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Chris Muniz

Western American Literature, Volume 48, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer

2013, pp. 56-69 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/wal.2013.0032

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wal/summary/v048/48.1-2.muniz.html

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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 simplistically 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, negotiation, and hybridity are everyday constants (Madrid 4). The narcocorrido, 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 borderlands.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 referential 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

Chris
Muniz
Courtney
Fellion

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.

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 theorists 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

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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
(translated 3 from Somos Mas Americanos by Los Tigres del Norte)

In order to properly contextualize the cultural significance of the corrido, 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 territories 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 northern 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 literature, 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 colonization, 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 folklorists and cultural theorists have identified as a locus of identity construction 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.

Chris
Muniz
Courtney
Fellion

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 communities 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, particularly 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, alienation, oppression, drug-smuggling, and increasingly dangerous bordercrossings that immigrants were experiencing due to the increased militarization 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 workingclass 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-

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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.

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 numerous 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 surprising 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 smuggling marijuana hidden in the tires of their car. After a harrowing yet successful journey from Tijuana to a dark alleyway in Hollywood, Emilio

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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 narcocorridos 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 legendary 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 performance. 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 dismemberment. 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

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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 Creechan 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 superstitious, a stance Creechan and Garcia see as being reflected in the constant 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 violence 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

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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

Alfredo Rios aka El Komander is an artist who

continues to blur the line between urban and rural
signifiers in the narcocorrido genre.

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 countless 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 turning point in the Los Angeles Mexican migrant music scene: Mexicans
who had previously looked to gangsta rap as a mirror of urban outrage 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 resignify 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

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and narcocorrido labels trafficking in the trade [of] exaggerated, spectacular 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 working-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 commissioned 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

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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 Mexican 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 narcotrafficker (Edberg, Drug Traffickers 271). The narco stance, Edberg
argues, is ultimately nothing more than larger-than-life, ritualistic theater, 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 remember (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

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BuKnas de Culiacan. Weapons and violence play a central role

in the videos and lyrics of this high-profile band from Sinaloa.

same way that cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, 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 historical 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 impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the same time (Simulations 72).
Rural elements in the narcocorrido take on new significations as roosters 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 longing for an imaginary ahistorical past, an age of stability/normalcy (58).
While the violent and seemingly lawless world evoked by the narcocorrido 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 people 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

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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.

N otes
1. 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 frontier history (199, 200). In his tracing of the construction of competing
notions of the frontier, Klein reminds us that Turner-era historiographers tended to focus on the marching black boot of Anglo patriarchy 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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Camacho, Alicia Schmidt. Migrant Melancholia: Emergent Discourses
of Mexican Migrant Traffic in Transnational Space. South Atlantic
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