In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Foreword Howard Campbell It’s six o’clock on a weekday evening in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua , Mexico. Radios in the colonias, barrios, and cantinas are tuned to XEPZ 1190, Radio Norteña. A familiar jingle wafts over the airwaves; it’s ‘‘Hour of the Corridos,’’ with ‘‘el Abuelo Chabelo’’ (Grandfather Chabelo, a playful inversion of a popular Mexican television character, Chabelo, an adult dressed in children’s clothing who is the star of one of the main children’s programs). The phones start ringing. The first caller, a child, wants to hear ‘‘El Gato de Chihuahua’’ (The Cat from Chihuahua). El Abuelo asks the child to solve a riddle and then plays her song. The next caller, a woman, wants to hear ‘‘Camelia la Tejana’’ (Camelia, the Texan). El Abuelo agrees to her request, then scandalously flirts with her (el Abuelo is eighty-five years old and badly wrinkled). He concludes the conversation with an off-color joke, to the delight of the caller, and a goofy laugh track in the background. To another caller: ‘‘Which corrido do you want to hear? OK, ‘Jefe de Jefes’ (Boss of the Bosses).’’ Another joke and then el Abuelo switches to one of his alter egos, a tough guy who engages in macho banter while machine guns fire in the background. It’s live radio on the border, and the narcocorridos are popping. During the 1990s, as the Juárez cartel consolidated its narcoticstra fficking empire and Mexico experienced an unprecedented increase in drug violence, the narcocorrido musical genre emerged to chronicle these events and their impact on society. Corridos and drugs have a long history in Mexico. Illegal drugs and the lucrative profits derived from them have been a shady but important part of the Mexican economy since at least the 1920s. Because the United States is Mexico’s major market for narcotics —initially, mainly marijuana and heroin, but more recently also cocaine, methamphetamines, and others—the drug trade has been x Howard Campbell a major element in the love-hate relationship between the two countries. Corridos as a musical form can be traced back to the romantic ballad tradition of fourteenth-century Spain. Spanish conquistadores brought this style of music to Mexico, where, by the nineteenth century, it had become a vehicle for expressing and commenting on people’s lives, events, and popular sentiments. Especially noteworthy are the corridos about border skirmishes between Mexicans and Anglo Americans and those about the Mexican Revolution ; additionally, throughout Mexico, small towns and villages have local corridos. Northern Mexico is best known for corrido production , but it is a type of music made on both sides of the border, wherever Mexican people live, and in other parts of Latin America. The narcocorrido craze of the 1990s rejuvenated a traditional musical form and gave it the glitz and visibility of telenovelas (Mexican soap operas) and rock concerts. The rags-to-riches theme in narcocorridos echoes the central plot of Mexican soap operas, but from a decidedly macho, masculine perspective. The best-known norteño groups playing narcocorridos became as popular as Juan Gabriel or the Rolling Stones. Drug trafficking, formerly a profitable and dangerous but primarily underworld phenomenon, had become a pervasive feature of Mexican society and popular culture . Drug lords such as Rafael Caro Quintero and Amado Carillo Fuentes became celebrities just like movie stars. More young Mexicans, not just gringos, began consuming illegal drugs, and the narcostyle of attire (expensive cowboy boots, hats, and belts, flashy silk shirts, and shiny gold jewelry), accoutrements (ostentatious mansions, fancy trucks, and AK-47s), and living tickled the popular imagination. Despite the profound impact of drugs and narcoculture on Mexican society, narcocorridos are a relatively new and understudied phenomenon in the social sciences. Elijah Wald, a music journalist, hitchhiked all over Mexico to interview the innovative songwriters and singers who created the genre.Wald’s brilliant, highly readable account of his journey among the narcocorridistas is an essential source of information (Wald 2001; see also Quiñones 2001c for a sophisticated journalistic account of the narcocorrido innovator Chalino Sánchez). José Manuel Valenzuela, in a richly detailed study that focuses on the lyrics and meanings of narcocorridos, provides a major Spanish-language contribution to our understanding of the codes and values that define the narcoworld (Valenzuela 2002). Now, Mark Edberg, using the time-tested methods of anthropological field research, offers a much-needed, grounded perspec- [18.118.184.237] Project MUSE (2024...

Share