This is the fifth blog post in a new series featuring behind-the-scenes discoveries from the Ethnomusicology Archive & Lab at UT Austin’s Butler School of Music.
BY DIMITRIS GKOULIMARIS, PHD STUDENT
In our most recent blog post, I introduced a CD collection of field recordings made by the writer-folklorist-activist Alejandro Parédes, titled Mexican Songs. I discussed the issue of Mexican identity and cultural expression among Tejanos, as evidenced in the songs that Paredes recorded in Texan border towns.
In this post, I dive deeper into the genre of corridos (narrative ballads) as they are represented in Parédes’s collection. I specifically look at historical corridos, as an audible link between Tejano communities and the Mexican (and Mexican American) national imagination(s).
Corridos are sung across much of Mexico, as well as in the border regions of the United States. They became especially widespread during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1921. Nowadays, their popularity lives on in offspring genres like narcocorridos and the currently chart-topping corridos tumbados of the likes of Peso Pluma and Junior H.
Corridos are song-stories, serving a narrative function. Before the advent of mass media, corridos provided aspects of entertainment, education, and information, disseminating stories of love, heroism, and political drama across the Spanish-speaking countryside. Their retelling of historical events was crucial to the development of popular narratives concerning major historical processes, such as the Mexican revolution.
The practice of singing historical corridors appears to be alive and well in 1950s south Texas, which is when and where Paredes conducted the bulk of his field recordings. One CD in his collection contains performances by Mercurio Martínez from Laredo, who seems to specialize in historical and political corridos. In “La Batalla del Cinco de Mayo,” he sings about the 1862 Battle of Puebla and praises the victorious general Zaragoza. This victory of the Mexican Republic against imperial France is celebrated locally in Puebla, but as those who reside in the US may know, Cinco de Mayo in the States has become a day of celebration of Mexican heritage.
Mercurio Martinez: La Batalla del Cinco de Mayo
Martínez also sings a song about the pre-Revolution uprisings against Porfirio Diaz in the 1880s and 1890s, titled “Los Pronunciados.” Yet not all historical corridos are concerned with Mexican history proper. The song “Al General Grant” is a praise for Ulysses S. Grant, who in fact fought against Mexico in the Mexican-American war. Nevertheless, this song praises his role in the US Civil War and in the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.
It certainly makes sense for historical corridos in the Texan context to address US historical figures, in addition to the common thematic elements from Mexican history. However, what I personally find most intriguing are the corridos that tell local history. Martínez sang one such song, which he claimed to have authored himself: “Corrido de Zapata,” about the then-recent elections in border-adjacent Zapata County, TX.
Mercurio Martinez: Corrido de Zapata
Perhaps my favorite of these local corridos is “Gregorio Cortez” as performed by Raquel Ocáñez de Guerrero from Brownsville. First of all, women-led performances are rare in this particular collection; the corrido appears to be a male-dominated genre. Listening to a woman’s voice was refreshing, and she sings quite beautifully, without any instrumental accompaniment, in a rather pure and simple form of storytelling.
Raquel Ocáñez de Guerrero, Gregorio Cortez
I was also fascinated by the story of Gregorio Cortez, as retold and embellished by this corrido. The events told in this song took place in Karnes County, TX, not too far south from where I am writing at this moment. In 1901, Gregorio Cortez was approached by a sheriff who mistook him for a wanted horse thief. When the sheriff attempted to arrest Cortez and his brother, the two resisted; the sheriff shot and wounded Cortez’s brother, and, in turn, Cortez shot and killed the sheriff. A much-mythologized manhunt ensued; this particular version of the corrido, for example, claims that Cortez was pursued by a search party of 300 white men. Eventually, Cortez was caught and imprisoned. In 1905 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, although in 1913 he was granted early release.
Cortez’s story became symbolic of Mexican American resilience against the discrimination of law enforcement and the legal system, and his ballad became one of the most iconic Texan corridos. In fact, the legend of Gregorio Cortez is such a central part of Tejano folklore, that Paredes himself made it the topic of his famous 1958 book, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. The title alludes to a recurring line in the corrido: “con su pistola en la mano.”
Listening to the various corridos contained in Paredes’s collection made me contemplate the intersecting national and local histories of Mexico, the United States, and Texas. It is these histories that gave shape to the Tejano community. In their corridos, Tejanos render into word and sound their identity as both Mexican and American, and perhaps more importantly, Texan. This sentiment is best encapsulated in the common Tejano saying: “yo no crucé la frontera, la frontera me cruzó.” I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.
