El “Adiós Tejas” in El Corrido Pensilvanio: Migration, Place, and Politics in South Texas

Nearly a century ago, Mexican migrant laborers, some escaping revolutionary conflict, others lured by employers responding to worker shortages, began heading to jobs in regions of the northern US. Many came from the interior states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán, and some were brought north under a “temporary admissions” policy enacted to ease labor shortages during World War I (Reisler 17, 27). For example, from 1917 to 1919, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company transported Mexicans from a staging area in Fort Worth, Texas, to work on tracks in Pennsylvania and surrounding regions (Vargas 60-61). A few years later, corporate executives with the Bethlehem Steel Company, again in Pennsylvania,¹ responded to their own labor needs by hiring Mexican workers mainly from Michoacán (Taylor 3).² In cooperation with both national governments, the steel producer transported several hundred Mexicans from a staging point in San Antonio, Texas, beginning in April 1923 (3).³ These Pennsylvania enganches, or work contracts, are in many ways unremarkable, except for how both seem to have become intertwined as the sources for a key Mexican American corrido,⁴ El Corrido de Pensilvania (also known as El Pensilvanio or La Pensilvania), about a hopeful migration to Pennsylvania in search of a better life.

Although its exact origin is unclear, this Texas-Mexican corrido was probably first recorded in 1929 by well-known San Antonio area musicians Pedro Rocha and Lupe Martinez.⁵ The tune and its variants have attracted academic interest from various scholars, including Américo Paredes, who in his study of border folksongs stresses that none of the corrido’s variants “have replaced ‘La Pensilvania’ in Texas-Mexican tradition as the song epitomizing Mexican migrant labor” (Texas-Mexican 26).⁶ However, its political and economic context has been most sharply brought to light by Dan Dickey, who has placed it within a larger study of early twentieth-century corridos de las pizcas, or corridos of the cotton harvest.⁷ The cotton harvest background remains crucial and indeed plays a role later in this essay, but my principle aim here is to move beyond a historical accounting and to examine a fundamental tension between stasis and movement within El Pensilvanio’s basic narrative architecture, a tension that arises from global, non-national identity dynamics and illuminates the complexity of the Mexican American experience in the United States. I will conclude with some thoughts about how these tensions might generate political consciousness. This project thus seeks to make a point specific to Mexican American culture but also another, more general argument about the potential relationship between the stresses of globalization and the rise of political activism.

The corrido’s globalist⁸ dimensions lie in the way that, regardless of the variant, El Pensilvanio reveals a realm of consciousness requiring people to reckon simultaneously with internationality and locality. On one hand, it is a narrative of Mexican migrants cheerily journeying to a better life in Pennsylvania, and on the other hand, equally important, it is a narrative of Texas Mexican Americans, or Tejana/os, making a hard turn into the local with an angry response to a more internal condition of dispossession and racism. One might contrast this kind of narration with tales of transnational dualities between two imagined national centers or hybridized mediations that blend histories. However, a more useful frame for analysis lies in the contradictory effects of globalization that make visible the often fractious and dynamic responses to global contact, one of which is a dialectical activation of locality. This allows us to fully register the way a corrido about Pennsylvania can also be a South Texas phenomenon with a fundamentally important cotton field context. It is important to note that the Rocha/Martinez corrido variant cited below is itself complicated because it references a date, “April 28,” that would seem to suggest the 1923 enganche (which began in April) but omits any reference to steel mills, a detail which at least one other variant includes. Moreover, the Rocha/Martinez version analyzed here refers to Fort Worth, not San Antonio...