Abstract
This article examines a corrido, a Mexican folk song, crafted through the collaborative songwriting efforts of Los Pepenadores, a formally organized yet often disregarded workers’ union that laboured in the garbage dump of Oaxaca, Mexico. Situating this corrido within the community’s 42-year history of environmental interaction and their multisensory listening and sound-making practices reveals the organic development of their collaborative process. This community’s corrido serves as a testament to their history and a repository for their memories and stories. This article also addresses this corrido’s ongoing importance following the dump’s closure in 2022, as the community negotiates recording and sharing their song to honour and uphold their enduring connections. Drawing from two years of fieldwork, two decades of personal connection and engaging the fields of ethnomusicology, sound studies, discard studies and community music, I propose an interdisciplinary framework to examine how this corrido functions within this community, revealing its roles in self-representation, shared experience and inclusion. I argue that Los Pepenadores’ virtuosic, multisensory environmental engagement and strong communal ties, combined with the corrido genre’s deep cultural roots, produced a distinctive instance of multisensory songwriting. This collaboratively composed corrido stands as a poignant tribute to a proud community.
Published Version
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