narcocorridos and the nostalgia of violence

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Chris Muniz

Western American Literature, Volume 48, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer2013, pp. 56-69 (Article)

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Narcocorridos and the Nostalgia of Violence: Postmodern

Resistance en la Frontera

Chris Muniz

A musical derivation of the traditional polka- and waltz-like corrido, the narcocorrido (literally, drug ballad) is often dismissed and simplis-tically read as an archaic and ultraviolent form of the classic Mexican ballad, updated only in its replacement of revolutionary heroes with the glorified exploits of contemporary crossborder drug traffickers. While increased attention has been given to the genre from scholarly and popular authors in the past decade (see Edberg, El Narcotraficante; Herlinghaus; Quinones; Simonett; Tatum; Wald), the narcocorrido continues to bring about contested meaning and interpretation, often echoing the ongoing battle for control and ownership of the physical and psychic space of la frontera, a space where complexity, negotia-tion, and hybridity are everyday constants (Madrid 4). The narcocor-rido, with its embodiment of the complex cultural negotiations of the borderlands, offers a cultural text that can enable western studies to build on work of other scholars seeking to expand notions of what the West, or frontier, is or can be (see Campbell, Comer, Kollin) and to place the often neglected or overlooked contribution of norteo culture and music within ongoing discussions of postcolonial life in the border-lands.1 In this essay, I will argue that the narcocorrido specifically enacts a postmodern fantasy that serves to counter hegemonic US discourse that has historically neglected the norteo point of view or situates the former inhabitants of the New Spanish frontier within an east-west paradigm that fails to acknowledge the complex legacy of conquest that preceded the founding of the American West.2

In particular, I will reveal how the contemporary corrido operates as a narrative form of geopolitical intervention, reflection, and critique; I will also show how those involved in the production and consumption of the narcocorrido signify and negotiate the meaning of the cultural myths and simulacra from which it has traditionally drawn meaning. My hope is that by illuminating the tragically perverse, historical paradoxes that have produced this musical form within the context of the refer-ential past and the present of its making, we will begin to understand how narconarratives can be read not only as critiques of the free market system that seeks to regulate the numerous legal and illegal networks

WAL 48.1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2013): 5669

Courtney Fellion 57 Chris Muniz 57

that symbiotically link the United States and Mexico but also as artistic forms that enable listeners to situate themselves symbolically within what I argue is ultimately a hyperreal and nostalgically constructed simulacrum. Using Baudrillards notion of simulations and simulacra as a framework, I intend to deconstruct the narco performance, revealing how any grounding in a rational reality has long since been replaced by a world of spectacle and empty signifiers. This impulse may initially seem to depart from the more rooted investment in place that cultural theo-rists like Hermann Herlinghaus rely on conceptually but is intended to demonstrate the impact that globalization and late capitalism have had on notions of region/place as well as on the often stateless subjects who are forced to navigate and reconcile the past through the simulacra of the present.

Theyve shouted at me a thousand times that I should go back to my country Because theres no room for me here I want to remind the gringos: I didnt cross the border, the border crossed me America was born free, but men divided it They marked a line so I can jump it And they can call me invader And thats a common mistake

Alfredo Rios aka El Komander, leading figure of el Movimiento Alterado, a popular ultraviolent subgenre of narcocorridos. All images accompanying this essay are reproduced with permission from Twiins Music Group.

58 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 201358 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

They took from us eight states Who then is the invader? Im a foreigner in my own land And I didnt come here to cause you trouble Im a hard-working man(translated3 from Somos Mas Americanos by Los Tigres del Norte)

In order to properly contextualize the cultural significance of the cor-rido, it is important to return to the nineteenth century, for it is out of the literal and figurative space of the border that a distinct norteo identity emerges. The roots of this enduring subaltern identity can be traced back to the northern frontier settlements of New Spain. Physical and social isolation from the political and administrative center of the nation resulted in the formation of what Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo would label as ciudadanos imaginarios, or imaginary citizens, in his book of the same name. The resulting annexation of the northern ter-ritories of Mexico to the United States in 1848 only exacerbated these pressures, as nearly one hundred thousand former Spanish colonials and Republican Mexicans found themselves doubly marginalized in their new patria, treated more as conquered enemies than as fellow citizens (Gutierrez 485).

It is into this space that the corrido emerges. Proliferating in north-ern Mexico after the US-Mexican War of 1848, the corrido was a hybrid musical form that combined European dance rhythms, primarily the polka and waltz, with that of the Spanish folk ballad. For folklorist Amrico Paredes, corrido narratives served as a form of resistance litera-ture, testimonials that challenged the stereotypes and official versions of history often imposed on the region from both the United States and a pre-Revolution Mexican government. Focusing on themes of coloniza-tion, independence, revolution, bootlegging, and border conflict, early corridos were populated by pistol-packing bandits and revolutionary heroes (often portrayed as one and the same), a site that many folklor-ists and cultural theorists have identified as a locus of identity con-struction and negotiation within the discourse of marginality that the norteo experience represented (see Paredes, Ragland, Herlinghaus). The oft-cited Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, which emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, serves as an example of the corrido archetype: Cortez, a peaceful farmer, wanted for the killing of a crooked sheriff, evades the pursuing Texas Rangers at every turn, taunting them with his evasive abilities, only turning himself in once he realizes that innocent people are being punished for his crime:

The hound dogs were coming, Following his trail, But catching Cortez Was like reaching for a star.


Gregorio Cortez said: Why do you even try, You cant even catch me, With those hound dogs!

The Americans said: What shall we do if we find him? If we walk right in, Only a few of us will make it back.

By the corral of the ranch They surrounded him. There were more than 300 men, But he jumped through their ring.(translated from Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, author unknown)

The legend and corrido it inspired caused the figure of Cortez to become aligned with Mexican revolutionary figures like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, men who took the law into their own hands in order to preserve the dignity and honor of their families and their commu-nities in situations complicated by poverty, racism, and attempts by both the Mexican and American governments to tame the last frontier (Ragland 124). Most important, as Edberg points out, corridos of this era were bound up in the changing landscape of power between the United States and what had been Mexico, as they were bound up with images of what it means to be from the sierra, or from the tough, dry border countryimages of people who are survivors, who are wily and resourceful, who know the land, who can take punishment, and who are not deterred by the imposition of a border (El Narcotraficante 107).

It was a theme that would carry well into the twentieth century, par-ticularly as the United States began to formally regulate the flow of labor between the United States and Mexico. As US immigration and labor policy transformed, so too did the modern corrido, with the thematic content of the ballads mirroring the issues of economic struggle, alien-ation, oppression, drug-smuggling, and increasingly dangerous border- crossings that immigrants were experiencing due to the increased mili-tarization of the border (Ragland 145). It was a series of themes that the Grammy Awardwinning Los Tigres del Norte would harness in their revival of the corrido as a living tradition associated with the working-class migrant (Ragland 154). As Quinones relates, over the span of their forty-plus-year career, Los Tigres have chronicled the epic tale of the arrival of Mexicans in the United States and, as immigrants themselves, have spoke[n] to (and often for) a Mexican audience in America through songs that recognize the labor and longings of those immigrants, often voiceless in both countries (Quinones, Los Tigres). Where other Mexican groups in the 1970s began moving away from the old-fash-


ioned corrido in favor of the modern sentiments of love-ballads and the rhythm of the cumbia (a popular, contemporary dance rooted in the northern Colombian folk tradition), Los Tigres brought the focus back to the corrido and added stylistic nuances to the ensemble sound, locating the characters farther north of the border and inside the United States (Ragland 143, 154). Speaking and singing in the language of the working-class Mexican, Los Tigres were instrumental in granting the genre two very important new avatars: the narcotraficante and the mojado (literally, drug trafficker and wetback). Songs like Vivan los Mojados (Long Live the Wetbacks) and El Mojado Acaudalado (The Wealthy Wetback) proved to be just as popular as Los Tigres numer-ous narco-themed songs like El Jefe de Jefes (The Boss of Bosses) and Pacas de a Kilo (One-Kilo Packets).

The affinity between the two archetypes was first sensed in the sur-prising popularity of Los Tigres Contrabando y Traicin (Smuggling and Betrayal). Released in 1972, the song tells the tragic (fictional) love story of Emilio Varela and Camelia the Texan who are tasked with smug-gling marijuana hidden in the tires of their car. After a harrowing yet suc-cessful journey from Tijuana to a dark alleyway in Hollywood, Emilio

Rogelio Martinez aka El RM. Finding mainstream success in 1997 with a Spanish cover of Shania Twains Youre Still the One (Y Sigues Siendo T), the former telenovela star turned ballad singer finds a new audience as producers Adolfo and Omar Valenzuela transform him into the next king of the Twiins Music Group.


ultimately betrays Camelia by announcing that they are to go their separate ways after the delivery as the love of [his] life is waiting for him in San Francisco. Apparently, he didnt expect what happened next:

Seven gun shots rang out, Camelia killed Emilio, The police only found a gun thrown away, About the money and Camelia, nothing more was ever known.

(translated from Contrabando y Traicin by Los Tigres del Norte)

The song was an instant hit with men as well as women and struck what Cathy Ragland called the perfect balance of imagination and reality to make it the kind of modern-day outlaw corrido to appeal to hundreds of thousands of undocumented Mexican immigrants whose illegal status place[d] them outside authority and constantly on the run (144). The song spawned numerous imitations and half-rate sequels, giving birth to the narcocorrido genre in the process.

While still recording and performing their own brand of narcocor-ridos to this day, Los Tigres continue to express ambivalence about the glorification of the narcotraficante lifestyle and the violence that often follows in its wake. Most of that critique has been aimed at artists like Chalino Snchez who, in the early 1990s, would usher in a new wave of ultraviolent corridos where the lifestyles of the narco and the singers began to blur. Chalinos persona was that of one who actually lived the narcotraficante life and whose image was fashioned on a combination of the nortea bandit hero, mojado power identity, regional Sinaloan folklore, and his own real-life (or supposed real-life) experiences (Ragland 161, 162). After getting his start writing corridos for inmates, smugglers, and other assorted underworld figures, Chalino rose to fame with a series of local mixtapes filled with graphic details of the drug world, including torture and execution (Ragland 162). Chalinos leg-endary status only grew when he was involved in a notorious shootout with a concert-goer in Coachella a few months before he was murdered under mysterious circumstances in Mexico in 1992, lending credence to the notion that corridos had become the Mexican equivalent of gangsta rap (Herlinghaus 87).

As performed by such groups as Grupo Exterminador and Explosion Nortea, it is hard to fault those who take offense at the violent imagery that has seemingly become the central element of the corrido perfor-mance. Highly popular songs by Movimiento Alterado and BuKnas de Culiacan pack every lyric with hand grenades, bazookas, AK-47s, and even anthrax in narratives that inevitably lead to torture and dismem-berment. Los Tucanes frontman Mario Quintero shows consciousness of this critique in a 2010 interview with The New York Times: We have tried doing some songs about drugs and violence from a more critical perspective. Nobody asks for them. So we dont sing themsongs for


peace, or songs about ending violence. Its not what the people want to hear (Kun, Minstrels).

It is a troubling admission that instantly problematizes James Cree-chan and Jorge de la Herrn Garcias critique of journalists and scholars who focus exclusively on negative aspects of narcoculture in what they argue is a lingering attachment to cultural representations of Mexico from the nineteenth century (32). In their analysis, the sophisticated organizational elements of drug networks are often overlooked in favor of representations that [reduce] Mexicans to the role of drug smugglers and [assign] them a core identity that is unsophisticated and supersti-tious, a stance Creechan and Garcia see as being reflected in the con-stant portrayal of Mexico as merely a conduit or supply route managed by larger, more sophisticated (i.e., intelligent) foreign powers (32, 33). This media and scholarly focus on Mexican narcocultura, they argue, is often at the expense of other equally relevant and culturally indigenous sentiments that, as in the case of Los Tigres del Nortes body of work, constitute a significant portion of the norteo cultural experience. Songs about immigration, identity conflict, political corruption, nationalism, love, death, and existential angst are often overlooked or marginalized, leading to what Ragland has deemed an orientalized interpretation of Mexican culture that not only situates the Mexican subject in the familiar space of the exotic other but also as one whose deviant status is the direct result of living within a less progressive society (195, 196, 196).

Unfortunately, these critiques overlook that narcocorridos and the cultura that they seek to align themselves with, if not outright represent, attract audiences on both sides of the border in a way that resonates in the inventory of enduring cultural representations that make up [both] American culture and Mexican culture, particularly as they relate to the image of men or women who are willing to risk all against social forces that are stacked against them in the quest for respect (Edberg, El Narcotraficante 1). Indeed, the outlaw is a figure that resonates with the cultures of the American West and la frontera in surprisingly analogous ways. While a crosscultural analysis is outside the scope of this essay, it isnt too much of a leap to suggest that, similar to the way in which the Western evokes and denies the role of violence used in colonizing the West (which has become central to discourse on the construction of the US character), the narcocorridos embrace of vio-lence gestures at the violence already embedded in Mexican history and culture through the process of colonization.

In other words, if we are to interpret narconarratives not simply as critiques of a system that encourages and exploits illicit labor and contraband networks but also as an artistic form that enables listeners to act out a fantasy and articulate or express an identity in the face of an unstable geopolitical situation (Herlinghaus 55), then similar to the way in which Baudrillard deconstructs Francis Ford Coppolas


film Apocalypse Now (1979) in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), we can begin to deconstruct the narco performance, according it a place that is as much physical as it is psychical, a place where any grounding in a rational reality has long since been replaced by an excessive world of

expenditure and psychedelic spectacle (Lane 91, 91, 92). For Baudrillard, the hyperreality in Coppolas film (and its similitude with the Vietnam War) is the reversibility of both destruction and production, the film destroying to produce itself (Simulacra 60). Likewise, Chalino (and count-less others) have had to kill or be killed in order to accord authority and authenticity to the narco lifestyle and their own personal legends: in [all] instances, destruction and production are interchangeable (Lane 91).

Cultural theorist Josh Kun points to Chalinos death in 1992 as a turn-ing point in the Los Angeles Mexican migrant music scene: Mexicans who had previously looked to gangsta rap as a mirror of urban out-rage now looked to corridos and banda; closets full of Raiders jerseys suddenly shared space with cowboy hats, belt buckles, and boots (California Sueos). It was a pivotal moment culturally that epitomized Baudrillards notion of what one might label death that produces as an entire generation of young Mexican Americans began to not only appropriate musical styles of the Mexican working-class, but also to re-signify them as symbols of their own cultural identity (Simonett 331). While corridos continued to be seen as privileged narratives capable of transmitting a form of historical truth, a new generation of musicians began transforming artists like Chalino into contemporary folk heroes, unleashing a multiplicity of ever-shifting signifiers and alignments that drew upon this cultural legacy and privileged position.

In her cross-genre analysis, Amanda Morrison notes that in the 1990s, the contemporary corrido, like gangsta rap before it, came to be driven by the profit logic of capitalism, with Los Angelesbased gangsta rap

Alfredo Rios aka El Komander is an artist who continues to blur the line between urban and rural signifiers in the narcocorrido genre.


and narcocorrido labels trafficking in the trade [of] exaggerated, spec-tacular imagery of life in the hood, proudly bearing a questionable correspondence to reality (394, 384). Besides being a reflection of the fully realized demographic power of the young Mexican American in Los Angeles, this new reality was a form of identity politics that allowed Mexican American consumers to celebrate their roots by listening to regional Mexican music, imaginatively allying themselves with work-ing-class peasants of their ancestral homeland (Morrison 382). It is my contention that this imaginative alliance expressed (and continues to express) itself as a dissatisfaction with the modern condition and also functions, to borrow a term from Alicia Camacho, as a form of migrant melancholia often expressed as a poignant nostalgia for the small town idyll (Simonett 326). This alliance is most noticeable in the com-missioned corrido market where anyone with the proper means can pay to have songwriters produce a song in ones honor. The commissioned corrido, then, serves in the creation of a larger-than-life, fictional self that enable[s] the clients to be whoever they imagine (Simonett 331). Most important, by injecting their own story into that of a culturally respected tradition, they profit from the mythical hero image that has been granted to important personalities (Simonett 331). Within this process, we can witness the narco becoming a copy without an original, an invention or artifact evoked to replace the actual with an imagined mask of power and agency within the complex psychic and physical powerplay of la frontera.

Nathaniel Lewis, writing on the literary West, reminds us that narratives invent the place, invented the place even before contact and that the act of seizing and asserting occupational control over the physical space of the American West only served to literalize an already imagined set of social-spatial relations, the so-called empty space of the frontier functioning as a void onto which the dreams and desires of any would-be settler could be projected (191). Lewis sees this act as a concrete expression of Baudrillards precession of simulacra, a period which would eventually give way to the postwestern era in which the evocations of an imagined Old West would express themselves just as powerfully as narcocorridos conjure up the world of Old Mexico. Yet instead of the mythic original and authentic cowboy or settler that we find in Westerns, we find the mythic Mexican revolutionary and valiant farmer simultaneously simulating a ghostly incarnation [that] does not challenge the concept of the copy so much as induces a nostalgia for the past, a golden age of harmony (Lewis 208). In her study on the modern condition of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym points out that nostalgia, like progress, is dependent upon the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time. [T]he object of romantic nostalgia must be beyond the present space of experience, in the twilight of the past or


an island of utopia where time has happily stopped (13). Thus, in the northern frontier of Mexico, we experience the birth of an imagined world that, to borrow from Lewis, not only distorts actual history but replaces it with a kind of fantasy. This fantastic world gradually intrudes on the real one until it becomes established as reality itselfindeed, people hanker to believe the story and what it says about them; they want to trust this new authenticity, unaware that they are now living in a hyperreal world, a simulacrum in which reality is only a copy, a set of invented images (192, 19293).

Perhaps the popularity of these invented images for those Mexi-can migrants struggling with the feeling that their lives are unreal or inauthentic take the form of a simulated preindustrial, premodern landscape and lend themselves to the creation of a narco-trafficker persona [that] exists outside of and beyond the actual life of any given narco-trafficker (Edberg, Drug Traffickers 271). The narco stance, Edberg argues, is ultimately nothing more than larger-than-life, ritualistic the-ater, a notion reflected in the perception of many Mexican American youths for whom the narcocorrido is not seen as real but as a fantasy and entertainment, a performance that is first and foremost imbued with a sense of play (271, 267). Baudrillard argues that this process of simulation is directly related to nostalgia and ultimately leads to a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality, expressing itself, for our purposes, as an anachronistic space where one may remem-ber (and possibly mourn) lost history, a place where time has stood still, an encounter that creates nostalgia for a history that never was (Simulations 12). Thus, Baudrillards assertion that Disneyland serves as a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real in the United States can be applied to la frontera: instead of an infantile world [created] in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere in the real world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, we instead step into a reverse fantasy where the infantile plasticity of Disneyland is replaced by the murderous and treacherous world of the narco (Simulations 25). This narco simulacrum takes on the qualities of a perverse colonial adventure, an imagined reversal of history where the former northern territories of Mexico become reappropriated on multiple levelsthe Other, in this fantasy, is played by the gringo, the Texas Ranger, the border patrol officer, and various other archetypes encountered on both sides of the border zone. This new gaze recenters the narrative in and of the South and asserts a new level of authority, the colonizers now under cultural surveillance, the North now a dangerous, immoral, deceptive, and abusive place while the South is a place of morality, respect, community, and family. In this way, history becomes what Baudrillard calls a retro scenario and desperate rehallucination of the past (Simulacra 43, 123). In the


same way that cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its clas-sics, retroactivates its original myths, so too do we see the unfolding of a mythos that attempts to bury its ghosts as well as resurrect a histori-cal period where the struggle of life and death was imagined to have a level of meaning and importance not conferred in current transnational discourse (Simulacra 47, 44). Instead of Baudrillards conception of the newsreel, it is the narco of the present that gives the sinister impres-sion of kitsch, retro and porno all at the same time (Simulations 72). Rural elements in the narcocorrido take on new significations as roost-ers become code for marijuana; parrots, cocaine; goats, heroin; and in perhaps the most explicit mesh of kitsch, retro, and porno, the cuerno de chivo (horn of a goat) becomes the AK-47 assault rifle.

An interesting parallel is found in Boyms recollections of social upheaval in the former Soviet Union: how, in spite of the great social transformation that had occurred at nearly every level of society after the fall of the Soviet empire, within a decade, public reflection on the experience of communism and state repression gave way to a new long-ing for an imaginary ahistorical past, an age of stability/normalcy (58). While the violent and seemingly lawless world evoked by the narcocor-rido seems antithetical to Boyms evocation of stability and normalcy, I contend that the imagined world of narcocultura in a perverse way evokes a world of the familiar and echoes the longing for continuity and community in a fragmented and disjointed world, what Boym would identify as a defense mechanism against accelerated change (64). How better to articulate a desire for stability amidst the dizzying unease that the accelerated rhythms of border passage and the social upheaval of the drug war continue to wreak upon entire communities? What better way to articulate the complex human needs and desires that drive peo-ple north only to find themselves trapped in the nexus of a system that demands the utilization of cheap labor in order to operate? As Boym relates, the true object of longing is not really the place called home but a sense of intimacy with the world, not the past in general but that imaginary moment when we had time and didnt know the temptation of nostalgia (251).

For our purpose, then, the frontier fantasies represented in the narcocorrido are in essence a nostalgic response to the uncertainty and

BuKnas de Culiacan. Weapons and violence play a central role in the videos and lyrics of this high-profile band from Sinaloa.


violence of the contemporary environment into which the community finds a voice through its music. Conceptually, this echoes Baudrillards notion that actual transgression and violence are less serious [to the repressive apparatus] for they only contest the distribution of the real (Simulations 38).

Thus, the real scandal that the system conspires to mask through the process of dissimulation expresses itself as a form of moral panic as we approach the primal (mise en) scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality (Baudrillard, Simulations 2829). In other words, it is capital itself that is ultimately immoral and unscrupulous, a demigod that demands the death of its protagonists to achieve a completeness that often feigns morality in an attempt to camouflage its true nature (Baudrillard, Simulations 27). While violent, disturbing, and often alien to those unable or unwilling to understand the context in which narcocorridos are created, it is through this realization that the strategies and codes of the narcocorrido expose the symbiotic relationship narcocultura has with the broader structural violence that continues to fuel the real and the imagined violence of la frontera.

Notes1. See Klein for an especially insightful analysis of how, even in early

twentieth-century US historiography, one could also find borders and borderlands employed as close discursive cousins of frontier, if not synonyms for that word (188).

2. Again, Klein is particularly adept at untangling the convoluted and complicated histories of the invention of culture that underlie the ongoing ways in which historical identities come together in fron-tier history (199, 200). In his tracing of the construction of competing notions of the frontier, Klein reminds us that Turner-era historiogra-phers tended to focus on the marching black boot of Anglo patriar-chy while neglecting to acknowledge the subaltern discourse of the Spanish Borderlands that preceded it (200).

3. All translations from Spanish are mine.

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