Cannabis and the Mexican Revolution: How Pancho Villa's 'La Cucaracha' Put Marijuana on the American Map

If you want to understand how cannabis became "marijuana" in the English-speaking mind — and how that single linguistic swap steered a century of American drug policy — you have to go back to a dusty railway line in northern Mexico in 1910, a folk song with a thousand verses, and a small, strong-willed cavalry general named Doroteo Arango who the world would soon know as Pancho Villa.

The song was "La Cucaracha." The army was the Villista División del Norte. And the verse that traveled north across the border, into American newspapers and vaudeville halls and eventually into a 1937 federal prohibition bill, went like this: "La cucaracha, la cucaracha, / ya no puede caminar / porque no tiene, porque le falta, / marihuana que fumar."

The cockroach, the cockroach, can't walk anymore — because she has no marijuana to smoke. That verse, sung by thousands of soldaderas and soldiers and campesinos during the Mexican Revolution, is arguably the first moment cannabis went viral in American culture. And, tragically, it is where the plant picked up the Spanish-language name that would later be used against it.

A Plant That Was Already in Mexico

Cannabis did not arrive in Mexico with the Revolution. It arrived with the Spanish, who in the 16th century brought hemp (cáñamo) to the colony for fiber, rope, and sailcloth. The Spanish Crown at various points ordered growers to produce it, because the Spanish navy needed rope and the Mexican climate was excellent for hemp cultivation.

By the 1800s, Mexican curanderos — traditional healers — were using the psychoactive variety in tinctures and poultices, and the word marihuana (spelled marihuana in the period, with the h that the U.S. government would later switch to j) had stabilized in Mexican folk Spanish. The etymology is still debated: some researchers trace it to indigenous Nahuatl roots, others to Spanish regional slang, others to a phonetic borrowing of Chinese pharmacy terms brought by Pacific trade. What is undisputed is that by the late 1800s cannabis was common in rural Mexican life, familiar to soldiers, farmers, and the urban poor.

The Revolution Puts Cannabis on Horseback

When Mexico descended into civil war in 1910, cannabis went where the soldiers went. Soldaderas — the women who traveled with the armies, cooked, carried supplies, and in many cases fought — used cannabis as a practical analgesic, a sleep aid, and a way to manage hunger, exhaustion, and grief. The División del Norte, Villa's army, stretched across thousands of miles of desert and mountain, and the smoke of rolled cannabis leaves was as much a feature of its camps as bean pots and guitar strings.

Villa himself, in the usual romantic telling, was a teetotaler — he banned hard liquor among his staff and reportedly disapproved of drunkenness on the march. Cannabis, however, occupied a different moral category in the Mexican peasant culture of the time. Whether Villa personally smoked is not historically well-established. What is well-established is that the men and women around him did, widely, and that this became associated — in the U.S. newspaper imagination — with the entire revolutionary army and, by extension, with Mexico itself.

"La Cucaracha" Goes Viral

"La Cucaracha" as a song is much older than the Revolution. Musicologists trace its bones back to Spain, then Mexico, where it accumulated hundreds of verses over the 19th century. Each era, each war, each political faction grafted on new lyrics. Some verses mocked a general, some mocked a lover, some mocked whichever president was currently falling.

During the Revolution the song exploded. It was short, catchy, easily rewritten, easily memorized, and it traveled along the train lines and telegraph wires with the armies themselves. The marihuana-that-fumar verse appears in print and in field recordings by the mid-1910s, attached to various factions but most durably to Villa's side.

American journalists covering the Revolution from El Paso and San Antonio newspapers picked up the song and the verse. Vaudeville performers in the U.S. Southwest worked it into their acts. Phonograph recordings began circulating in the 1920s. By the time John Reed and Ambrose Bierce and a dozen other American writers were back from covering the border war, "marihuana" had entered the U.S. English-speaking vocabulary as an exotic, vaguely dangerous word associated with Mexican laborers, musicians, and soldiers.

That shift — from cannabis (a medical word found on American pharmacy shelves for a hundred years) to marihuana (a foreign, racialized word tied to a specific immigrant population) — is the pivot on which the 20th-century American war on cannabis turns.

The Policy Consequences

It is almost impossible to tell the American prohibition story without the Revolution in the background.

Between 1910 and 1930, U.S. border states experienced a large influx of Mexican migrants fleeing the violence and economic chaos of the Revolution. Local newspapers in Texas, Colorado, and California filed panicked stories about "marihuana crazed" laborers — a narrative mostly invented, but commercially irresistible. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, weaponized this coverage in the 1930s to push the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively outlawed cannabis at the federal level. The law deliberately used the Mexican-Spanish word "marihuana" rather than the medical term "cannabis" — partly because many U.S. citizens still had a bottle of cannabis tincture on the bathroom shelf and would have been alarmed to learn that was the same thing being banned, and partly because racializing the plant made it easier to prohibit.

In short: a Revolutionary-era folk-song verse helped cement a specific word in the American imagination, and that word helped pass a law that criminalized the plant for the next eighty years. The policy consequence is inseparable from the cultural moment.

The Song Survives, the Plant Survives

Here is the historical irony: both the plant and the song survived prohibition intact. "La Cucaracha" is now sung in elementary school music classes, used in Hollywood westerns, recorded by symphony orchestras. The specific marijuana verse comes in and out of family-friendly versions, but the song itself has long outlived Pancho Villa, Harry Anslinger, and the men who criminalized both the plant and the people who sang about it.

Cannabis, meanwhile, is legal for adult use in the state of Chihuahua's cross-border neighbor, New Mexico, and in more than 20 other U.S. states. Mexico itself has walked a slow, complicated path toward adult-use reform, with the Mexican Supreme Court ruling repeatedly that personal cannabis use is constitutionally protected and with ongoing debate over implementation. In April 2026, the circle has half-closed. The plant that traveled north with a song is beginning to travel south again with a legal market.

Why It Still Matters

For cannabis consumers in 2026, the Mexican Revolution chapter is not just costume-drama history. It is a reminder that the word you use for a plant changes what the state does with it. The switch from cannabis to marihuana in 1930s U.S. policy was a linguistic trick with body-count consequences. Recognizing that is part of why modern legalization advocates, including in federal rescheduling discussions, are careful to use "cannabis" in regulatory text — reclaiming the neutral, scientific term after a century of politically loaded language.

It is also a reminder that cannabis has been braided into working-class, folk-musical, revolutionary life for far longer than the American prohibition era can pretend. "La Cucaracha" is, among many other things, a song about soldiers needing weed to keep walking. A century later, the plant is still with us, and — finally — the soldiers, the migrants, and the descendants of everyone in that story can access it legally in growing parts of North America.

Key Takeaways

• Cannabis was introduced to Mexico by Spanish colonists as hemp and integrated into Mexican folk medicine and rural life by the 1800s.
• The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) put cannabis on the move with Pancho Villa's armies, most famously through the folk song "La Cucaracha," which included a verse about a cockroach who cannot walk without marijuana to smoke.
• American newspapers, vaudeville acts, and phonograph recordings carried both the song and the word "marihuana" into U.S. English in the 1910s–1920s.
• Commissioner Harry Anslinger used the racialized, foreign framing of "marihuana" to help push the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively prohibited cannabis federally.
• The linguistic switch from "cannabis" to "marihuana" was central to prohibition's political success — and the modern return to "cannabis" in 2026 regulatory language is, in part, a quiet correction of that century-old slander.

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