I
Borders, Bullets, and Ballads:
The Social Making of a Master Poem

In 1915, as European imperialist powers fought their bloody Great War, and two years before the Bolshevik uprising in Russia, both war and revolution raged in Mexico and briefly on the northern side of the Mexico-United States border. During the initial phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1911), various allied revolutionary groups had deposed the autocratic, United States-supported dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. However, this initial unity fragmented when the more conservative groups in the coalition took power but failed to demonstrate a clear commitment to the speedy realization of the Revolution's ideals, principally serious land redistribution. The more liberal and populist forces of leaders such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, in alliance, opposed this betrayal and the civil war continued. In April 1915, in "the most famous military engagement of the Revolution—the battle of Celaya," the army of general Alvaro Obregón, in the service of the conservative President Venustiano Carranza, defeated the populist forces of Francisco Villa in a ferocious encounter that presaged the ultimate demise of Villa and Zapata (Meyer and Sherman 1979:539).^[1] The Wilson administration's recognition of the Carranza government that same year also signaled the eventual triumph of conservative capitalist rule in Mexico and the continuing impoverishment of the Mexican masses, albeit in the guise of an official rhetoric of "institutional" revolution (Cockcroft 1983:99–116).

The pivotal Battle of Celaya was witnessed in part by a wealthy American adventurer, man of letters, and world traveler, Edward Larocque Tinker, who accompanied Villa's troops as a civilian observer. On the evening following the battle, as he "wandered along the boxcars on which the troops were quartered on the roofs," he heard "singing and the strumming of stringed instruments." Seeking the source of this music, he

came into the light of a campfire around which a crowd of Villa's ragged soldiers were gathered with their soldaderas —those amazing Amazons

who cooked for their men, and, with pots and pans, and often a baby on their backs, kept up with the regiments on gruelling marches; or, when need arose, snatched a rifle from a corpse and fought as fiercely as any male. This strange motley crowd, most of them showing strong strains of Aztec, was listening in the moonlight like fascinated children to the singing of three men. (1961:7)

As he listened "to the assonance of their voices," Tinker reports,

I too was fascinated and thought they sang some old folk tale. As verse after verse, however, took the same melodic pattern I suddenly realized that this was no ancient epic, but a fresh minted account of the battle of the day before. . . . It was a corrido —hot from the oven of their vivid memory of the struggle between Villa and Obregón—the first one I had ever heard. (1961:7)

The context of social conflict; singing in verse with the "same melodic pattern"; a narrated account of a specific powerful incident; male performers and a predominantly male audience (we shall attend to the presence of women later)—all of these enter into Tinker's general but likely accurate account of his first corrido performance. In 1943, when he returned to Mexico "to lecture on North American idealistic literature" at the National University, he "got a chance to study the subject" and also realized that, while "no ancient epic" singers, the corrido performers he had seen,

like the payadores of Argentina and Uruguay, were, in almost every essential, the lineal descendants of the troubadours who performed at the Court of Eleanore of Aquitaine in the middle of the 12th century, and that their songs were the Creole counterpart of the early Spanish romances, those Iberian chansons de geste in which countless medieval bards sang the famous exploits of Hispanic knights to the accompaniment of the lira mendicoram—romances which must have come to America with the Conquistadores. (1961:7–8)

In this chapter I shall examine Tinker's definition of the corrido in much greater detail and set out its relationship to the social history of its most active period. It must be clear from the outset that I am not discussing all corridos but only the epic heroic corrido of greater Mexico. We will see how this song narrative with its long heritage, compelling artistry, and its implication in social conflict became a master precursor poem for at least two generations of male Mexican-descent poets in the United States. For although the corrido had a very limited

influence on writers in Mexico (Paredes 1958a:102), it exerted a far more creative influence on Mexican-American writers. It was in the Mexican North and in the U.S. Southwest (hereafter, the Border) with their intimate ties of geography, population, and culture that the Mexican corrido flowered. In that same spring of 1915, as Obregón's machine guns and artillery were cutting down Villa's barbed-wire-entangled infantry like so many British at the Somme, the Texas rural police known as the Texas Rangers, supported by U.S. cavalry, were ruthlessly suppressing an armed rebellion of Mexican-Americans protesting Anglo-American authority in south Texas (Paredes 1958b:25–27; Harris and Sadler 1978; Montejano 1987:117–28). Around campfires in south Texas and in northern Mexico, where the rebels took refuge, they strummed guitars and sang of their violent encounters with the hated gringos (Paredes 1976:32–34). They sang in the same verse forms and recurring melodic patterns used by Villa's norteño (northern) soldiers, who at that moment were fighting against U.S.-supported domination a few hundred miles south of the border at Celaya.

Before explaining how a medieval poetic form introduced into southern Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors became a distinctive and artistically powerful master cultural poetics of the northern Border, I want to expand and specify Tinker's description of the corrido.

The Greater Mexican Corrido: an Expanded Definition

Even allowing for the literary license often taken by Anglo-American writers on Mexico (Robinson 1977), it is not difficult to appreciate why the Mexican corridos "fascinated" both Villa's "ragged soldiers" and the urbane, cosmopolitan Professor Tinker. But one must correct Tinker's impression that the corrido is a direct, relatively unchanged descendant of the Spanish romance introduced into Mexico with the Conquest. For the moment, let us note the key differences, which I will historicize later in this chapter. Following Mendoza (1954), Geijerstam (1976:50–51) lists these important differences between the older Spanish romance and the later corrido:

1. The romance has lines of seven or eight syllables; corridos tend to have eight, but may have up to twenty syllables per line. (This is particularly the case with historical corridos from the state of Guerrero.)

2. The romance consists mainly of a nonstrophic series of lines, assonantic, with simple rhymes (monorrimos ) on lines with an even number; the corrido is strophic, with four or six lines in each verse, and has different types of rhyme.

3. The romance is epic, novelistic, and morisco , that is, it deals with fiestas, tournaments, love affairs, and so forth. The corrido expands these themes, becoming a kind of local news service.

4. In musical terms, the romance is "serious," modal, and melodically restrained, while the corrido is "overflowing," lyrical, and of wider melodic range, though it retains the metric and rhythmic characteristics of its Spanish ancestor.

5. The romance usually consists of a dialogue between two principals; in contrast, the corrido is a narrative usually in the first or third person, with the troubadour acting as the (hypothetical) witness of the event described.

Contemporary scholars have refined these observations. Almost all scholars agree that the corrido is a male narrative folk song of greater Mexico composed in octosyllabic quatrains and sung to a tune in ternary rhythm and in 3/4 or 6/8 time. The quatrains are structured in an abcb rhyme scheme with no fixed number of stanzas for any given song or performance. The opening stanza usually sets the scene, time, and central issue of the narrated events and may, on occasion, carry a request from singer to audience for permission to begin the song. Often the closing stanza offers an overall comment on the narrated events and may also announce that the ballad has ended and express a farewell from the singer to the audience (McDowell 1985; Mendoza 1939, 1954; Paredes 1958b, 1963, 1976; Simmons 1957). Finally, corridos, in the words of their best younger scholar, "focus on events of particular consequence to the corrido community," on "events of immediate significance" that produce a "heightened awareness of mutual values and orientations" (McDowell 1985:46). The variations are sometimes considerable, but all scholars posit this basic corrido type.

Tinker heard an early and immediate corrido about the monumental battle at Celaya. Although he provides no text, most likely the ballad he heard resembled the version collected by Vicente T. Mendoza (1954). The first and last stanzas are (the translations are my own):

De Los Combates de Celaya

En mil novecientos quince
Jueves Santo en la mañana
salió Villa de Torreón
a combatir a Celaya
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ya no le temo al cañón
ni tampoco a la metralla
aquí da fin el corrido
del combate de Celaya
(Mendoza 1954:53–56)

Of the Battles of Celaya

In nineteen hundred and fifteen
On a Holy Thursday morning
Villa left from Torreon
To do battle at Celaya
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I no longer fear the cannon
Nor the machine gun do I fear
and here ends the corrido
Of the battle at Celaya.

We may begin by noting the poem's predominantly octosyllabic lines—"En mil novecien tos quin ce"—with syllabic stresses on two, five, and seven. From the outset the folk poet has a traditional obligation inherited from the Spanish romance to shape his lines within this rhythmic constraint, especially if we assume that the poem may also be read. There is some validity to this latter assumption, as we shall see.

However, the socially and artistically optimum mode for the corrido is as a sung poem, and in this mode a musical rhythm overrides the poetic meter. As Paredes (1958b:208) and McDowell (1981:65–70) both note, as song, the corrido imposes an additional artistic obligation upon the corridista (the composer-singer): to sing to a rhythm that in all likelihood is not consonant with the meter. To use their own shared example, let us consider the two opening lines from "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez):

En el condado del Carmen
Miren lo que ha sucedido

In the country of El Carmen
Look what has happened

If read as poetry, these lines would be stressed on the first, fourth, and seventh syllables: En el conda do del Car men. But when sung, the lines would have a very strong stress on the second, rather than the first, syllable of each line. When repeated in each line of the ballad, this musical syncopation, which alters the poetic meter, produces a discernible aesthetic effect. The "counterpointing of rhythms," Paredes

explains, and the ending of the second line of each quatrain on "the major chord formed on the subdominant," and "high register singing," all add "a great deal of vigor, almost defiant vigor, to the delivery of the corrido when it is sung by a good singer" (1958b:209). Already at the level of rhythm, the artistic manipulation of what McDowell calls "two autonomous systems, the poetic and the musical" constitutes the fundamental basis of a strong poem (1981:70).

A contrapuntal relationship is also articulated by the contrast between the corrido's stable rhyme scheme and its stanzaic novelty. In each stanza the second and fourth lines "must be controlled for rhyme or assonance" (McDowell 1981:56). McDowell elaborates on this artistic challenge: "From the composer's point of view, the critical moment in this structural unit are those key words at the end of lines 2 and 4. . . . Spanish, with its tendency to alternate vowels and consonants and even to delete certain unstressed consonants, contains many words which fortuitously end with the same pair of final vowels" (1981:57). As McDowell emphasizes, "it is the task of the corridista to exploit these congruences in tailoring his stanzas, while maintaining the semantic integrity of the corrido " (1981:57).

However, even as the corridista is maintaining the rhythmic patterns and rhyme scheme, he is also constructing a chain of stanzas in which, according to corrido tradition, there is rarely a repetition of stanzas and there is no refrain. That is, "the content of each successive stanza is new" (McDowell 198 I:56), creating the rapidly changing imagistic scenery of the corrido (Paredes 1958b:185). Thus, in the first stanza of the Celaya corrido we imagine Villa, the protagonist, setting out from Torreón to do battle; in the second stanza, we find ourselves riding a troop train, and we are also introduced to General Obregón, Villa's antagonist.

Corre, corre, maquinita
no me dejes ni un vagón
nos vamos para Celaya
a combatir a Obregón.
(Mendoza 1954:53)

Run, run, little train
Leave no cars behind
We are going to Celaya
To do battle with Obregón.

The imagistic and scenic novelty of each stanza is artistically counter-pointed to the recurrent rhyme and rhythm. (Perhaps it was something

like this for Francisco Villa's peasant soldiers riding in their troop trains. They must have watched the changing scenes of the landscape from northern Coahuila to south-central Guanajuato even as they heard the repetitive rhythm of the train carrying them down the tracks to their destiny at Celaya.)

Earlier, I spoke of the corrido as a narrative folk song, yet it is not a wholly narrativized discourse in the strictest sense. Rather, as McDowell points out, the general "narrative" of the corrido is really a structure of alternations. The corrido often alternates between actually narrated (chronologically linear) segments, in which an iconic account of events is presented, and other segments that constitute "the emotional kernel of the corrido, " verses that "dramatize that most dramatic of human involvements, the face-to-face interaction." The corrido may "expand the greater portion of its energy in presenting dialogue," and when it does so, iconicity is transcended and an "experiential substratum" appears in the ballad with a "relation of identity . . . presumed to obtain between the words spoken in the experiential substratum and the words sung by the corridista " (McDowell 1981:47).

"El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" illustrates the point. At one instant in his flight, Cortez is surrounded by lawmen who have thrown up a corral around him. Under intense gunfire, he jumps the corral, kills a second sheriff and escapes with parting shots from his gun and his lips.

Allá por El Encinal
según lo que aquí se dice
les formaron un Corral
y les mató otro cherife.

Over by Encinal
According to what we hear
They made him a Corral
And he killed another sheriff.

In the next stanza, Cortez speaks in quietly boasting metaphors:

Decía Gregorio Cortez
echando muchos balazos
—Me he escapado de aguaceros,
contimas][contimás] de nublinazos.
(Paredes 1958b:156)

Then said Gregorio Cortez
Shooting out a lot of bullets
"I have weathered thunderstorms;
This little mist doesn't bother me."

For McDowell, such a scene is the key to the corrido's artistic power, for it permits a "narrative discourse . . . punctuated by flashes of identification between the narrative and the experiential substratum" (1981: 48); while the corrido "does not favor poetic conceit in its presentation of narrative detail . . . the portions of reported speech . . . provide the corridista with ample scope to wax poetic" (1981:61).

Marked and traditional poetic language emerges in the form of ritualized and metaphorical boasts and insults by the central protagonist of the ballad. That Gregorio Cortez uses metaphoric language to compare the lawmen's furious shooting to a "little mist" also reinforces the image of the hero as an accomplished individual who can ride, shoot, and speak, often in "complex and subtle poetic conceits native to the oral tradition of his community." In the final analysis, of course, we are really speaking of the folk poet's ability to be an "accomplished man of words" (McDowell 1981:64).

While being attentive to all these artistic obligations, the folk poet must also respond to certain demands created by his relationship to his community, and these demands also shape his poem. Of particular interest here is what McDowell calls the "reflexive" character of the corrido manifested in its traditional opening and closing stanzas, which place the principal narrative in a metanarrative frame. The opening scene-setting stanza and the formally announced closing and farewell at the end enable the song to refer to itself, to "draw attention to the occasion of performance rather than to the occasion of narrative action" (McDowell 1981:48). Here one might quarrel a bit with McDowell, though. It is not clear, for example, why the opening stanza of the Celaya corrido—describing Villa setting out from Torreón—is not part of the "occasion of narrative action" but rather a reference to the "occasion of performance." Nonetheless, this opening stanza is distinct from those that follow, in that the latter put the audience immediately and imagistically into the movement and din of battle, which is, after all, the central concern of the corrido. In its imagistically unfocused, somewhat more abstract language, the first stanza does have something of a metanarrative quality. The reflexive quality of the final stanza is, in contrast, transparent: for the first and only time the singer at Celaya refers to himself in the first person, implicates himself in the battle, and clearly informs his audience that his song is ended.

Such reflexivity situates the song in an intimate relationship to the audience and, by extension, to society. Whatever the considerable

achievement of the individual folk poet, the song also flows from the social and back to it again. This useful fiction, that society is also the author of the song, is also upheld by another artistic convention. While we clearly have the appearance, albeit brief, of the first person in the final stanza of the Celaya corrido, most corridos embrace "the literary fiction of an understood observer, who encases his observations in the impersonal third-person . . . the typical case involves an impersonal authorial voice, present but not implicated in the events it depicts" (McDowell 1981:46). The effacement of the author into the impersonal third person precludes the audience from indulging in any easy personal identification with any figure in the poem. Rather, one tends to identify with the public social events depicted and the cultural actions that produce them. Further, the effacement of the corridista reinforces the social, collective nature of the corrido. While most corridos are the work of a single author, any personal point of view manifested in the ballad seems to represent a shared perspective. "Above all," Simmons posits, the composer "must identify himself with the pueblo and take care that the opinions he expresses are acceptable to the pueblo " (1957:36).

As to the performance itself, the optimum manner for experiencing the corrido as social art is in a face-to-face performance, such as that reported by Tinker. Following Paredes (1976), McDowell notes three traditional principal occasions for the singing of corridos: the solitary setting (when riding the range alone on horseback, for example); the familial context, with both sexes and different ages present; and the allmale group setting. The first is, by definition, not a social performance, while the second makes for a limited repertoire and a subdued rendition (violent corridos might be excluded or censored, for example). The allmale setting, however, places no such limits on the fullest display of the corridista's competence. Both Paredes and McDowell situate such performances in a cantina, or barroom, but they also take place today during men-only barbecues in south Texas. It is in these all-male settings that the full range of corrido aesthetics is on display, both the talents of the singer-composer as well as the skills of the audience, their ability to judge and comment on the form and content of the ballads (McDowell 1981:71).

Today, corridos are also transmitted through the printed page, films, records, and oral recitation without music. But the all-male face-to-face performance still dominates the perception and definition of the

corrido, and it too is an ideological act in its own right. Indeed, we must pursue the theme of masculinity a bit further as we now examine the propositional content—the heroic world—of the corrido.

The Heroic World of the Corrido

The corrido, we noted earlier, focuses on events that are of particular significance to the corridista's community and that capture and articulate this community's values and orientations. Among such classes of events—natural disasters, the election of officials, the untimely death of a child—one theme seems to have struck a special resonance: confrontation, violent confrontation, between individual men who often represent larger social causes but just as often are concerned with their personal honor. In neither case should the issue be petty or small, and in some corridos both concerns are intertwined:

The fearless man of action, the capacity to die honorably—these are themes characteristic of a heroic world view and the world view of the corrido is decidedly heroic. Part of the propositional intent of the corrido is to stipulate that a man should die honorably, should confront death fearlessly.

The honorable course of action is highlighted by presentation of its opposite, the man who disgraces himself by flinching at impending death. (McDowell 1981:53)

At the height of the battle of Celaya, his soldiers falling around him, rather than retreat, Villa redoubles his courage, according to his corridista:

Dice Don Francisco Villa:
—De nuevo roy a atacar,
me han matado mucha gente,
su sangre voy a vengar.
(Mendoza 1954:55)

Don Francisco Villa says:
—I will attack again
They have killed many of my people
Their blood I will avenge.

In contrast, as the composer of the ballad of Gregorio Cortez tells us, the Anglos chasing Cortez knew only fear:

Venían los americanos
más blancos que una paloma
de miedo que le tenían
a Cortez y su pistola

The Americans were coming
They were whiter than a dove
From the fear that they had
Of Cortez and his pistol

Cortez then speaks:

Decía Gregorio Cortez
Con su pistola en la mano:
—No corran, rinches cobardes
con un solo Mexicano.
(Paredes 1958b:156)

Then said Gregorio Cortez,
With his pistol in his hand:
—Don't run, you cowardly rangers,
From just one Mexican.

It is this image of the fearless man defending his right with his pistol in hand that defines the male heroic world of the corrido. To the extent that his personal sense of honor and right are congruent with larger social values and conflicts that concern the entire community, his heroic posture assumes an even more intense social signification. If this latter point is correct, we can begin to understand why the corrido flourished along the Border from the mid-nineteenth century and then declined after 1930.

The Sociohistorical Origins of the Heroic Corrido

Most scholars of the genre agree that corrido-like songs have been composed in Mexico since the Conquest. There is also total agreement on the corrido's general formal and thematic indebtedness to the Spanish romance, although significant differences argue decisively for the corrido's distinctiveness as a genre, as already noted. Therefore, most scholars take their cue from Mexico's leading authority on the history of the corrido and agree that "in its crystallized form, such as we know it today" the Mexican corrido is "relatively modern" (Mendoza

1954:xiii), that is, a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially of the intense social change occasioned by the Mexican Revolution. Simmons offers a respected dissenting note and argues that much earlier corrido-like songs are found throughout Latin America, although he also concludes that the corrido "finally evolved or solidified into its modern or definitive form during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century" (1963:1). Mendoza locates the geographical origins of the corrido in southern Michoacán, in deep southwestern Mexico. From there, he believes, it traveled into the northern part of the country, where, he notes, it is also very strong (Mendoza 1939:152–53).

In 1958, however, in conjunction with the publication of his With His Pistol in His Hand , Américo Paredes, an American scholar of Mexican descent, suggested a significantly different theory for the historical and geographical origins of the Mexican heroic ballad. In "The Mexican Corrido : Its Rise and Fall" (1958a), Paredes puts forth a persuasive and undogmatic case for locating the corrido's temporal origins in the mid-nineteenth century and its geographical origins in southern Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, an area Paredes calls the Lower Border.

Paredes cautiously and prudently begins to make his argument by noting the inability of scholars to locate a distinctive ballad tradition within Mexico prior to the period of the Revolution. While there are earlier scattered balladlike songs throughout Mexico, none of these are clearly heroic ballads, nor do they constitute a ballad tradition, that is, a group of ballads enduring over time and expressing a focused collective consciousness (1963:233). But, Paredes argues, such a balladry was in existence in the Lower Border at least since, but probably not before, the mid-nineteenth century, long antedating Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship and the first stirrings of revolution in national Mexico. Recently, Luis Leal has affirmed Paredes's thesis in his own work on the border corrido "Leandro Rivera" (1987).

It is at this juncture that we can begin to historicize the differences noted earlier between the Spanish romance and the Mexican corrido. In a phrase, the period's intense social change seems to have produced a condensing, grounded effect on the aesthetics of the romance. The generally looser form of the nonstrophic, metrically diverse romance now becomes strophic, with a regular meter and a more complicated rhyme. The "'serious,' modal and melodically restrained" music of the

romance now becomes the "'overflowing,' lyrical" energy of the corrido, as though its wider melodic range were musically equipping it to respond to a socially energetic moment. We may also historicize the shift in authorial voice between these two forms. The Spanish romance has a wholly detached, almost silent narrator whose main focus is delineating dialogue between two principals, while the corrido is "a narrative usually in the first or third person, with the troubadour acting as the hypothetical witness of the event described" (Geijerstam 1976:51). This shift to the witnessed event would seem consistent with the need to concretely ground and legitimize the corrido as an ideological instrument in the context of sharp social conflict. And this same sharp sense of conflict would occasion the need for a more direct narrative delineation of events rather than the indirect emergence of the story through dialogue.

Finally, we note a thematic shift from the epic, novelistic Spanish romance, which deals with "fiestas, tournaments, love affairs, and so forth," to what Geijerstam, after Mendoza, believes is an expansion of these themes in the corrido. Geijerstam is only partially correct here, for although corridos on a wide variety of subjects do begin to appear, in the manner of the Spanish romance, nonetheless, the heroic corrido with its thematic of socially significant male confrontation becomes the best known and most popular. We may say that even as the genre expands, it also contracts, with the best-known corridos fixed, as Paredes says, on "one theme . . . conflict; [on] one concept of the hero, the man fighting for his right with his pistol in his hand" (1958b:149).^[2]

For most of greater Mexico, the Revolution provided the intense social conditions required for the crystallization of the heroic corrido. But Mexico had undergone at least three major social crises: the war of independence from Spain (1810–1821), the invasions of the U.S. army in the 1840s, and the French occupation in the 1860s. Why did these crises not produce a definitive heroic balladry? And what conditions prevailed along the Lower Border during this same period that did? Paredes does not explicitly answer the first of these questions, but suggests an answer in his discussion of the second.

For Paredes, at least two general social conditions are prerequisite to the emergence of a heroic balladry. First, there must be present a community with a general tradition of balladry, scattered and uncrystallized as the tradition may be. Second, this community must find itself in a fairly sharp adversarial relationship with other groupings in the

social order, a relationship based on an unequal distribution of power, status, and resources. Both of these obtained during Mexico's successive conflicts with Spain, the United States, and France, and they were also present in the northeastern corner of Mexico, which historically included much of what is now south Texas. (Before independence, this land was part of the Spanish province of Nuevo Santander, afterwards, part of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.) Yet the former set of relationships produced only scattered corrido-like songs in the interior of Mexico, while the latter adversarial relationship produced a heroic balladry on the Lower Border. Here we must enter into the more specific conditions that Paredes finds necessary for the crystallization of the Spanish romance tradition, which was part of the Border's oral entertainment, into a truly heroic balladry: relative isolation from "the main currents of world events," a reliance on orality as a primary means of communication, the presence of a patriarchal culture, and the cultural practice of a kind of vernacular democracy in which the local community managed its own political affairs with little interference from the central government. These conditions, Paredes implies, were not present in the interior of Mexico but did define the Lower Border.

The Lower Border and the Birth of the Heroic Corrido

Settled in the mid-eighteenth century by the Spanish as part of their northern expansion out of Central Mexico, the Lower Border was home to a relatively isolated folk society. Arid geography and nomadic Indians separated these folk from the developing centrist culture of central New Spain and, after independence, Central Mexico:

The Lower Rio Grande people lived under conditions in which folk cultures develop. They lived in isolation from the main currents of world events. They preferred to live in small, tightly knit communities that were interested in their own problems. Their type of social organization was the family holding or the communal village, ruled by patriarchal authority under a kind of pre-eighteenth century democracy. (Paredes 1958b:242)

The villages' decision making was done by male elders with, one assumes, the more or less tacit consent of others. Compared to, let us say, Central Mexico, this generally self-subsistent, vernacularly democratic society lacked a sharp sense of social stratification—one might

South Texas - Mexico

say that the Border people tended toward a gemeinschaft society and culture.^[3] Lastly, Paredes notes, "their forms of entertainment were oral."

These then are some of the specific internal social features that, when joined to an adversarial relationship with an external force, generate a heroic balladry, especially when this adversarial consciousness is widely shared within the community and not overridden by sharp internal factionalism, that is, when the adversarial consciousness itself becomes cultural and historically enduring. The persistent adversary was, of course, the United States. More specifically, in 1826 Mexico decided to permit the regulated settlement of Americans, largely from the South, immediately north of the Lower Border, in what is now central and eastern Texas. For some ten years, these new settlers lived alongside the Lower Border people of Mexican descent, with the Nueces River more or less separating them. But larger political events soon brought those north of the Nueces into direct conflict with those on the Lower Border:

What subsequently made the balladry of the Lower Border different was the Texas Revolution and the annexation by Texas of the Nueces-Rio Grande part of the old province of Nuevo Santander, one-half of the home area of the Lower Rio Grande people. Thus a border was created, and the bitterness resulting from events between 1836 and 1848 provided the basis for a century of conflict. (Paredes 1958b:243)

The passage requires some elaboration, particularly as it concerns the development of an American hegemony over the Lower Border people on the north bank of the Rio Grande after the United States-Mexico War of 1846–47.

At the conclusion of the war, the Lower Border people on the north bank were legally Americans, their homeland now a part of Texas. They found themselves annexed into a new culture whose racism, religious prejudice, and linguistic xenophobia were directed toward them (de Leon 1983). They had first encountered these attitudes in the reprehensible actions of General Zachary Taylor's army troops, many of whom were southerners. In affirmation of a specious U.S.-Texas claim to southern Texas, Taylor's army was ordered to march from its staging area near Corpus Christi into the disputed territory, thereby initiating hostilities. It met and defeated the Mexican army in a series of battles—the first, north of the Rio Grande—on its way to victory in Mexico City. What is sometimes overlooked is this army's initial encounter with Lower Border guerrillas—the first Mexicans to fight (Paredes

1958b:133)—as well as its indiscriminately violent conduct toward the largely civilian population both along the border and in the interior of Mexico (Montejano 1987:1–99).

Reinforced by the events at the Alamo and at Goliad, Anglo-American antipathy toward Mexicans continued to find sharp expression among the new settlers who began to enter the Lower Border area from central Texas, the site of the initial Anglo core settlement, and the South. The political marginalization, strict social segregation, and racial violence against local "Mexicans" that began at that time have not yet entirely disappeared (de Leon 1983; Foley 1977; Montejano 1987). It is this sustained asymmetrical social encounter—this "conflict of cultures," Paredes calls it—that, in his estimation, provided the prime generative ground for the mid-nineteenth-century emergence and development of the heroic corrido along the Lower Border.

The oldest complete corrido known to scholars also dates from the 1860s and deals with border conflict. "El Corrido de Kiansis" has as its subject the cattle drives from the new Anglo-owned large ranches of south Texas to Kansas. Although organized and financed by Anglo-American ranching entrepreneurs, Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) furnished a substantial part of the labor and know-how for this industry and these drives. There is no man-to-man violent conflict in this ballad, but we do find the heroic Mexican vaquero pitting his superior riding and roping skills against those of Anglo cowboys:

Quinientos novillos eran,
todo grandes y livianos,
y entre treinta americanos
no los podían embalar.

Llegan cinco mexicanos,
todos bien enchivarrados,
en menos de un cuarto de hora
los tenían encerrados.
(Paredes 1976:55)

Five hundred steers there were,
All big and quick,
And thirty American cowboys
Couldn't keep them bunched together.

Then five Mexicans arrive,
All of them wearing good chaps;
And in less than a quarter-hour
They had those steers penned up.

According to Paredes, there is some fragmentary evidence of another heroic corrido from the early 1860s telling of an armed encounter between Juan Nepomuceno Corrina, a hero of the Lower Border, and the Anglo-American authorities after they mistreated a Mexican. Cortina kills a sheriff, organizes local Mexicans to fight the Anglos, and then, facing superior forces, escapes across the Rio Grande.

From the 1860s until the turn of the century, heroic corridos about such encounters began to appear in large numbers along the Lower Border. The concept of the local hero fighting for his right, his honor, and status against external foes, usually Anglo authorities, became the central theme of this balladry, reaching its social artistic zenith in the most popular of corridos, that of Gregorio Cortez. (We will return to this most famous ballad in some detail in chapter 3.) While focused on the local hero and his right, the heroic corrido consistently places Cortez in relationship to broader social conflict, as in the Kansas ballad, with emphasis on the collective experience of "mexicanos" versus "americanos." We often find this dialectic between self and society, as in one of the late corridos of the period concerning the organized armed uprisings against Anglo-American authority in south Texas in 1915. "Bands of Border men," Paredes tells us, "under the leadership of Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa raided as far north as the King Ranch, burning ranches, derailing trains, killing American civilians, and attacking U.S. army detachments." Paredes notes the results of this uprising.

Texas Rangers and sheriff's deputies took out their frustration at not being able to catch the sediciosos (the seditionists) by slaughtering as many innocent Mexican farm workers as they could lay their hands on. Hundreds were summarily "executed" without trial, and many hundreds more fled to Mexico to escape the rinche terror. The results were that more land in south Texas was cleared of Mexicans so it could be "developed" by Anglo newcomers in the 1920s. (1976:33)

It is in this context that the composer of "Los Sediciosos" (The Seditionists) tells us:

Decía Aniceto Pizaña
en su caballo cantando
—¿Dónde están por ahí los rinches?
que los vengo visitando.
—Esos finches de la Kiñena,
dicen que son muy valientes,

hacen llorar las mujeres
hacen correr alas gentes.
(Paredes 1976:73)

Aniceto Pizaña said,
Singing as he rode along,
"Where can I find the rangers?
I'm here to pay them a visit."

Those rangers from the King Ranch
Say that they are very brave;
they make the women cry,
and they make the people run.

Paredes's account is entirely authoritative and persuasive, but several other factors also contributed to the emergence of the heroic corrido of the Lower Border. First, a prolonged period of social domination does not of itself produce this balladry; this relationship must be mediated. Before such a balladry can exist, there has to be a significant emergence of actual social resistance to domination, a social source of the ballad's heroic thematics. We have already noted examples of such resistance in the armed actions of individuals like Gregorio Cortez and groups like the sediciosos of 1915. Other important forms of resistive discourse included militant newspapers in the major towns in south Texas, such as Laredo, Brownsville, and San Antonio; left-of-center labor union activity, which organized numerous strikes, particularly in the agricultural section (Zamora 1986); and organized reformist political activity that sought redress for social grievances through institutional means (Limón 1974). All of these operated within a general ethnic nationalist temper (de Leon 1983) and formed the wider context of the Lower Border corrido.

Second, Paredes clearly suggests that heroic actions are most appealing and most productive of a balladry when they occur in a losing cause. In a brilliant comparison to Scottish resistance to English domination, he argues that while

the Scot was able to mount a strong attack and score some local victories, he always lost in the end to a superior army from the south. The same situation faced the Mexican border raiders. It was the Scot, usually on the losing side, who produced the most stirring of the British border ballads. On the Rio Grande, it was only the losers in the conflict, the Border Mexicans, who produced ballads. (1958b:244)

As part of a powerful and expanding American capitalist political economy, Anglo-American victory on the Lower Border was, indeed, almost inevitable. From this perspective, Paredes's "conflict of cultures" thesis can be viewed at a much more fundamental level, as can the ideological significance of the corrido. What was fundamentally at issue in the Lower Border was a rapid transformation of a whole cultural mode of production. As Montejano (1987) has demonstrated, racial and cultural oppression were but the overt manifestations and ratifications of the forced transformation of a whole way of life from the generally self-subsistent, vernacularly democratic, political cultural economy keyed on the Spanish language and face-to-face oral communication, to an increasingly mass capitalistic, cash crop agriculture and an English-language print and media cultural economy, all of the latter dominated mostly by Anglo-Americans, who controlled the political state apparatus. With the rapid loss of their small landholdings through legally and morally questionable means, the people of Mexican descent in south Texas either died, became dislocated cheap labor in the new economy, or left for Mexico (Montejano 1987). After 1910 this cheap labor force was replenished by thousands of impoverished refugee Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande into Texas, mostly from the northern Mexican states, leaving behind the chaos and unfulfilled promise of Mexico's thwarted Revolution and bringing with them even more corridos, these from a later experience of social conflict.

The Border Heroic Corrido, the Mexican Revolution, and Greater Mexico

Based on the foregoing argument, Paredes also offers an implied thesYis to explain the relative absence of a heroic corrido tradition in Mexico's interior during most of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he implies an explanation for the heroic corrido's relatively sudden emergence in Central Mexico during the period of the Revolution.

Earlier, following Paredes, I suggested that certain enabling socio-cultural conditions for the corrido did not obtain in the Mexican interior prior to the Revolution, among these a collective adversarial consciousness, a prolonged social conflict, a sense of a violated communal social order, an orally based culture, heroic actions by local heroes, a sense of a "lost cause" in the face of a fundamental cultural

transformation, and, finally, of course, the general if latent sense of a ballad tradition awaiting the appropriate social conditions to foster its emergence. While these conditions did not prevail throughout most of the nineteenth century, they did coalesce during the period of Revolution, set in motion by the same fundamental international political economy that had affected the Lower Border. The same essentially North American capitalist forces had been at work in Mexico since Porfirio Díaz came to power in 1876. The late nineteenth century was a period of intense political centralization and economic development in Mexico, but the development was of questionable benefit to Mexico as a whole. It was a time "in which foreigners, with U.S. entrepreneurs at the forefront, took over much of the economy": "The state did not merely submit to foreign pressures on the debt: it threw open the doors to foreign investment in an attempt to marshall sufficient capital and technical expertise to generate significant economic growth for the benefit of domestic and foreign monopolies" (Cockcroft 1983:87).

With the huge exception of Mexico's poverty-stricken laboring masses, "almost all bourgeois and large-landholder interests prospered from vast increases in production and trade" supported by the Díaz dictatorship, which "institutionalized a repressive apparatus and an ideological system emphasizing political stability, science, technology, and material progress" (Cockcroft 1983:87)—but only for a few and to the massive social detriment of many, particularly the large poor rural sectors. The latter's social condition, always precarious, worsened under the Díaz regime (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458). Through legal coercion and state power, these large sectors lost what remained of their traditional landholdings. In southern Mexico, "by the early twentieth century most of the villages in rural Mexico had lost their ejidos [commons] and some 134 million acres of the best land had passed into the hands of a few hundred fantastically wealthy families" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458).

In the north, traditionally a region of small, individually owned ranch holdings (not unlike those of pre-1848 south Texas), "tendencies to concentration of landed property . . . had been fierce"; in Chihuahua, "by 1910 seventeen persons owned two-fifths of the state," while "95.5 percent of all heads of families held no individual property in land" (Wolf 1969:33). After some postindependence reform, the oppressive hacienda (plantation) system of the Spanish colonial period was reinstituted, in the north and south, and "over one half of all rural Mexicans

lived and worked on the haciendas by 1910" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458). Severe social deprivation also befell the other half, the "free," itinerant, easily exploitable labor force that moved from hacienda to hacienda. And, as might be expected, their urban counterparts fared no better (Cockcroft 1983:88–94).

Such deprivation in complex modern societies goes hand in hand with high rates of illiteracy among the dominated—at least until such time as technological advancement requires an "adequately" literate labor force. Estimates of illiteracy during the Porfiriato range as high as 84 percent (Cockcroft 1983:88). Therefore, one can reasonably assume that among the most deprived social sectors, orality continued to be a primary mode of communication and artistic expression. An important difference between this period of class orality and others earlier in Mexican history was its predominantly Spanish character; that is, by the late nineteenth century Mexico was predominantly a mestizo, Spanish-speaking nation (Heath 1972:53).

During the late nineteenth century, then, Paredes's three initial critical conditions—the political disruption of a rural, communal social order; a period of prolonged and intense social domination; and a predominantly Spanish-language, class-based, mestizo oral culture—came together as never quite before. Politically, they led to the Revolution of 1910; aesthetically, to the emergence of the heroic corrido in the Mexican interior.

Three other important factors also contributed to the emergence of both revolution and balladry. First, in response to the massive scale of oppression under Díaz, the popular participation in rebellion was massive as well, distinguishing this period of revolution from others in Mexican history, when the most deprived sectors of the populace participated on an inconsistent and piecemeal basis. The Revolution of 1910 was truly a popular, peasant rebellion (Wolf 1969:3–50). Second, the vanguard of the Revolution, unlike earlier Mexican leaders drawn from the more elite elements, was composed of men close to the people and to folk traditions like the corrido. Finally, we must note the decisively northern character of the Revolution. With few exceptions, such as Emiliano Zapata of the southern state of Morelos, the strongest leadership and the strongest participation came from the northern Mexican states (Cline 1969, Knight 1986:11–62).

This last point is critical because it lends even greater strength to Paredes's thesis concerning the border origins of the heroic corrido. As

he notes, "It would be little short of wonderful if the corrido had suddenly come into being at two different places and two different times. Either the Lower Border corrido owes its existence to the Greater Mexican form, or the Greater Mexican corrido is indebted to the more localized Texas-Mexican ballad" (1958b:105). The latter option seems more likely. As Villa's norteño soldiers sang their ballad around the evening campfire near Celaya in April 1915, it is likely that they were singing in a form they had learned in their home region of Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande from Texas. It was a form that their regional neighbors in the Lower Border states and likely their kinfolk, the TexasMexicans, had been employing in their struggle against Anglo domination since the 1850s. A parallel set of social conditions in central Mexico later in the century provided further nurturance for this poetic form, which, like much of the revolutionary energy, came down into Mexico from the north. Formed through an earlier experience with social domination along the Lower Border, the heroic corrido became an expressive form for all of greater Mexico during the Revolution.

The United States continued to support the Porfiriato, and early on the Mexican Revolution "in terms of the key interests of peasants and workers . . . was defeated " (Cockcroft 1983:112). This defeat added the final ingredient to the forging of the corrido on the southern side of the border—the sense of a lost, though just, cause. After the war many of Mexico's poor went north, crossing the border and making their way principally to the Southwest but also to the Midwest and to Pennsylvania. Most of these immigrants were from the northern Mexican states, where the fighting had been particularly harsh. They established permanent residence in the United States and joined earlier generations of Mexicans who had settled here. As they moved beyond Texas, they introduced the heroic corrido into California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as the Midwest.

In this amalgamation of greater Mexican peoples, we also find an amalgamation of many distinct, though closely related, cultural forms, among them the heroic corrido. For the corrido continued to be sung wherever Mexican people traveled and settled. The corrido corpus now included ballads of Lower Border conflict and those newer ones from the Revolution. A corridista singing in the central market area of San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s would sing of both Celaya and Cortez, as would his counterpart in a plaza in Guadalajara, Jalisco, for people and songs also moved south when workers returned home. North and

south of the border, audiences continued to be fascinated by the theme of strong men fighting for their rights and for their people, a theme cast in a complex poetics. It is this imagistically powerful unification of the personal, the artistic, and the social that appealed to the predominantly male corrido community and made the corrido a master poem of social struggle.

Social Struggle and the Political Unconscious: the Making of a Master Poem

It is not difficult to see how the greater Mexican corrido becomes an expressive instrument of social struggle. Much of its imagery unequivocally speaks in these terms. However, we can strengthen this reading if we probe beyond the corrido's manifest significations and toward what Fredtic Jameson calls the "political unconscious" of Western narrative forms, an unconscious politics that Jameson finds registered at three distinct levels in such narratives. (For a more detailed exposition of Jameson's ideas, see Appendix A.) We are partially anticipated in this approach by Richard Flores (1987), who offers just such an analysis of "Los Sediciosos," a corrido mentioned earlier in this chapter.^[4]

Taking Jameson's first level of analysis, that of chronological political history, Flores suggests that corridos may be seen as the repositories of the essential "facts" of social struggle; for example, the passed-on knowledge of 1915, of a real living man named Gregorio Cortez, of oppressive Mexican dictators and Texas Rangers. The importance of this primary level of political efficacy and social struggle must not be diminished, for such a condensed repository of basic knowledge is essential for any resistive consciousness. Yet, as McDowell has noted, the corrido is not primarily intended to be such a repository, and, indeed, assumes a wider field of knowledge already present in the corrido community and gained from other sources (1981:47).

Given this limited, autonomous contribution to the community's knowledge of chronological political history, it is at Jameson's second and, most fundamentally, at his third level of signification and interpretation that the full articulation of the corrido's political unconscious must be sought. For the corrido of border conflict, and here we continue to follow Flores's lead, the second level of analysis would see the chronological figures of the first level not as literal representations but as what

Flores, after Jameson, calls ideologemes , minimal units of symbolic discourse in a discourse of class relations. In this second-level reading, the opposing figures of border Mexican hero and the Anglo authorities must be seen in the full social context of the antagonistic class relations: "the Texas-Mexicans, reduced to peones in a class system, construct an ideological discourse to resist the forces . . . that have dehumanized them" (Flores 1987:17). Thus the corrido, with its surface, first-level projections of ethnic difference "also reflects a deeper conflict based on class difference and the emerging agricultural industry. In this context, the ideologemes of Ranger-bandit and rinche-hero reflect the ensuing class conflict around the shared code of the land: the control and ownership of the means of production on the border" (Flores 1987:15).

Like the corrido of border conflict, the corrido of the Mexican Revolution can also be seen as a repository of basic historical data for a public with minimal access to the official written word. Again, the historical particulars transmitted by the corrido are important but not as socially significant as the reproduction of class relations and consciousness. For example, an overwhelming number of folk corridos speak admiringly of those figures most closely associated by historians with the interest of the Mexican masses, principally Villa and Zapata. Other figures in the Revolution do not fare as well. Not too surprisingly, there are almost no corridos about Porfirio Díaz (Simmons 1957:70), and those few concerning such figures as Carranza, Madero, and Obregón are at best ambivalent in their attitudes and at worst reproving of men who ultimately betrayed the Revolution (Simmons 1957). The corridos of the Mexican Revolution thus also speak of oppressive class relations and resistance through the concrete ideologemes of the true revolutionary hero and the apostates who supported a return to the class-dominant status quo. As in the corridos of border conflict, in these later corridos the shared code of struggle is the rightful ownership of the land.

In speaking interpretively of the corrido as a signifier of class relations, one is forced to acknowledge the perhaps too easy applicability of a notion like the political unconscious to this material. Unlike the modernist texts from which Jameson derived his theory—texts in which political content is largely repressed—the corridos display the political unconscious in a way only too manifest. In the corridos about Celaya and Cortez, for example, the sociopolitical dimensions and class rela-

tions are immediately accessible. Other corridos, however, depict confrontations between men as a matter of personal honor rather than as representations of social causes. To understand how such a corrido expresses class relations, we must recall the corrido's historical context. The ballads' depiction of personal duels in the name of honor is occurring at a time (1890–1930) when bourgeois society no longer subscribes to such a code and now directs and practices violence on the mass scale of Celaya, south Texas, and the Somme. Only the subaltern classes of greater Mexico, the corrido seems to say, have maintained the courage and personal sense of honor to settle their disputes faceto-face and not through the mass, anonymous, industrialized violence of machine guns, tanks, and poison gas. Only in this context can we understand one corridista's paradoxical appreciation of face-to-face violence:

¡Qué bonitos son los hombres
que se matan pecho a pecho
Cada uno con su pistola
defendiendo su derecho!
(Paredes 1976:78)

How admirable are men
Who fight to the death face to face,
Each of them with his pistol,
Defending his right.

It is not the violence in itself that matters, the corrido seems to say, but its form. For if men must fight, the form of violence can provide some large degree of redemption.^[5]

Having thus evoked the notion of form—here, the social form of violence—we approach Jameson's third level of interpretation, in which we look to the form of symbolic acts to grasp their role in the articulation of social conflict and change at the highest level or broadest sphere. For Jameson, this is the inherent conflict that constitutes any social formation, the latter understood as the social arrangements of any given historical period where distinct modes of production overlap and come into conflict. Here symbolic acts may speak to this conflict by articulating, principally in their form, the sedimented ideological traces of older modes of production in conflict with the present or the anticipatory messages of a future mode of production. Thus, quite apart from its function as a record of political history and as a carrier of the

ideologemes of class relations, the corrido of greater Mexico, in its formal florescence from about 1890 to 1930, formally articulates the antagonistic modes of production. It is a formal expression of a selfsubsistent, vernacular, democratic political economy. Here I add to Flores's fine beginning.

We have already noted the political economic domination of greater Mexico by a world capitalist economy led by the United States. It is equally important to highlight the cultural component of this domination. For example, even as the Anglo-American capitalists reorganized the economic life of the border Mexicans and imposed a new political order, they also began the systematic effort (almost completed) to culturally assimilate this population even while maintaining it as socially subordinate. This new cultural reeducation entailed a two-front strategy and a host of weapons. First, it was necessary to delegitimize native culture, indeed at times to render it odious to Mexicans themselves. These efforts included the institutional purveyance of denigrating stereotypes; the disciplined expulsion of Spanish from public life, particularly the schools; and, most effective of all, the socially produced construction of "Mexican" as synonymous with "poor" and the socially ostracized; indeed, strict social segregation became the order of the day in many parts of the Southwest until well into the 1950s (de Leon 1983; Montejano 1987). Second, while maintaining Mexicans in a low status, the Anglo-American authorities saw to it that Mexican youngsters were taught English and basic American civic culture, at least through their earlier years of schooling. Some minimal amount of such learning was absolutely necessary if this labor force was to be well disciplined and integrated into the lower end of the new political economy, particularly as the latter shifted away from agriculture to an urban industrial identity (Barrera 1979). The school system served as a locus for both broad strategies: Mexican youngsters learned the English language and American civic culture in schools that were consistently segregated at least until the 1950s in some parts of the Southwest (San Miguel 1987).

This broad two-part strategy was in full swing by 1911, in the middle of the corrido period, as is evident in discussions within the MexicanAmerican community at the time. Members of this community resented the purveyance of denigrating stereotypes and upheld their right to maintain Spanish, yet they grudgingly recognized that they must learn English if they were to have any mobility in the new social order (Limón 1973, 1974). As we shall see in the next chapter, to the degree that

such linguistically keyed mobility occurred, it led to the emergence of an ambivalent, small, middle class whose solidarity with the mass working classes was at best tenuous. It is against these discourses of domination that, in Foucault's terms, we must see other increasingly subjugated discourses of resistance such as the struggle of the Spanishlanguage press and, in our present case, the florescence of the corrido (Foucault 1980). We have already argued this case at two levels, primarily levels of content, but here we are interested in positing the notion of form and its sedimented ideology of conflict and resistance.

For at a historical moment when Mexican culture, as well as its political economy, was being reorganized and "Anglicized" in the interest of domination, it is just possible that the sheer music, the strict predictable measured poetics, the Spanish language of the corrido, indeed, the strong sensory quality of the male performance context constituted a point of resistance at the level of form. Such form as ideology, I suggest, likely reminded its audiences of another time and place, another form of social life. At a time when distinct cultural modes of production—agrarian precapitalist and emergent capitalism—overlapped and came into conflict, the content of the corrido spoke directly and critically to the present at two levels of social critique, but its form provided an implicit model of a perceived better past, an anchoring point in a new storm rising.

The formal ideological relationship of the corrido to the revolutionary crises in Mexico's interior was not that altogether different. For during the Porfiriato most of Mexico was experiencing some level of Anglicization compounded by bourgeois French influence. As Cockcroft tells us, and it is worth quoting him at length, in 1890, a member of the ruling Mexican elite

expressed his satisfaction to the Chamber of Deputies, "on seeing foreigners as owners of high finance, of credit institutions, of the electrical power plants, of the telegraphs, of the railroads, and of all those things which signify culture and the progress of Mexico." Education, which was for the elite (by 1911 illiteracy still plagues 84 per cent of the population), included teaching of English because, in the words of educator Ezequiel Chávez, "it was believed necessary . . . given the growing union between the Anglo-American people and our people." Justo Sierra, minister of public education, encouraged the "saxonization" of Mexico—including more immigration—to develop the nation's culture and economy. A national normal school was created in 1887, and from then until 1919 almost all Mexican textbooks became the private business of Appleton

Publishing Company of New York, and were written by U.S. authors. (1983:88)

The pervasive influence of bourgeois French culture on the Mexican elite of this period is only too well known. With regard to the fate of the corrido, however, it is worth noting the internalization of European modernism, articulated through Paris, by Mexican poets such as Amado Nervo. While ostensibly a revolt against nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, modernism contained its own contradictions: "modernists . . . turned their backs on political, economic, and social problems as they sought refuge in the world of the imagination"; elitist in its continuous innovations and refinements of language, modernist poetry "was designed for the upper class" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:475–76).^[6]

In this context, the form of the corrido—its rhymes, meter, music, and stanzaic patterns spoke dialogically as an oppositional voice of the "illiterate" Mexican masses. The corrido articulated a different cultural mode of production against the Díaz-led imposition of a European and American bourgeois ideology of form. When the corridistas at Celaya sang in 1915, they articulated both a critical political vision of the world at the level of content and a counteraesthetic, an equally political ideology of form. When the corridistas of south Texas sang of Gregorio Cortez in 1901, they too sang this political poetics, but for these Mexicans, their folk Spanish-language corridos also spoke critically and formally to a world in which domination was articulated in English.

Contradiction and the Corrido: The Repression of Woman's Voice

At a critical historical moment, then, the epic heroic corrido offered an oppositional voice to external domination, a voice registered at various levels of discourse. Yet as a representation of patriarchy, which it most assuredly is, the corrido necessarily carries within it a large element of internal domination and repression, a repression of the gender Other.

Maria Herrera-Sobek has argued recently for a fivefold archetypal representation of women in the Mexican corrido (1990). However, she defines the corrido tradition rather broadly to include what I would more comfortably call quasi-corridos, including what Américo Paredes has called "movie corridos," ersatz ballads produced in Mexico City

by the mass media to accompany a series of B movies. Both corridos and films nostalgically create a historically dubious "charro" ranching world dominated by hard-drinking, womanizing, boastful men. Paredes associates this exaggerated movie-made machismo with Mexico's desire to sense its own strength after a historical experience of international inferiority (Paredes 1967). I amplify on Paredes only by noting that this rural "manly" nostalgia also masks the failure of the ruling party, the PRI, to redistribute land to the peasants.

But in speaking of the definitive epic heroic corrido—definitive as a source of powerful poetic influence—Herrera-Sobek observes that "in its epic character the corrido is similar to the canción de gesta . Both forms extol the exploits of protagonists, who are usually male. Women generally play secondary roles in the narratives" (1990:xiii), and she identifies "the treacherous woman" and the "good mother," in secular and Virginal roles, as the dominant "secondary" images in this particular corpus (1990:67–72; 4–8). Be that as it may, women simply do not appear that often at all in this corpus, even in these secondary imagistic roles. Whatever the merit of Herrera-Sobek's observations with regard to the entire corrido corpus, women make few appearances in the epic heroic folk corrido. It cannot be the general case, as she wants to imply, that "corridos depicting the heroic exploits of Mexican fighting men need such a negative figure . . . to precipitate the hero's descent" (1990:72; emphasis mine) if this female traitor is absent from many of the greater Mexican corridos. For example, there are no such female figures in the more representative folk corridos about Celaya, the seditionists, or Gregorio Cortez.

A treacherous female figure does appear in the folk epic corrido "Valentín Mancera," which Herrera-Sobek analyzes. However, because her Jungian typological approach focuses on identifying the distinct archetypes, she does not explore the dialectical relationship between this image of treachery and that of another kind of woman—the good mother, which she reserves for an earlier chapter (1990:68–71). Shortly before the hero Valentín Mancera is betrayed by a treacherous woman and killed, he has this encounter with his mother.

Su madre, triste, decía:
—¡Válgame Dios, Valentín!
¿Hasta cuándo te reduces?
¿Cuál será tu último fin?

Valentín le contestó:
—No llore, madre adorada

vale más morir peleando
que correr de la Acordada
—Echeme su bendición
que ya me voy pa' Galvanes
(Mendoza 1954:177)

His mother, sadly, did say
—Dear God, Valentín!
When will you calm down?
Where will you finally end?

Valentín answered her:
—Don't cry, adored mother,
It is better to die fighting
than to run from the authorities
—Give me your blessing
For I am going to Galvanes

Against the forces of social domination that are aided by a treacherous woman, Mancera finds support in the maternal. And although this maternal theme, this affirming presence of woman, is itself not characteristic of corridos, it is a theme that seems to appear more often than the treacherous woman.^[7]

Of far greater importance than these limited negative and positive female images is the corrido's larger gender politics and poetics of exclusion and repression. Woman is almost wholly excluded or repressed in the male world of the corrido, in the ballad's predominant imagery and subject and equally so in its principally male-defined performative context. (And a case could be made that the corrido's form—its rigid, repetitive quatrains, its linear, hard-driving narrative style, its sharply bounded universe with its formal openings and closings—is maleengendered.)

Yet, like all repressions, this one cannot be forever contained. In "Valentín Mancera" the hero acknowledges and defers to the maternal as a source of strength. Compared to the image of an activist treacherous woman, this maternal emergence represents a potentially far more radical challenge to the patriarchal ethos of the corrido. Though articulated in what some might see as a "submissive" maternal imagery, the figure of the mother stands as an active counteralternative to the hegemonic world of the father—real and poetic—in the influential construction of his sons. Moreover, in Tinker's description of hearing his first corrido at Celaya, we encounter the concept of the active maternal and familial, of the woman who struggles wholly on behalf of her community, oc-

casionally killing in its defense. As the three corridistas sang of Celaya, the audience included not only Villa's ragged soldiers but also "their soldaderas —those amazing Amazons who cooked for their men and, with pots and pans, and often a baby on their backs, kept up with the regiments on gruelling marches; or when need arose, snatched a rifle from a corpse and fought as fiercely as any male" (Tinker 1961:7).

This image of women's participation is amplified by Meyer and Sherman's portrait of the women who accompanied the soldiers:

The soldaderas were more than camp followers. They provided feminine companionship, to be sure, but because neither the federal army nor the rebel armies provided commissary service, they foraged for food, cooked, washed, and, in the absence of more competent medical service, nursed the wounded and buried the dead. Both sides were dependent upon them, and in 1912 a federal battalion actually threatened mutiny when the secretary of war ordered that the women could not be taken along on a certain maneuver. The order was rescinded. Not infrequently, the soldaderas actually served in the ranks, sometimes with a baby slung in a rebozo or a young child clinging at their skirts. Women holding officer ranks were not uncommon in the rebel armies.

The soldadera endured the hardships of the campaign without special consideration. While the men were generally mounted, the women most often walked, carrying bedding, pots and pans, food, firearms, ammunition, and children. Often the men would gallop on ahead, engage the enemy in battle, and then rest. By the time the women caught up, they were ready to move again, and the soldadera would simply trudge on. Losing her special "Juan" in battle, she would wait an appropriately decent period and then take on another, to prepare his favorite meal and share his bed. (1979:556–57)

These women were not primarily soldarias (soldiers), but they were responsible for military logistics—the heart of any campaign, according to military analysts. The active, nurturing social reproduction and defense of community through "women's work" was crucially important at this moment in history. This is the image of the maternal that informs the poetry we will examine, an active maternal that serves as a creative resource for the most radical revisionary strategy toward the world of the father and his poetry and toward society. The gender basis for this radical revisionary subversion already lies within this patriarchal culture. It too is part—a necessary part—of any son's anxiety of influence and, progressively revised, can also play a larger oppositional role in a transformed corrido as it looks out to a continuing external domination.

The Rise and Fall of the Greater Mexican Epic Corrido: from Residual to Emergent

Yet even with this latent gender contradiction, the corrido had a larger oppositional mission in society, although it did not last, at least not at the full performative strength it acquired between 1848 and 1930According to Américo Paredes, by the 1930s "when Mexico's Tin Pan Alley took over the corrido, its decay was inevitable." Paredes explains: "At first radio and the movies employed folk singers and composers, and Mexican popular music had a brief golden age. But soon the demand for more and more new songs wore the folk material thin" (1958a:102). It is as if, Paredes seems to be suggesting, the demand for corridos produced a new body of songs that were "thin" in their articulation of the traditional aesthetics and social vision.

This is a judgment confirmed by Dickey (1978) with respect to corridos, and comparatively collaborated by Patterson (1975) with respect to the political transformation of American folk song into "country western" at about this same period of time and through these same processes. Patterson traces this transformative process to the cornmodification of a Southern oppositional folk song culture in response to two demands posed by a new advanced capitalism: The first was a demand for a noncontroversial music appropriate for a general audience and suitably edited for radio play. The second entailed the transformation not so much of the music itself, but rather of its social base.

Like greater Mexican campesino society, both the black and white agrarian base of Southern folk song was disrupted by an advanced capitalism that "between the late 30s and the early 50s" succeeded in "driving them out of the rural South and into southern, northern, and western cities and into industrial and service occupations" (Patterson 1975:283–84). These urban migrants managed to retain some of their musical culture in these new settings for a time, through radio and recordings, but the lack of a sustaining organic community base soon meant a "thinning" of the erstwhile oppositional musical culture.

Similarly, in an analysis focused on Mexicans in Texas but, as Paredes suggests, applicable to greater Mexico, Dickey reports:

This "golden" age of recording and radio, where the technology was new and the folk material was rich, was not to last, howeyer. The social fabric

of the Tejano (Texas-Mexican) communities was changing, the people were becoming more urbanized and influenced by American ways; as a result there was a demand for new . . . corridos more than for the old songs. With increased professionalization, commercialization and the blending of traditions and innovations in Tejano music by the late 1930s and the 1940s, new trends were emerging in the music. (1978:17)

Neither Paredes nor Dickey specifies the social forces, but they undoubtedly resemble those social forces that Patterson identifies as the sources for the diminishment of folk song as an oppositional form.

This constellation of new forces—advanced capitalism—meant that very few, if any, new corridos of epic heroic quality continued to be played after the 1930s. The earlier heroic corridos, like those of Celaya and Cortez, continued to be sung, and were sometimes recorded and even played on the radio, but not as frequently as other kinds (Dickey 1978:19; Peña 1982:39). These other kinds of corridos concerned more everyday themes and issues of interest to the community, including natural disasters, betrayed love affairs, contraband, murders, and immigration. Despite their subject matter being rooted in the everyday experience of the greater Mexican people, these corridos tended to be increasingly the products of professional composers who, though closely related to the community, nonetheless had an ear out for the commercially conditioned demands of radio stations and recording companies. These demands tended to produce corridos more attuned to the sensationalistic (drug-dealing murders, etc.), and poetically constrained both by recording and radio play time and what appears to be, over time, a less than rigorous poetic aesthetic. It is within this commercial world that we also find Paredes's "movie corridos" of extreme machismo.

As such, the corridos composed in the period between 1930 and 1960 rarely, if ever, spoke directly to social conflict. To the extent that social conflict was addressed, it was to depict and protest the victimization of Mexicans, at least in the U.S., through discrimination (Peña 1982.). Rarely did there appear within this period the carefully crafted heroic world of a man confronting another defending his right, and often that of his community, with his pistol, real or metaphorical, in his hand. Yet the heroic corrido did not altogether disappear. While now decidedly historical, the heroic corridos of conflict from the Border and the Mexican Revolution continued to be heard or read in a variety of forums. One might hear them in cantinas, or in open-air plazas. Some

recordings were available, and people played them at home (as my father played them for me) or occasionally heard them played on the radio. For a more intellectual public, Vicente Mendoza's important collection appeared in 1954. Shortly thereafter, Américo Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand was published.

To clarify the corrido's relationship to its past, present, and future, we may conceptualize this historical relationship by using the fluid, subtle, and historically sensitive Marxist cultural theory of Raymond Williams. Williams's great contribution is to allow us to see how subordinate groups are dialectically related to domination in cultural terms and how this relationship can be transformed over time.

The epic corrido of greater Mexico never became fully archaic, in Williams's terms; that is, it was never wholly restricted to one definite historical period. Rather, the corrido took on the status and quality of a residual culture that "by definition has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present" (Williams 1977:122). If, in its "pure" state, such a residual form once played an active role in contesting the hegemony of domination, as did the epic corrido, seemingly, it is at even greater risk of being transformed, as happened to the epic corrido after 1930. This is so because "at certain points the dominant culture cannot allow too much residual experience and practice outside itself, at least without risk" (p. 122). Domination attempts to work its cultural hegemony by continually producing a "selective tradition"—by admitting only those discourses that verify and legitimize its own power, and "it is in the incorporation of the actively residual—by reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion—that that work of the selective tradition is especially evident" (p. 122).

Nonetheless, the active residual may maintain its counterhegemonic stance at least in part because "certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation" (p. 123).

What Williams does not, and does not have to, specify in his general treatise is precisely how the residual remains effective in the present. As regards our case at hand, it is clear that the dominant culture—the binational bourgeois culture of the Border—does limit the corrido, even

as some aspects of the corrido (the less-than-epic recorded corridos mentioned earlier, for example) continue to express "certain experiences, meanings, and values . . . lived and practiced on the basis of the residue." Residual traditions are one resource for subordinate groups in their ideological struggle against domination; but in contesting cultural and, ultimately, social hegemony, subordinate groups can also turn to "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship" that "are continually being created." As Williams recognizes, defining this emergent culture is very problematic. For one, "it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of dominant culture . . . and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it. . . . the social location of the residual is always easier to understand" (p. 123). Williams is likely fight on this point, but the distinctions might be more helpful were he not to insist on such a sharp sense of the emergent as wholly "new," since the seemingly "new" more often consists of new transformations of older, that is to say, residual, forms.^[8] Perhaps only the residual forms keep the emergent forms at some distance from the dominant culture, while only the "pure" new practice allows the emergent to be an "effective element of the present" and to work as a counterhegemonic practice. If this is at least sometimes the case—and I do not wish to generalize here—then we may ask how the new and the residual work together to respond effectively to domination and its hegemonic assault.

It is from this perspective that I want to approach the poetic texts I have chosen. As a fully active contestative practice in its own right, the epic corrido waned from the 1930s to the 1960s, but as an active residual practice in new transformed poetic emergences, the epic corrido continued to carry its powerful poetic and counterhegemonic influence into a new period.^[9] These transformations played a role in a new social struggle against domination, even as the poetic emergent and residual carried on their own "internal" struggle of poetic influence. This internal struggle in the service of the social requires that the later poets possess a full knowledge of the precursor. The key figure in the transmission of such knowledge is Américo Paredes, the corrido's foremost scholar and foremost poetic son.

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

It's a wise child that knows its own father.
The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald