The Mexican Corrido

The Mexican corrido is in essence a lyrical genre, primarily narrative, which narrates with a simple and invariable musical phrase composed of four members those events that powerfully touched the sensibility of the masses; violent crimes, violent deaths, tales of bandits, catastrophes, railroad derailments, wars, battles, heroic deeds, humorous stories, simple love couplets, couplets of unrequited love, or of a satirical nature. As can be seen, it includes the epic vein of battles and heroic deeds that give origin to the heroic gesta. The corrido is generally regarded as "very Mexican." It is primarily a literary genre, but can also be defined as a genre blending textual and musical elements. Mexican heroes, such as Pancho Villa, Benjamin Argumedo, Felipe Angeles Emiliano Zapata, and Francisco I. Madero, are apotheosized and their deeds immortalized. And famous battles, such as La Toma de Zacatecas and Los Combates de Celaya, are subject matter of a vast number of heroic gests. As for the corrido's lyrical nature, it derives from the affective overtones found throughout the songs. The corrido also generally recounts a story in either the first or the third person; hence its narrative character. Mexicans apply a variety of descriptive terms to the corrido: romance, historia, narracion, ejemplo, tragedia, mananitas, recuerdos, versos, coplas. The corridista may insert any of these terms into the lyrics of the song to identify it, often at the beginning or end, though these terms may appear anywhere in the composition. Two basic types of corrido exist in Mexico, the romance corrido and the corrido mexicano; they cannot, however, be precisely distinguished from one another. Some confusion also surrounds the use of the term corrido and romance. Even in the colonial era they may have been used synonymously. Many books and articles deal with all aspects of the corrido. Others concentrate on the typically Mexican corrido.

The origin of the romance lies in the Spanish folklore, as is evidenced by the meter, melody, and range of subjects. The narrative technique and the topics of the romance are reminiscent of the northwestern European ballad, with the distinction that Spanish romances seldom have a refrain. The romance tends not to take a strophic form, that is, it does not consist of coplas. Instead it is conceived as being composed of a varying number of related lines, usually with eight syllables per line. The melody phrases are generally repeated at regular intervals, but there are also romances with melodies that change constantly. Some of the first corridos collected in Mexico revert for subject matter to battles and heroic deeds as in the traditional Spanish romances. The rebirth of the romance in the form of the corrido was no doubt stimulated by the many wars and political conflicts of the turbulent years that followed the Independence movement of 1810 in Mexico. It is the wars, the revolutions, the riots, and the coup d'etat that have given rise to the song of war, the camp ballads and the corridos in which shall be consigned the deeds, the defeats and victories of many heroes.

The corrido proved to be a popular and easily adaptable musical form of expression and during the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 the corrido peaked in creativity and popularity. It comes as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the Mexican scene that the corridos reveal profound dislike and even hatred to the basic traditional attitude of the Mexican pueblo toward the United States and North Americans. Indeed, in treating this aspect of the Mexican mentality, chronology is of little significance until Word War II. There is no apparent evolution of attitude - only peaks and depressions in the intensity of the masses' animosity. Because of wide regional variations, changes in the corrido tradition in the past half century and a generally loose employment of the term corrido it is hard to pinpoint the exact form or content of the corrido, as there will always be exceptions. But as it applies to the Southwest as well as Mexico, the corrido in its most usual form is defined as a ballad of octosyllabic quatrains, narrating a story, and sung to a simple tune in ternary rhythm whether it be 3 / 4 or 6 / 8 metre.

Corrido have traditionally been men's songs. They have been sung in gatherings at home, in the fields at work, on horseback, in town plazas by traveling troubadours, in cantinas by blind guitarists, and on troop campaign marches during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1930, but are now heard mostly on records and over the radio. These ballads have generally been sung in major keys to tune that have a short, less than octave range. In its literary form, the corrido seems to be a direst descendant of the romance, the Spanish ballad form which developed in the Middle Ages, became a traditional form through the re-conquest of Spain, and was brought to the New World by Spanish conquistadors. Like the romance, the corrido employs a quatrain verse form with an A-B-C-B pattern for it's line endings. However, in the case of the corrido the romance's assonance line endings are replaced by the modern rhyme. The portrayal of women in Mexican corridos has been influenced by the portrayal of women in the Spanish epics and romances from which these folk songs ultimately derive. The Spanish epic is concerned primarily with the actions of guerreros (warriors), the females being cast mainly in supporting roles as wives, mothers, and daughters. Many corridos exhibit as attitude similar to that of the epic in their depiction of female characters. 2 Women in early epics and romances were not generally viewed as love objects in the stereotypical manner of the French troubadours. Portrayal of women in courtly love poetry tended to concentrate on the physical and spiritual attributes of women who were cast in the unvarying mold of pearly white teeth, milk-white skin, and golden hair; this stereotype is mostly absent in the Spanish epic and totally absent in heroic corridos, where women typically appear in a family context.

Although the corrido often does not have a set content and can have non-narrative functions, as a ballad form it is characterized by a certain objectivity and intent to narrate a situation or event. This is evident in the different names applied to corridos treating specialized subject matter or types of situation and events. Referring to a tragic event, national disaster,

...