Singing the border news.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Mexican corrido

Then said Gregorio Cortez With his pistol in his hand, "Ah, so many mounted Rangers Just to take one Mexican!"

from the corrido of Gregorio Cortez, (circa 1901)

The Mexican corrido, or sung narrative ballad, holds a primary place in the mythos of that country's last century. Corridos were the poetry, press, and propaganda for much of Mexico's revolutionary past. Before the days of radio and universal literacy, the corrido--by spreading news to one and all--held the nation together during its darkest days. Today these collected songs have become the schoolchild's history book.

The first corridos of the mid-nineteenth century heralded outlaws who dared challenge the established order. In the early days of the Revolution, freshly minted corridos passed the word faster than newspapers could be printed. They chronicled Pancho Villa's battles of Torreon, Zacatecas, and Celaya; praised Emiliano Zapata and vilified Porfirio Diaz; and immortalized small-time heroes like Juan Vasquez, and Juan Carrasco.

John Reed, who chronicled the revolution in his book Insurgent Mexico, wrote of soldiers gathered around the fire singing a corrido about Pancho Villa: "One of them began to sing. . . . He sang one verse, and then the next man sang a verse and so on around, each man composing a dramatic account of the deeds of the Great Capitan. . . . While one man sang, others stared upon the ground, wrapt in composition. . . . [T]hey sang around their fire for more than three hours."

Like all folkloric genres, the corrido's formal structure is flexible. It generally has a consonantal rhyme scheme a-b-c-b in quatrains of eight-syllable lines. Textual conventions include a Homeric account of personal heroism; an explicit statement of names, dates, and places; short quotations of the hero's actual words; the singer's call for his listeners' attention (la llamada); and the singer's farewell (la despedida).

As with other oral art forms, the corrido seemed to have sprang from a preliterate folk consciousness. If, contrary to Reed's overly idealized account, it was not collectively improvised around a fire, it certainly did speak directly to the people in simple, memorable words and images. Its purpose was both practical and artistic--to spread news, boost morale, and entertain the war weary. Some corridistas were famous, like Marciano Silva of the Zapatista forces in Morelos, while most remained the anonymous Everyman.

The corrido got its name apparently from the term...