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.