Traditional Ballads in a New Key

Towering above the audience in 10-gallon cowboy hats and leather-trimmed Western wear, Los Tucanes electrify a swaying sea of fans with a cautionary song about the rise and fall of a reputed drug baron who enjoyed wealth, fame and power until hubris--and the law--caught up with him.

The youths at concerts sing along, much as their great-grandparents once sang the ballads of Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. But these modern desperadoes are cocaine cowboys, not revolutionaries, and their exploits are fueled by drug money, not dreams of land and liberty.

From campfires to cantinas, the corrido norteno--or northern ballad--is an indigenous song of popular culture that is equal parts Shakespearean tragedy, Greek chorus and news story.

Like opera, the corridos of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands immortalize the drama of everyday life, elevating tales of lonely immigrants and their run-ins with U.S. authorities to the status of myth and legend.

Like rap, the corridos of contemporary times tell gritty tales of modern mean streets, dramatizing the star-crossed careers of drug lords and their cocaine kingdoms in border boom towns.

And like rap, these narcocorridos--from the same popular lexicon that spawns terms like narcopolicia and narcopoliticos--have drawn a chorus of grass-roots criticism from parents, law enforcement authorities and health experts.

Citing concerns familiar to anyone who follows the U.S. debate over rock and gangsta rap, critics say the ballads are the soundtrack to a nihilistic cult of automatic weapons and cocaine traffickers that is seducing their young. Some have even urged authorities to ban the songs from the airwaves.

“Young people are receiving constant subliminal messages glorifying the narcos, their cars, their girlfriends,” said Marta Rocha de Diaz, 57, Tijuana’s answer to Dolores Tucker, the U.S. anti-rap crusader. Rocha is the president of Housewives of Playas de Tijuana, a seaside suburb that has been shattered by the drug-related executions of local youths.

“These songs are very destructive,” she said. “They are egging these kids on. Why don’t authorities stop this propaganda?”

Defenders of the narcocorridos say they are not the siren call of cocaine kings, but an artistic reflection of an undeniable reality in sprawling border cities like Tijuana. They say the storytelling ballads are a mirror of the contemporary Mexican political drama and part of a tradition as old as Mexico itself.

Experts agree. Some academics trace the narrative style of the ballads to the Nahuatl epic poetry of the Aztec empire; others to the Andalusian romantic verses brought by 16th century Spanish conquerors. Some of the oldest known corridos recount the battles of the 11-year war that led to Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, according to Steve Loza, an eminent ethnomusicologist at UCLA.

The music of the northern corridos is distinguished by European polka rhythms that were brought--along with the signature instrument, the accordion--by the German and Czech railway workers and farmers who settled in the Texas-Mexico border region in the late 19th century, Loza said.

The Mexican Revolution, viewed as the Renaissance of the corrido, was the era when the populist balladeers began to shape history, not just recount it, experts say. It was during that long conflict that began in 1910 that the corrido norteno emerged in embattled northern Mexico as the emblematic style, Loza said.

Around campfires, the corrido was a prime news source for the illiterate peasants and soldiers, telling of the battles and heroes that would build modern Mexico, said Jose Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a corrido expert at the prestigious Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Baja California. The songs slyly eluded the censorship of authorities, who knew that news of revolutionary triumphs could encourage more peasants to mutiny, he said.

“The function of the corrido has always been to narrate current events and social history from the point of view of the people,” Valenzuela said.

Critics say today’s urban balladeers have corrupted the art form and embraced crass commercialism.

Nowadays, said Dr. Manuel Molina Bellini, a respected Tijuana anti-drug educator, the singers simply parrot the violent U.S. movies and television shows that appeal to young audiences. Molina, director of a drug addiction treatment center, is among those trying to persuade radio stations to stop playing narcocorridos.

“The original corridos of the revolution ended with the tragic death of the hero,” Molina said. “In narcocorridos, the trafficker prevails, and crime pays. The narco manages to stay alive, elude capture, get his drugs across the border, and vanquish authorities. The moral is that being a narco gives you immunity.”

Some authorities scoff at arguments over the ballads’ artistic integrity. “They romanticize criminals,” Tijuana state judicial Police Chief Antonio Torres Miranda declared tersely.

Mario Quintero, 26, the lead singer of the Tijuana-based Los Tucanes, says troubadours are being treated like the fabled Greek messengers killed for bearing bad tidings.

“The only difference between us and the 6 o’clock news is that we set the events to music,” Quintero said. “Drug traffic exists, just as drug use exists, and as long as it does, so will the narcocorrido.”

Los Tucanes do receive some unorthodox fan mail, he conceded.

Every month, Quintero said, the group gets 30 to 50 letters from anonymous correspondents who boast in detail of how they managed to smuggle drugs into the United States.

“For a smuggler, getting a drug shipment across the border is a triumph,” Quintero said.

The best anecdotes are written into Los Tucanes’ songs, Quintero said.

A recent Tucanes hit, “My Three Animals,” is a sly song in which a rooster, parakeet and goat are thinly disguised decoys, Quintero admits, for marijuana, cocaine and heroin. “They make me rich, and I don’t even buy them food,” Los Tucanes sing. “In California and Nevada, in Texas, Arizona and Chicago I have people who sell my animals. Now I am a big shot . . . with money in abundance.”

But the true message of Los Tucanes, Quintero said, is underscored by corridos such as “El Guero Palma,” about alleged drug kingpin Hector Luis Palma. The song opens with the crash of a plane that led authorities to the plush Guadalajara mansion where Palma was arrested--along with 33 corrupt police officers who were protecting him. Palma is being held in a high-security prison, accused of narcotics trafficking, according to the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico City.

“We want young people to be aware that this is something that will not get you anywhere. These men might be viewed as heroes for a while, but they always come to the same bad end,” Quintero said. “Corridos are to dance to, to listen to--but not to live.”

Academics contend that the ballads have always documented cutting-edge controversies. Like frescoes, their creation seems to thrive on the immediacy and urgency of their raw materials.

Once upon a time, northern corridos celebrated cross-border desperado Joaquin Murieta as a Robin Hood-styled folk hero who defended mistreated Mexicans in California after it was taken by the United States following the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, he said. Smuggling Mexican moonshine into the United States was a popular Prohibition-era theme.

In modern times, singers have documented the assassinations that have rocked Mexico’s political arena and, to the chagrin of investors, its stock market.

“Corridos are used by Mexicans to immortalize their heroes, but also to satirize their tragedies,” UCLA’s Loza said.

Like the history of Mexico, corridos transcend the U.S.-Mexican border, documenting the strikes of low-paid drywall workers in Anaheim and singing the praises of Cesar Chavez, the late union leader of California farm workers. There are corridos about baseball hero Fernando Valenzuela.

Cross-cultural conflicts between Mexicans and authorities in el norte are prime fodder. Songs poke fun at the cat-and-mouse game between coyotes, or immigrant smugglers, and U.S. Border Patrol agents, who are invariably portrayed as a collective scourge known as “la migra.”

Other corridos deal with the vicissitudes of the immigrant experience itself. One laments the fate of two illegal immigrants who contract AIDS in the United States. They commit suicide together rather than return to Mexico.

Corrido expert Jose Manuel Valenzuela Arce does chastise balladeers--but not for their narcocorridos. Corridos, he expounded in a 152-page academic treatise, are “permeated by machista attitudes which reproduce sexist archetypes of women.”

With the exception of a fabled revolutionary heroine and a few modern gangster molls, women rarely appear beyond the self-sacrificing wives, mothers and sweethearts--or heartless flirts who get what’s coming to them, he said.

“Women are invisible, or appear as foils to highlight the virtues of the men--a theme that reflects their portrayal in most official histories of Mexico,” Valenzuela said.

Disorganized campaigns to silence the drug ballads have been mounted in several states along the border since the narcocorrido boom began three years ago. Citizen groups have mounted campaigns to silence the drug ballads in several states, but the popular songs play on.

“Suppose the narcocorrido were outlawed. I am sure it would be kept alive, as it always has been, by popular oral culture,” Valenzuela said.

No one is talking about banning the songs in Tijuana, but some radio stations do refuse to play them.

“It’s out of social conscience, not because we favor censorship,” said Gloria Enciso, director of Tijuana’s Radio Enciso. “We do not wish to glorify people who are not leading decent lives. If radio stations voluntarily elected to stop airing them, it would encourage efforts to stabilize our youth and our society.”

Local record stores view the new corridos as a growth industry whose cachet is only enhanced by disapproving elders. “Forbidden Corridos,” by Los Tigres del Norte, is anything but prohibited, though it is hard to keep in stock. So is a recent Tucanes recording, “14 Smash Hits,” which has sold an estimated 1.2 million copies in Mexico and the United States, according to the group’s record distributor.

The groups’ cross-border appeal is reflected in concert dates and radio play. Both groups have cracked the Billboard Latin hit list. A typical month finds Los Tucanes serenading audiences from Chicago to Guadalajara. They regularly play California cities between Tijuana and Fresno--a route that one radio station director, Raul Ortal, calls the “corrido corridor.”

“This is not an underground phenomenon. The new generation of corridos is making millions of dollars,” said Ortal, operations director of KWKW La Mexicana, one of Los Angeles’ most popular Latino music stations.

Narcocorridos “are very popular in Los Angeles. When a guy gets arrested and goes to federal prison, they make a corrido of his story,” Ortal said.

Critics wave away discussions of the merits of the exalted corrido tradition. The bottom line, they say, is that narcocorridos project a distorted image of border culture, amplifying the elements residents are least proud of.

“So does the TV news,” countered Sandra Luz Camacho, 24, a Tijuana corrido fan. “Young people, and many older people too, are drawn to corridos because they are like movies--they have drama, heroes and villains. It is natural for our parents to worry, but we’re not about to imitate songs about gangsters. I think people are taking this a little too seriously.”