Monday, June 23, 2008

Mexican Narcocorridos Warble about Drug Lords & Hit Men

By Sandy McLeod

The article title in the newspaper jumped out at me.  I was relaxing in Cabo San Lucas last Christmas, soaking up the sun and the festive spirit, and now this: “The Savage Silencing of Mexico’s Musicians.”  What in the world is happening in our next door neighbor?

The story was out of Morelia and talked about one of Mexico’s musical superstars, Sergio Gomez.  He had an international following, his smile drove women wild, his star was on the Walk of Fame in Las Vegas, he was 34 years old and commanded US$100,000 a concert and he had just played to a packed fútbol stadium crowd in this beautiful colonial city.

And now he was dead.

Shortly after the show he was kidnapped, strangled and beaten.  His face was disfigured by cigarette burns.  It looked like one of the dozen or more murders of musicians in Mexico last year, nearly all of which bore the trademarks of the drug cartel hit men who have been blamed for over 4,000 deaths in Mexico in the past two years.

But Gomez’s death was different.  It set off a chain reaction which saw a number of bands cancel their tours.  And it brought to the attention of the public the role of the drug cartels and the music business in Mexico.  It is common knowledge that the cartels finance some of the up and coming groups and then launder money through the largely unregulated concert ticket sales.  But Gomez was never linked to any cartel.  It is merely the cost of doing business in Mexico.  A Mexican promoter said, “The narcos are completely involved in the business.  They control everything.  It’s like the mafia.”

And they are celebrated in music.  In fact, one writer has stated, “In Mexico, the musical celebration of counterculture figures is in the country’s DNA.”  A musical style, the corrido, which goes back to medieval times with Robin Hood, Jesse James and the like, has celebrated national figures like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, heroes of the Revolution, and now the bandit heroes are drug traffickers and the genre has become narcocorrido.  As Elijah Wald, author of the fine study Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas, writes, the songwriters are “essentially court poets for the drug world.”

The lyrics are much like those of other folk songs and songs of protest in other countries.  The corrido is a wonderful music form, often played by a traditional norteño group composed of guitar, accordion, and bajo sexto (a large 12 string bass guitar).  New musical configurations have developed.  The new banda sound features a full brass section, and a popular group in Michoacán uses a large harp.  It is very danceable.

The music itself often sounds like a polka, which is part of the musical heritage of the south Texas-northern Mexico borderlands.  In the 1960s the corrido as a musical form seemed to be dying but in 1972 Los Tigres del Norte, the Tigers of the North, released “Contrabando y Traición.”  It means smuggling and betrayal and is the story of a love affair gone bad.  The heroine, Camelia la Tejana, Camelia the Texan, and her boyfriend come to Los Angeles with a load of marijuana in their car’s tires.  They sell it and he dumps her, saying, “Here’s your half, now I’m going up to San Francisco to my true love.”  Big mistake.  Camelia pulls out a gun, blows him away, and the last line of the song is “All the police found was the fired pistol; of the money and Camelia, nothing more was ever known.”

The song was a huge hit and Los Tigres are still very popular.  The Tigres originally looked like a country group from Nashville with expensive suits and cowboy boots and hats.  Then came Chalino Sanchez, from Sinaloa by way of East L.A., with his ordinary clothes, untrained voice, and gangster cool.  Chalino carried a gun and used the language of the streets in his songs.  Early in 1992 Chalino was shot at during a concert in Coachella and he returned the fire from the stage.  In May of that year he was found dead after giving a concert in Culiacan, Sinaloa, one of the drug cartel capitals of Mexico.  The case was never solved.

While the lyrics of the corrido are a form of musical newspaper (9/11 spawned a number of songs written both here and in Mexico), the narcocorrido is firmly tied to the world of narcotics.  As the English journalist Richard Grant points out in his fascinating book God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre, the production of marijuana, heroin, and opium in the Sierra Madre has turned that locale into one of the world’s biggest producing areas.  It has created a “hillbilly vendetta culture,” abysmal poverty cheek to cheek with billionaire drug lords, and huge pickup trucks with darkly tinted windows, spinner hubcaps, and sound systems blasting songs with lyrics like “I’m one of the players in the Sierra where the opium poppy grows….  I like risky action, I like to do cocaine, I walk right behind death with a beautiful woman on each arm….  I’ve got an AK-47 for anyone who wants to try me.”

While it would be easy to write Mexico off as a lawless state, given the adverse publicity it has received (part of it a result of the immigration wars in this country), that would be a mistake.  Yes, homicides related to organized crime have jumped 47 percent this year.  Yes, you can buy attributes of the drug trade to wear: fake DEA baseball caps, images of marijuana leaves on tee shirts or belt buckles, symbols of the “three little animals” – the parakeet (cocaine), rooster (marijuana) and goat (heroin), expensive ostrich cowboy boots.

But that doesn’t make you a player in the narcotics game.  (Full disclosure: I wear ostrich cowboy boots bought in Mexico.)  What it does underline is that some forms of music are extremely relevant to the realities of societies.  They are living newspapers.  Los Tigres were called by Wald a cross between the Rolling Stones and Willie Nelson except they are still on the Hit Parade and the Stones and Willie aren’t.

And when it comes right down to it, we are the consumers of their product.  As the Tucanes de Tijuana sing, “The big labs don’t stop working because the consumers don’t stop buying.”  And they won’t until we don’t.  No finger pointing, no holier than thou attitude, no for or against.  Just a simple example of supply and demand.

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Sandy McLeod, a MexiData.info guest columnist, is an English language essayist with Việt Tide, a California-based magazine mostly in Vietnamese where this article first appeared on June 13.  Prior to his retirement, with a Ph.D. in comparative culture Dr. McLeod taught history of the Americas in college.

 

Reprinted with permission.