’re still here.
There’s another subtle power in Ronstadt choosing this particular song. Commentators on the piece often note how demanding it is for a singer—its dramatic leaps and emotional intensity asking for both control and abandon. Ronstadt meets that demand without turning it into theatrical display. She doesn’t “act” the suffering. She inhabits it, the way one inhabits an old family photograph: with tenderness, with respect, and with the sting of recognizing what time cannot return.
And that’s why “La Cigarra (The Cicada)” lingers long after the last trumpet fades. It carries a hard-won, unglamorous wisdom: you may not always get the love you seek, you may grow tired of searching for it, but the song—your song, the part of you that still dares to feel—can remain alive. In Ronstadt’s hands, surrender is not weakness. It’s a kind of grace: the decision to keep singing, beautifully, while the night is still loud around you.