Traditions of Mexican Corridos in Rolando Hinojosa’s “The Valley” and “Klail City”

Abstract

The paper dwells on the traditions of Mexican and Mexican-American ballads called “corridos,” such as “Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” in the novels of Texas writer Rolando Hinojosa. Corrido that emerged in the XIX century and continues developing today is a unique phenomenon of Mexican and Mexican-American literature. It serves as a worthy material for understanding the problems of cultural interaction, cultural border and multiculturalism. The paper aims at defining the role of corridos in the fictional world of Rolando Hinojosa, the novels “The Valley” and “Klail City” were taken to be analyzed. It gives a brief overview of the genre development based on the key works of the top scholars who study corridos in Russia and abroad. The article also dwells on the creation of the corrido about the folk hero Gregorio Cortez. There is a hypothesis proposed to explain Hinojosa’s decision to opt for the Mexican ballads: the writer was averse to the didactic and propagandistic ideas of Chicano literature of that time which prompted him to use corridos as a means of the hidden moral. Traditional corrido motifs such as revenge, injustice and social inequality are analyzed. The article concludes that in Hinojosa’s polyphonic and fragmented novels, corrido type stories perform plot-forming and compositional functions, direct the reader’s perception.