Mexican Corrido Research Articles

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy

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

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.

Corridos, Tequila (and others), and Mexican/Chicano Masculinity

The Mexican corrido is one of the most popular cultural manifestations both in the United States and Mexico. From its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, the corrido has dealt with “people’s stuff,” such as war, love, honor, immigration and/or belonging to a land, among other everyday life issues. The corrido is, in short, a symbol of identity and belonging, and can be considered a marker of the Mexican identity on both sides of the border. In this sense, it is to be expected that the corrido, as an expression of “people’s stuff,” voices the relevance of a “national” symbol. In the same way, tequila is regarded, at least internationally, as directly related to “lo mexicano/chicano,” and in many cases also to Mexican/Chicano masculinity. Starting from this premise, the aim of this article is to observe the presence of tequila and its significance as a symbol of “lo mexicano/chicano” in the work of Los Tigres del Norte, one of the most prominent corrido bands, both locally and internationally.

“Los Músicos”: Mexican Corridos, the Aural Border, and the Evocative Musical Renderings of Transnational Youth

In this research article, Cati V. de los Ríos examines US-Mexican transnational youths' engagement with the Mexican musical genre corridos, border folk ballads, and its subgenre, narcocorridos, folk ballads that illuminate elements of the drug trade and often glamorize drug cartels. She draws from ethnographic methods to present empirical knowledge of four young musicians' critical readings of these genres and their place-making and community-binding practices across their public high school. She demonstrates how these transnational youth draw from their communicative practices to construct meaningful communities on their school campus and details how their evocative musical school performances serve as a cultural resistance to contemporary anti-migrant sentiments. Rather than positioning youth consumption of narcocorridos as simply a “deviant” activity, the findings argue that youth engage critically, intellectually, and aesthetically with narcocorridos as a popular culture practice and that some songs carry important transnational critiques and lessons on capitalism, state-sanctioned violence, and globalization.

El corrido mexicano en tiempos de YouTube: memoria colectiva, agencia cultural e hibridación en el caso Ayotzinapa

Se estudia la manera en que el corrido mexicano que circula en YouTube, en tanto modalidad híbrida de cultura popular subalterna para la construcción de memoria colectiva, se incorpora al repertorio subversivo de las protestas transnacionales contemporáneas por la justicia social. A partir del caso de los 43 estudiantes de Ayotzinapa, y basados en la teoría narrativa de Paul Ricoeur, se identifican elementos de permanencia y cambio en las formas de agencia cultural que surgen de las apropiaciones digitales del corrido que proveen de memorias alternativas al discurso oficial.

Mapping the Burrito Circuit

Formed in 2002 in Los Angeles, the Aggrolites contribute to the Chicano reggae and ska revival scene while maintaining fi delity to the Chicano power soundscapes that gained cohesion along the “Burrito Circuit.” This essay defi nes the Burrito Circuit based on interviews, an analysis of three representative Aggrolites songs, and album cover art that reflects the early Chicano movement’s visual representations of cultural affirmation. Featuring bands such as Thee Midniters, the Premiers, Tierra, and Los Lobos, the Burrito Circuit helped develop a nonrepresentational stylistic influence that expands our understanding of Chicano soundscapes beyond the Mexican corrido and Afro-Cuban styles previously associated with cultural reclamation. As national popular music catalogs remain organized along a grid of R&B (“black”) and pop (“white”) music, Chicano identity markers within these racialized categories have largely gone unacknowledged. By examining the Aggrolites’ brand of Chicano soul, funk, and garage rock–infl ected reggae, as well as their visual profi le that hails working-class Chicano experience, we can discern how the Burrito Circuit’s sound and sights that began on Los Angeles’s Eastside continue to be sensually available and politically relevant to audiences as an expression of cultural audibility and spatial entitlement.

Cultural memory and constructions of collective identity in the Mexican corridos: Intertexts, motives and formulas in the characterizations of the popular heroes

Este artículo analiza de qué maneras se relacionan los textos literarios del corrido mexicano con una memoria cultural y cierta construcción de identidades. Los corridos se consideran poesía tradicional oral, entrando en la memoria del colectivo transmisor que hace el texto suyo, por lo que puede desarrollar determinadas funciones de reforzamiento identitario a través de elementos intertextuales como fórmulas y motivos conocidos. Se observa una continuidad temática y estilística desde los orígenes hasta las manifestaciones contemporáneas de este género de poesía oral. En especial, en la época de la Revolución los corridos tuvieron su momento de decisiva importancia y los textos, con fines de propaganda, sobre la figura construida de Pancho Villa inscribieron su nombre como cierto tipo de héroe popular en la memoria cultural.

Toward aCorridistaConsciousness: Learning From One Transnational Youth's Critical Reading, Writing, and Performance of Mexican Corridos

AbstractThis article examines instances of a U.S.–Mexican transnational youth honing his critical translingual literacy skills through his engagement with corridos, Mexican balladry in Spanish that often emphasizes injustice and border strife. The author relies on ethnographic classroom observations, the student's journals, and semistructured interviews to provide a glimpse into the complexities and sophistication of the bilingual youth's everyday language and literacy practices in an era of vehement anti‐immigrant rhetoric. This inquiry asks, (a) What do literacy practices deeply rooted in corridos look like? (b) How does one youth read and engage with the Mexican musical genre of corridos to make sense of his social and political world? and (c) What are the environments and educational settings that supported this literacy development? Findings detail a transnational youth'scorridista(balladeer) consciousness and its concomitant language and literacy practices that shape and are shaped by his participation in both his Tijuana communities of origin and his Los Angeles communities. Specifically, this study showcases a student's uses of literary devices, including allegory, to describe myriad forms of oppression and resistance found in corrido lyrics and throughout the lives of U.S.–Mexican transnational youths. Attention to literary genres that are often unsanctioned in traditional English‐medium classrooms and recognizing the complex cognitive abilities of bilinguals can harvest critical insight about literacy education in and out of school. Implications from this study highlight meaningful learning contexts for transnational adolescents’ literacies and how engagement of these literacies might be (re)conceptualized through an ethnic studies and Chicanx/Latinx Studies lens.

YO VENGO A CANTAR UN CORRIDO: EL SALTEADOR DE CAMINOS EN LA POESÍA MAPUCHE WILLICHE

In this article I explore the way that the Mexican corrido has followed from its origins in the Spanish romance through its emergence and development in Mexico, arriving then to the south of Chile and appearing in poems by contemporary Mapuche authors. The aim is to depict a transatlantic transfer that continues its geographic and temporal journey till it reaches contemporary Williche poetry of writers like Bernardo Colipan, Juan Luis Huenun and Juan Paulo Huirimilla. I want to map it to provide a context and then deepen in the analysis of this phenomenon and its contribution to literature. Through the study of the poems will be demonstrated the contact zones between the Chilean poetic lore, that of the Mapuche, and the Mexican music with its Hispanic roots.

Mexican Folk Music and Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Southern California: The Ramona Pageant and the Mexican Players

AbstractIn an environment of racial tension and conflict in Southern California during the first half of the twentieth century, the Ramona Pageant and the plays by the Padua Hills Mexican Players offered Mexican American performers a vital role in perpetuating cultural memory through music and dance. The Ramona Pageant, which began in Hemet, California in 1923 and is still in operation, remains one of the longest-running pageants, or historical dramas, in U.S. history. Similarly, the Mexican Players were founded during the Great Depression in 1931 in Claremont, California and performed continuously for more than forty years. This article argues that Hispanic musicians achieved a degree of cultural agency in these plays through the performance of Mexican folk music, especially canciones (love songs) and corridos (narrative ballads), which were essential elements in the “soundscape” of the Southwest. Although Anglos created and directed the plays, they did not create or perform the music. In spite of the plays’ largely romanticized portrayals of California's Spanish and Mexican past, they provided some of the few prominent forums in Southern California for Mexican American musicians and dancers during the first half of the twentieth century.

Jácaras and Narcocorridos in Context: What Early Modern Spain Can Tell Us about Today’s Narco-culture

CHARACTERIZING the entirety of narco-culture, let alone any culture, is quite difficult, but by analyzing a discrete musical-literary genre, the narcocorrido --a ballad-form mostly popularized in Mexico, the Borderlands, and the Southwestern United States--one can more easily characterize the culture's principal artistic manifestation. In its simplest definition, the narcocorrido is a song that recounts the exploits of narcos, meaning drug smugglers and their bosses. (1) Since the narcocorrido's existence as a specific genre is dependent on specific historical and social circumstances, the study of the genre also tends to focus on these. It is perhaps for this reason that comparative studies of the narcocorrido are relatively rare; and yet a brief comparison between the narcocorrido of the last several decades, and a very similar genre, the seventeenth-century Spanish (or romance de germania), can be very useful. By making a parallel selective taxonomy of both genres, I hope to provide enough material to create a general backdrop that can be used for further study to examine whether a generic element is the product of a Zeitgeist or is perhaps inherent in songs about criminals in the Hispanic world. Long before the word became a common term in Spain, the form existed as part of the romance tradition. In the late medieval period, alongside musical stories of martial heroes, there were songs about outlaws, the sort that occurs throughout much of Western culture, from Icelandic sagas (Barraclough 368) to Calabrian canto di malavita (Deaglio 359). What eventually made distinct from other Spanish ballads in the seventeenth century was their use of criminal jargon, called germania. In 1609, this distinction was formally announced when Juan Hidalgo published his compilation of anonymous works titled Romances de germania. In the vocabulario (glossary) included at the end of the collection, Hidalgo defines jacarandina as rufianesca o junta de rufianes, o ladrones (Hill 116). The individual who most firmly established the genre's popularity, and whose works were called jacaras after his death, was the master satirist Francisco de Quevedo. While he was not included as a named poet in the Romances de germania collection, his sarcastic criminal ballads were likely circulating in manuscript form around the same time (Pedraza Jimenez 84). Within the next twentyfive years, jacara would become a generic designation quite separate from any old-fashioned romance. This is reflected in Lope's Gatomaquia, published in 1634, as Gilard has pointed out (27): y en medio de lo grave del romance suave, les dijo con despejo, pareciendole versos a lo viejo, que cantasen picaresca. (335) In similar fashion, the narcocorrido is a ballad tradition transformed. Its very name reveals it as an offshoot of the traditional Mexican corrido, a ballad-form that shares many striking similarities with the late-medieval Spanish romance, just like the 300 years before. (2) Also like the jacara, much of the form and content for the narcocorrido existed many decades before that designation came into use. In Mexico, the revolutionary heroes of historic corridos were replaced by Prohibition-era smugglers, and eventually by traffickers in stuff harder than alcohol. Leading up to the consolidation of the narcocorrido as a genre in the 1970's, some mid-century corridos came closer to the in their content than in their later manifestations. These two works below, separated by about 300 years, have been placed side-byside for ease of comparison: Voy a cantar un corrido, escuchen con atencion! de las mujeres galantes, viciosos y malhechores, de Juarez hay de a monton. A unos los han desterrado, otros dejan la carrera, otros que por mala suerte han encontrado la muerte en la mentada Piedrera. Fernandez, con su dinero que de nada le sirvio, la muerte se le acercaba. …

Del duelo a la muerte a traición en el corrido: una cuestión de matices

El trabajo revisa dos temas recurrentes en el corrido novelesco: por un lado, el duelo como enfrentamiento en igualdad de condiciones y expresión de valentía de los combatientes. Y, por otro, la muerte a traición, ya sea con trampa o como agresión directa. La revisión de distintas versiones permite advertir las diferencias entre estos dos temas y las posibilidades de desarrollo. El análisis se realiza a partir de textos recogidos de la tradición oral por la propia autora, característica que permite dar cuenta de la forma de vida actual del corrido y de sus rasgos como un género tradicional que expresa un código de valores o normas de conducta de la comunidad que los alberga.

Lo no dicho en Corazón de Kaláshnikov, de Alejandro Páez Varela. Personajes, causalidades, parataxis

A stylistic analysis of Corazón de Kaláshnikov (2009) by Alejandro Páez Varela highlights that the novel is extremely elliptic: the focalization of the characters is external, the causal relations are implicit and the style is very much paratactic. This seems a response to an ethical choice far from the sensationalist representations of the violence in Ciudad Juárez, an option Páez Varela shares with the Bolaño of 2666, specifically the part about the femicides, that accounts for the ‘Global South’ moment. Paez Varela’s novel seems related to a peculiar geographic and climatic environment typicall of the North of Mexico. It shares its tense and sober style with Nellie Campobello, David Toscana and the mexican corridos.

Time for the "Corrido" and the "Romance"

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

The First Congress on History of Archaeology in Latin América (México, 1984): between an Argentine tango and a Mexican corrido

A tango is a type of traditional music that tells the story of a distressing and impossible love. Without a broken heart, a repentant macho, and without the narration of an unsuccessful love story, there is no real tango. A second usage of the word tango means an inadequate lie, that is, a lie about of some misfortune which is really an excuse for something else. The corrido, the contrary of tango, implies a violent altercation involving alcohol, with little opportunity for repentance or for the mourning of love, because when love is real, it is a matter of killing or dying. Corrido can also mean “to be thrown out, to be sent away”. The following account includes abundant questions that have remained unanswered because there were no answers in sight. It is a story with no bad or good guys because no one knows whom, or where they were, a story where no one is guilty of anything, where everything dissolves, despite the remaining facts. Where, in the traditional Latin American way (so difficult for the Anglo-Saxon mentality to understand) these issues are resolved by “what is your problem, my friend, if nothing has really happened here…!” This is a good story about a congress of archaeology that took place twenty years ago in Mexico, that was rich in tangos and corridos in their both respective senses.

Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border

* Acknowledgments * Introduction * Part One. The Social Base and the Negotiation of Identity *1. The Folklore of Groups of Mexican Origin in the United States [1979] *2. The Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture: Popular Expressions of Culture Conflict along the Lower Rio Grande Border [1978] *3. Folk Medicine and the Intercultural jest [1968] *4. On Ethnographic Work among Minority Groups: A Folklorist's Perspective [1977] * Part Two. The Folklore Genres: History, Form, and Performance *5. Some Aspects of Folk Poetry [1964] *6. The Mexican Corrido: Its Rise and Fall [1958] *7. The Concept of the Emotional Core Applied to the Mexican Corrido Benjamin Argumedo [1972] *8. Jose Mosqueda and the Folklorization of Actual Events [1973] *9. The United States, Mexico, and Machismo [1971] *10. The Decima on the Texas-Mexican Border: Folksong as an Adjunct to Legend [1966] *11. The Undying Love of El Indio Cordova: Decimas and Oral History in a Border Family [1987] * Notes * Bibliography: The Scholarly Writings of Americo Paredes

The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis

Journal Article The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis Get access The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. By Herrera-Sobek María. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. xix + 151 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $29.95.) Elizabeth Salas Elizabeth Salas University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 22, Issue 3, August 1991, Pages 349–350, https://doi.org/10.2307/969759 Published: 01 August 1991

The Mexican corrido: a feminist analysis

The Mexican corrido: a feminist analysis

The Mexican Corrido: as a Source for Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (1870-1950)

The Mexican Corrido: as a Source for Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (1870-1950)

The Mexican Corrido: Formula and Theme in a Ballad Tradition

MILMAN PARRY'S CONVERSION to an oral-formulaic perspective in the course of his Homeric studies, coupled with his field observations of the living SerboCroatian epic, enabled him to produce systematic theory of the formulaic character of literature originating in an oral tradition.' The dissemination of this theory, largely accomplished by Parry's student and co-worker, Albert B. Lord,2 ultimately precipitated what has been called a revolution in scholarly opinion.3 The oral-formulaic theory, with attendant controversy, has recently resurfaced in the pages of this journal. Bruce Rosenberg alleges the formulaic character of the spontaneous sermon;4 Bennison Gray counters with critique encompassing both Rosenberg's application and Parry's original formulation.5 Without pausing here to discuss the many valid questions raised by Gray, I will refer to only single far-ranging issue aired in his paper that is of crucial importance to my own: Can method designed to illuminate features of certain texts otherwise obscured in the passage of time be employed from literary and folkloristic perspective in approaching texts of another tradition? The present undertaking assumes an affirmative answer to this question of methodology. The current exchange between Rosenberg and Gray brings to mind the comments of H. L. Rodgers concerning the work of F. P. Magoun and others in the field of Anglo-Saxon literature. Rodgers insisted on tighter construction of the concept formula, if conclusions based on formulaic analysis were to be valid.