The Ballad of Narcomexico

Abstract

In the first years of the new millennium, Mexico experienced a wave of violence associated with the trafficking of illegal substances, and the deep-seated Mexican ballad tradition called the corrido has served as a chronicle of these events, facilitating a popular discourse couched in the sweet sonorities of Mexican song and bespeaking a heroic vision of history as witnessed at the grass-roots level. Here, in what was first delivered as an address to the American Folklore Society, I seek to get beyond the slick veneer of the narcocorridos, ballads that celebrate and glamorize the trade, to sample a zone of commemorative practice where narcocorridos share a space in the national consciousness with two additional manifestations of the contemporary genre: corridos of trafficking, which tell drug-world stories in a level-headed manner, and corridos of remediation, which seek to ameliorate the devastation wrought upon the Mexican people by the drug wars of the early twentyfirst century.

The Challenge of American Folklore to the Humanities

“…Although corridos became commercialized by recording companies and broadcast on television and radio, many folklorists point out that the folk process is still evident in an evolution of the folk hero corrido into the "narcocorrido" (McDowell 2012;Morrison 2008;Wald 2001). Emerging in the 1970s, the narcocorrido features the traditional tripartite corrido structure of salutation, description of events, and moral lesson to relate legends of fabled drug smugglers and dealers and their brazen exploits.…”

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

“…Despite the popularity of corridos, there have been very few investigations of the adolescents who read and write corridos as a literacy practice. There have been, however, extensive inquiries into corridos as an adult activist literacy practice in Mexican American and Chicana/o Studies (Herrera-Sobek, 1993;Paredes, 1958), rhetoric and composition studies (Noe, 2009), folklore studies (McDowell, 2012;Simmons, 1957), and media studies (Pedelty, 2004;Westgate, 2013). Within the field of adolescent literacy, there remains a paucity of research on the academic affordances of corridos in the lives of bilingual transnational young people.…”

“…As a singer-songwriter, Joaquín's corridista consciousness hones the ability to critically decode not only border corridos but also some of the allegorical nature of the more hard-core narcocorridos and cartel corridos that offer glamorized portraits of transnational drug trade leaders (McDowell, 2012). As a popular culture text, narcocorridos offer a window into the laborious intellectual work that students are already engaged in within the context of political and colonial discourses.…”

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

“…Of the distinct genres of Mexican regional music-which include Tejano, norteño, corridos, conjunto, mariachi, trio, banda, tropical/cumbia, among others-the corrido, accordion-driven border folk ballad, is arguably the most popular (Amaya, 2014). Traditional border corridos amplify the struggles of the working poor, transnational exploitation, and the necessary migration of people in their pursuit of economic survival (McDowell, 2012;Paredes, 1958;Schmidt Camacho, 2008). In contrast, the narcocorrido, a modernized subgenre of the corrido, is characterized as "a ballad that describes, apotheosizes, comments, or laments the deeds of those involved in the drug cultivation and trade" (Simonett, 2006, p. 3).…”