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Date: 15/03/2019

Mexican folk songs

Mexican traditional music dates to earlier periods before the colonial era. However, Mexican national music came into existence in the nineteen century as patriotic themes covering topics about national defense and those against foreign invasion. Military bands were created during this time, and band performances including those of the local bands were held in town squares. More transformations on music came in during the porfiriato when foreigners brought in their styles and a mash-up between the national music and English music developed. After the Mexican revolution, foreign music and music styles were abandoned, and composers went back to writing original traditional Mexican music under Carranza.

Mexican folk music is classified into two aspects; by the types of musical forms and styles, and types of ensembles. Corrido is in the category of the music classified by the types of musical forms and styles. Corridor music takes a narrative song of poetry form and often spoke about the old legends, heroes, love stories, drugs, immigration, etc. corridos majorly tell stories. The purpose of this paper is to explain the historical context in which the Mexican folk songs or corridos were written, the major themes in the songs, and the role the songs played in the Mexican American community in the 1920s.

Corridos were characterized by storytelling about the heroes, legends, and the popular folks in the community. Corrido music was sung in local clubs, meeting hall, gatherings, and some musicians recorded the music in the studios for radio play. Composers wrote about the migrant experiences in the United States whereby they described the stories about things such as politics, losses and gains, love affairs, nationality, cultural change, ethnicity, and racial illustrations. Mexicans were marginalized by the Native Americans who viewed the immigrants as a major threat to their political liberty, race, and economic prosperity. There were measures to restrict Mexican immigration into the country which was resisted anyway. Mexicans in the United States were allowed to express themselves through the corridos. Most of the employees in the major plantations in the Southwest and California consisted of the Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans which is why the American employers resisted the restriction of Mexican immigration.

Before the First World War, immigration was not monitored, and Mexican could cross to and from the United States easily. However, when the restrictions were imposed, immigration became tougher, and the Mexicans crossed the borders with regularity. Regularity did not help much though since the number of immigrants double each year. Legislations against the immigrants stemmed out, but the employers resisted them since they benefitted a lot from the cheap labor from the immigrants. In 1917, a bill which required each immigrant to pay taxes to fund the immigration bureaucracy was passed. The bill also required the immigrants to learn the Native American language. Later on, quota restrictions were eliminated, and Mexicans paid visa fee, learned Spanish, and paid taxes to qualify for immigration. Mexican corridistas sang about their audiences with songs about human rights, Mexican governments, the plight of migrant workers, and immigrant life in the United States.

The American employers played a major role in helping the Mexican migrants especially those who worked in their fields get a better life by coercing the Congress to ease restrictions on them. Labor from the Mexican immigrants was a solution to their loss of United States employees who were now getting jobs in the cities. The other advantage of Mexican labor was that it was cheap and benefitted the employers more.

Mexican corridos are purely Spanish in a specific form and content. It is structured in lines each with eight syllables and is in either four or six lines of stanzas. The rhyme scheme is based on the vowels in each line in the stanza. Normally, the first line rhymes with the fourth line, and the second line rhymes with the third line or the first line rhyme with the third line and the second line rhymes with the fourth line. The corrida, who has to be a male, sings along with playing the guitar. The rhythm and the pitch of the entire corrido are similar in all the stanzas except when the corrido has a refrain which may necessitate changing of the rhythm and the pitch.

The structure of the corrido is majorly a narrative story describing a phenomenon of a particular place and time with the aim of telling a view about certain social, economic, or political elements in the story. Since its inception, corridos told stories about national scenarios and are therefore identifies with the cultural pride, community, and political identity of the Mexican people. Nevertheless, corridos can be about the personal lives of people, for instance, the love stories as well. The corridos can also tell a story about women rather than just the males even though initially they narrated heroic stories.

In my own opinion, the corridos played a major role in telling the stories of the Mexican migrants in the United States in an attempt to fight for their freedom. Mexican laborers worked for cheap wages in the fields in California and southwest which were abandoned by the Americans who secured jobs in the city. Apart from that, they faced hostility as the Congress imposed immigration restrictions which required the Mexicans to pay for visas, taxes and learn Spanish for successful immigration. Corridos were the only way they could express themselves.

Works Cited

Herrera-Sobek, Maria. Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Paredes, Americo. “Ancestry of Mexico’s Corridos: A Matter of Definitions.” Journal of American Folklore 76 (1963): 231-35

Garlaza, Ernesto. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. Santa Barbara, CA: McNally and Loftin, 1964.