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n 91 CHAPTER 5 Violence in Mexican Music: Mancornando Me llaman el asesino por hay y dicen que me anda buscando la ley. “El asesino,” Mexican song Les seguí los pasos y maté a los dos. “Veinte años,” Mexican song La mancornadora is a theme in Mexican music that depicts a heavy existential experience between men and women. The songs are filled with graphic and painful metaphors. The outcome is often tragic and violent, and often involves the killing of women. The term mancornar represents power and control, and the animal horn is its symbol. It is a difficult subject to broach, but its presence in a number of songs and in social life suggests certain commonalities that are worth exploring. It is important to locate these themes within a broader frame, which includes ideas from Norman Denzin, Ernest Becker, Harold Searles, and Terry Warner. Denzin’s phenomenology of domestic violence provides insights into violence that involve concepts of self-deceit, uncontrolled anger, violent emotional action, negative symbolic interaction, and bad faith, all of which form the framework for this chapter. Moreover, the violent person attempts to justify his or her acts of violence by invoking a vocabulary of motives that are self-deceptive. The content of this chapter is about violent emotionality (Denzin 1984b). The lyrics support these themes. La mancornadora is reflected in only a small segment of Mexican music. It is couched within ever-popular corridos and rancheras played on the radio, at dances, and often in community fiestas in New Mexico. Much of what I discuss below is 92 n Chapter 5 about the ejemplo or trágico; both are a type of corrido that presents a tragic example as a moral lesson to the community regarding certain acts. Violence as Loss Denzin’s phenomenological analysis of lived violence focuses on spousal abuse, child abuse, and other forms of violence. His aim was to develop a depth framework that could be used to understand the multiple forms of family violence. The empirical evidence for this framework came from a comprehensive analysis of the literature on incidents of marital rape, sadomasochistic ritual, and spouse and child abuse, inflicting out of control emotions on the other person, making threats of murder and physical torture, and indulging in acts of “playful” violence (Denzin 1984b, 484). The nub of Denzin’s definition of violence is the centrality of loss. “Violence will be defined here as the attempt to regain, through the use of emotional and physical force, something that has been lost” (Denzin 1984b, 488). If loss is the central idea, then an expansion of the ideas of loss should explain (1) the depression and depletion of self-esteem following loss, (2) the violence attached to stalking, and (3) killing as a means of holding onto the lost object, as well as illuminating the self-deceit that accompanies these violent episodes. The lyrics in the songs discussed in this chapter are related to this central concept of loss. For example, loss and stalking are the poignant theme of the song “Veinte años.” The singer laments, “La mujer que quise me dejó por otro, / les seguí los pasos y maté a los dos” (The woman I loved left me for another. / I followed them and I killed them both). “Las leyes de la tierra me dieron sin clemencia, / viente años de prisión.” The man is sentenced to twenty years in prison. He killed “por que estaba loco” (because I was crazy, crazy for her love). Becker’s comprehensive theory of depression remains a bold and radical view of depression as loss. Becker’s idea is to keep what is “durable” in Freud’s psychoanalysis (see Becker 1971a, chap. 6). Becker’s view helps to draw out a deeper understanding of loss as he extends the Freudian ideas of object loss to “game loss,” “self-esteem loss,” and “meaning loss.” Depression, in everyday interactions, comes from people’s inability to create shared reality with others because a vital person in the “game” is missing. “Meaning loss” and the inability to create meaning, which occurs when action gets bogged down, saps an individual’s sense of self-esteem. Becker reasons, “If the ego is the basis for action, and if a warm feeling of self-value must pervade one’s acts, then it is only a step to focusing on the really crucial dynamic of a breakdown of action, namely, the undermining of the individual’s sense of self...

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