El Coco

El Coco is not a creature anybody has ever reported seeing. It is a word Spanish-speaking adults have used for five centuries to frighten children. Its oldest dated definition sits not in a folklore book but in a chronicle of Portuguese India: around 1553, João de Barros explains that his countrymen named the palm nut a coco because that was the word women applied "to anything with which they try to frighten children". The fruit took its name from the bogey, not the other way round. A year later, in 1554, the word surfaces in Lazarillo de Tormes in a scene of unexpected cruelty: Lázaro's baby brother points at his own father, who is Black, and shouts "Mother, coco!" By the time Goya etched Que viene el Coco in 1799, plate three of Los Caprichos, the formula had been in print for two and a half centuries — and the contemporary commentators who annotated the series saw in it not a ghost but an accusation: "the disastrous abuse of early education… forcing him to fear what does not exist."

El Coco is not a creature. It is a word, and that word is on the record long before 1799. The oldest dated definition I could trace is not in a folklore book but in a chronicle of the Portuguese expansion into Asia. Around 1553, João de Barros explains in his Década III why his countrymen call the Indian palm nut a coco: the Portuguese gave it "the name of COCO, a word applied by women to anything with which they try to frighten children", and the name stuck because nobody knew any other — the proper one was tenga among the Malabars and narle among the Canarins. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell reproduce and translate the passage in Hobson-Jobson (1886), alongside the other two witnesses to the naming: Garcia de Orta, writing from Goa in 1563, says "we have given it the name of coco, because it looks like the face of a monkey", and Cristóvão da Costa adds in 1578 that the Portuguese call it coco "because of those three holes that it has". So the order runs the opposite way from the usual telling: the fruit was named after the bogey, not the other way round. "Mother, coco!" A year after Barros, the word enters Castilian literature, and it enters through an uncomfortable door. In Lazarillo de Tormes, printed in 1554, the little boy Lázaro calls his brother — son of his mother and of Zaide, a Black stablehand — sees his own father and bolts: "because the child saw my mother and me white, and him not, he ran from him in fear to my mother, and pointing with his finger said: 'Mother, coco!'". The father laughs. And Lázaro, still a child himself, records the line that turns the joke into something else: "How many there must be in the world who run from others because they cannot see themselves." That is the oldest Coco legible in Spanish: not a monster in the wardrobe, but what a child calls a face he does not recognise. The dictionaries pin it down Sebastián de Covarrubias gives the word three separate entries in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611). One is the fruit, where he repeats the Portuguese argument: "The Spaniards gave it the name of coco because of the little face formed by the three holes, which look like eyes and a mouth." Another is kermes, the scarlet dye. The third is ours: "Coco, in the speech of children, means a figure that causes fright, and none so much as those that are in the dark, or show a black colour." Covarrubias then offers a biblical etymology — deriving it from Cush, descendant of Ham, "who reigned in Ethiopia, land of the Blacks" — which no linguist accepts today and which is best read for what it is: proof that by 1611 the word already carried the racial charge that Lazarillo had staged half a century earlier. The Diccionario de Autoridades (vol. II, 1729) defines it by function rather than form: "A frightful and ugly figure, or a cry like a monkey's, made to frighten and restrain children." For its supporting authority it chooses, precisely, the Lazarillo passage. It also records the set phrase "Guarda el coco", illustrated from Lope de Vega's La Dorotea, and an interlude by Quevedo in which a thief threatens in song: "Give me the purse. Coco, coco, coco!" Goya, 1799 By the time Francisco de Goya etched Que viene el Coco, plate three of Los Caprichos, the formula had been in print for two and a half centuries. The print — etching and burnished aquatint, 219 × 154 mm — carries its title engraved below the image and the mark "P.3." in the upper right corner. The ones screaming are the children: one throws up his arms to flee, the other clutches at his mother, who stays seated, holds both of them and raises her eyes towards a standing shape wrapped entirely in cloth, faceless. What makes the case exceptional is that the contemporary manuscript commentaries explaining each plate survive, and all three discuss this one. The Museo Nacional del Prado manuscript says the print "represents the disastrous abuse of early education. Making a child more afraid of the Coco than of his own father, and forcing him to fear what does not exist." The Ayala manuscript is sharper: mothers "frighten their children with the Coco so they can talk to their lovers". The Biblioteca Nacional manuscript combines both readings: "foolish mothers make their children fearful by conjuring the Coco; and worse ones use this trick to be alone with their lovers when they cannot get their children away from them." Lorca, 1928 The best account of how the Coco works was written by a poet. In his lecture Las nanas infantiles, Federico García Lorca observed: "The magical power of the 'coco' is precisely its blurredness. It can never appear, though it prowls the rooms. And the delightful thing is that it stays blurred for everyone." He then added a correction almost nobody quotes: "But Spain is not fond of the 'coco'. It prefers to frighten with real beings. In the South, the 'bull' and the 'Moorish queen' are the threats; in Castile, the 'she-wolf' and the 'gypsy woman'." Galicia, Portugal and the Americas The claim that the Coco "originated in Galicia and northern Portugal" circulates widely and I found no source that supports it. What is documented in the north-west of the peninsula is a related but distinct figure: the Coca, which the Dicionario da Real Academia Galega defines as a "legendary figure representing a monstrous serpent, brought out in some processions and popular festivals", giving the coca of Redondela as its example and tarasca as its synonym. The child-scaring coco is alive in Galician too, and the Academy records it with a domestic example: "Se non comes todo, vaiche vir o coco" — if you don't eat it all, the coco will come for you. For the American spread I can document the fact but not the chain. Eloy Martos Núñez, of the Universidad de Extremadura, describes the Ibero-American case as syncretic: under a single name — Coco, Cuco, Cucuy — "very different images may be beating", contaminated by Indigenous and African figures and overlapping with the sack man and the sacamantecas. I could not date the Coco's first American appearance from primary sources, and I would rather say so than fill the gap.

The Coco has no site. There is no cave, no lake, no house to visit: the only physical thing this tradition has left behind is Goya's print — and that one you can see. The print. Que viene el Coco is plate 3 of Los Caprichos, etching and burnished aquatint, 219 × 154 mm. The online catalogue raisonné of the Fundación Goya en Aragón (Government of Aragón) publishes its full record — inventory 225 — with image, inscriptions, provenance, exhibition history and bibliography, free and without registration; it is the source used for this page. The image shown here comes from the National Gallery of Art copy in Washington, released as CC0, so it can be downloaded and printed without restriction. The preparatory drawing (black and red chalk on laid paper, 198 × 140 mm) is held by the Museo Nacional del Prado, inventory number D. 4208. Like all works on paper it is not on permanent display: it is shown in rotations and temporary exhibitions, so check before going to look for it. The original copper plate survives in the Calcografía Nacional, inside the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, as number 174. The Academia is at calle de Alcalá 13, Madrid 28014, in the very centre of the city and a short walk from Puerta del Sol; its museum charges admission, sold through its online shop (rabasf.shop), and its collections catalogue is open at academiacolecciones.com. The Academia does not publish opening hours or ticket prices on its landing page, so check its website before travelling. The Calcografía still pulls and sells limited editions from Goya's historic plates. The living version. If what you want is a relative of the Coco that still comes out into the street, you need the Coca: the Dicionario da Real Academia Galega defines it as a monstrous serpent brought out in some processions and popular festivals, and gives as its example the coca of Redondela (Pontevedra), which parades at Corpus Christi. Be clear, though: the Coca is not the Coco. They share a root and they share the business of frightening people, but they are different figures, and anyone going in search of the bogeyman of the lullabies will find a processional dragon instead. The Redondela town council website had an expired security certificate when this page was written, so confirm exact dates by phone with the local tourist office.