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.