Time for the "Corrido" and the "Romance"

Abstract

Critics typically cite the date-formula as a formulaic component of the Mexican corrido. The date formula is a literary device in which a date, most often a year, begins the ballad and anchors it in a single historical moment. Critics, however, have overlooked the existence of the date-formula in other Hispanic ballads such as the lesser-known cuando and the sixteenth-century Spanish romance. The first part of the article argues that critical recognition of the date-formula in early romances alters and expands the traditional romance canon. The second part argues that the date-formula in El corrido de Esequiel Hern?ndez flags the composition as having a certain noticiero function and places it within a historical moment that the narrator and audience will immediately share. The date-formula also marks the ballad as a hortatory poetic form that demands social responsibility. sons. The principal ideological reason has to do with the nationality of the ballad. In an implicit or explicit maneuver to distance itself from Spain, many critics characterize the corrido as a distinctly Mexican creation. In turn, some critics cite unique characteristics that set the Spanish ballad tradition apart from other national ballad traditions, including the Mexican. Studies of the ballad in Mexico frequently either only study ancient ballads (Diaz Roig) or only study the corrido. In each case critics often contribute to an understanding of the corrido and the romance as generically and nationally distinct forms. With respect to form, one critic argues that the fundamental difference between each is that the romance typically tells its story through dialogue, while the corrido does so through a formulaic first-person narration (Mart?nez L?pez). The most powerful stylistic characteristic that has kept the two apart has been the widely assumed belief that a true romance must bear an atemporal, universal mystique. Men?ndez Pidal's widely-anthologized description of the Spanish romance as fragmentary has contributed to the belief that the romance has a timeless quality and hence is averse to a diachronic sense of time.1 In turn, the first-person narrator of the corrido typically recounts events in a diachronic, temporal continuum. Changing the critical understanding of the role of time in the ballad will contribute to rewriting the thinking behind the nationalist impulse that defined the ballad as an essential component of Spanish literature. For the nineteenth-century romantics who shaped romance studies, the ballad was not composed by present people (generally classified as vulgar and base), but by a Volk from a deep past. Agust?n Duran wrote in the nineteenth century that con