Commentary Set to Sad, Satiric Song

In a corner of his Garden Grove garage, Lino Espino is pecking at his gray electric typewriter, the Brother SX 14 he bought for $15 at the swap meet on Golden West Street.

He’s typing his latest corrido, a story told in waltz-time song and used by Mexicans for centuries to chronicle current events with pathos and satire.

Today, Espino is crafting a song about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Using two fingers, the 61-year-old laid-off aerospace worker types the lyrics.

In Spanish, it rhymes:

El golpe pego cuando nadie lo

sospecha.

Nos han herido de muerte.

Nos han clavado una flecha.

(“The blow fell when least expected. We have been mortally wounded. They have pierced us with an arrow.”)

With this effort, Espino joins a growing band of corrido composers, in the United States and Mexico, who are telling the story of Sept. 11 en espanol.

In Mexico, the “Bin Laden Corrido,” “Tragedy in Manhattan,” “Black 11th” and “Black September” have hit the radio airwaves.

In the United States, a singer who bills himself as El As de la Sierra (the Ace of the Mountain) just released a compact disc that includes the song “Tragedy in New York.” A little-known band, Imperio Norteno (Northern Empire), has produced a music video called “Terror of the Century,” written in a Bellflower trailer park.

“Every time there is a significant event, there will be a corrido,” said Guillermo Hernandez, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

The latest songs are emerging just as the populist musical genre--galvanized in recent years by tales of drug smugglers and illegal immigrants from the influential band Los Tigres del Norte (the Tigers of the North)--begins to get some respect and attention from the academic and literary worlds.

A book on the recent history of corridos is being released this month. There’s even an exhibit at the Smithsonian in the works.

This academic study in large part honors corrido writers such as Espino, passionate amateurs who churn out songs with a distinctive voice and world view shaped by Spanish-language television news and sensational tabloids.

There’s a professional side to the business too. Corridos represent a multimillion-dollar Southern California-based industry. Spanish-language radio stations play the music, and companies such as Sony have divisions dedicated to Mexican regional music.

The musicians who specialize in the corrido form look like something out of Nashville, with gaudy cowboy hats, colorful Western shirts and silver belt buckles. They sell out shows in Mexico and the United States.

But the real heart and soul of the craft reside in places like Espino’s garage.

The humble corrido represents the common man’s effort to write about, listen to and interpret the news, like limericks, oft-told jokes or even rap music, which convert complicated events into appetizing bits for the masses. And the genre--most appealing to blue-collar listeners in the United States and Mexico--opens its door to the hobbyist.

Fortified in the playing by accordions and 12-string bass guitars, these songs tackle drug deals gone bad, the travails of pop singers and the simply fantastic.

Derived from Spanish ballads and European storytelling traditions, corridos emerged during the Mexican Revolution as a way to spread the word about local battles.

More recently, they’ve commemorated the escapes of jailed drug dealers, the deaths of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S. border, the Columbine shootings, the standoff over Elian Gonzalez, Bill Clinton’s infidelities, the arrest of Mexican singer Gloria Trevi and the chupacabra, a monster once rumored to be rampaging through Latin America.

The stories told in corridos are “not the official history,” said UCLA’s Hernandez, a Spanish literature professor who is curating an exhibit on corridos that will open Feb. 14 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, then travel to nine cities. “You tell what you think.”

The corrido is a kind of “musical newspaper,” said Elijah Wald, author of “Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas,” being released this month by Rayo, a division of HarperCollins.

And although Woody Guthrie and later Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan wrote protest songs about current events that got the ear of college students and others, corridos have a far broader social appeal in Mexican culture, Wald writes in his book.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans love to remember words to songs, and even to this day, there is usually one person in small Mexican villages who collects the local news in corridos.

“They take an old tune and put together some lines that rhyme,” Wald said in an interview. “This is something everybody used to do in all European cultures until people learned to read and make newspapers. What is unique is that Mexicans and Mexican Americans have held onto the tradition.”

Espino paints on a larger canvas, drawing pop culture themes from television and the Mexican magazine Alarma, a rough Spanish-language equivalent of the Weekly World News. As he labors over his old typewriter, he says, sure, he’d like his songs to be hits.

One label, AJR Discos of Lynwood, turned down his latest tale of the terrorist attacks--”They pierced us with an arrow”--as they have done with so many others of his songs. No matter; rejection is part of his art.

“This is the way I express myself, bring my feelings into check, allow others to think about what is going on,” said Espino, clad in the huarache sandals typical of Mexican farmers, even though he has not been back to his native Zacatecas state in a decade.

It was in a community of 300 families in a farming village there that a neighbor impressed him with his corridos. Espino began to write his own about 12 years ago. He’s since had a few recorded by little-known bands.

Jose Guadalupe Paredes began writing his corrido just hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

His song, “Terror of the Century,” has been recorded at Discos Acuario in Long Beach by an Indio-based band, Imperio Norteno. A corresponding video, which features shots of the group in downtown Los Angeles alternating with video footage of the World Trade Center towers collapsing, has aired on KSFV-TV in Los Angeles on the Spanish-language program “El Show de la Musica del Pueblo.”

Paredes, 58, of Bellflower was a machine shop worker at an aerospace factory until he was diagnosed with emphysema four years ago. At home with an oxygen tank, he wrote song after song, and spent time at a record shop, Discos Acuario. He has since hooked up with a band that sings his songs.

Though Paredes has yet to make any money through a music contact, his face has become well-known: He appears on a commercial on Spanish-language television for anti-fungal foot cream.

Samuel Saldana pens songs in his 1995 white Ford van during stops between electrical contracting jobs. A frequent spot is the parking lot of Santa Ana’s busy El Toro Market, where he uses a keyboard he bought at a 99-Cent store to check musical notes.

The 56-year-old Anaheim man also gets his ideas from the news, and several of his many corridos have been recorded by local bands. He sings at local public events, and a compact disc of songs he wrote about the campaign of then-opposition party Mexican presidential candidate Vicente Fox was released in December.

His latest effort, “Black 11th,” has been played on Radio Mexico (1370 AM), and he has appeared on Spanish-language Telemundo television to sing a few verses.

Saldana continues working at his day job while awaiting word from the Fonovisa studio on whether it will buy his corrido. But a tape recorder on the dashboard is always at the ready, because, he said, “if I get an idea, I don’t want it to slip away.”

Zetina Vicente Ruiz, 30, of Delano, Calif., has written more than 700 corridos since he came to the United States 13 years ago. Since he was arrested on a series of drug and arms-related charges seven months ago, he has spent every day writing. He believes he is innocent and will soon be free. From his jail cell, he sends letters containing corridos to recording studios every day.

The onetime goat herder from Michoacan likes to play with words and his thoughts about romances and current events. “I allow my mind to wander, and I can come up with song after song,” Ruiz said.

Author Wald said the corrido as a pop music genre nearly died in the 1960s, dismissed as old-fashioned and with little relevance to modern life.

But in the early 1970s, Los Tigres del Norte energized the form with new songs on the narcotics traders who plied the border and the plight of immigrants without papers coming north for jobs.

The band has cut nearly three dozen albums and made appearances in many films. Its success encouraged competitors and lesser-known bands to produce their own corridos.

Although they admire Los Tigres, some writers complain that recording studios want only so-called narcocorridos while shunning news corridos that they say can hold listeners’ attention for only a short time. For this reason, many writers say much of their work languishes in their notebooks.

UCLA’s Hernandez said that even the many corridos that do get recorded are short-lived.

Of the few that survive, he said, “those are the ones that are our oral tradition.”