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Paulino Vargas shaped true stories into song. In his corridos, Vargas used spare, direct language to reveal grave specificities of the lives of poor immigrants. Wald mentions “La Tumba del Mojado” (“The Wetback’s Grave”), quoting this passage:

No Tenia Tarjeta verde travaje en Lousiana,
En un sotano vivi porque era espalda mojada,
Tuve que incliner la frente para cobrar la emana.

I didn’t have a green card when I worked in Louisiana,
I lived in a basement because I was a wetback,
I had to bow my head to collect my week’s wages.

This predilection for spare, direct language is Springsteen’s as well. It serves his stories effectively, and it hews neatly with the corrido tradition.

Corrido or Narcocorrido?

“The whole point of the corrido is that it is the voice of the poor and disenfranchised, and the tough, raw, and wild,” Wald writes in a chapter titled “Gangsta Corrido Dynasty.” For this reason alone, it seems tautological to add the “narco” prefix to “corrido.” In fact, Wald addresses this redundancy in his book, which is nevertheless titled with the “narco” prefix. When he travels from Durango across the sierra to the Sinaloa (“the heartland of the Mexican drug world”), he learns that in Sinaloa, drug ballads are called corridos. “In Sinaloa there is no other corrido theme,” he writes.

If “narcocorrido” is a useful term, maybe it is best employed to distinguish the empathy at the heart of a corrido (Springsteen’s ability to inhabit the minds and hearts of immigrants, drifters, and drug mules; Vargas’s ability to inhabit the mind of a “mojado” working in Louisiana) from the egoism of songs written (often commissioned) to glorify and glamorize the violence and power of drug lords. Some of these narcocorridos have received wide attention recently. Among them are songs extolling Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo and his escape from prison. Here’s an example:

The Role of Women

In Narcocorrido, Wald remarks that in traditional corridos, women tend to be “murder victims or deceitful lovers, not dashing bad girls in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde.” This, of course, fits neatly into the tradition of murder ballads – with some exceptions. I think immediately of “Lady Isabel & The Elfin Knight. Here’s Sheila Kay Adams singing that.

There are only two women (three, if we count the dead wife in “The Line”) in Springsteen’s border songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad. Neither “Sinoloa Cowboys” nor “Balboa Park” mentions a woman. The women who do appear in the border songs are vulnerable. They’ve known sadness. Do they fit Wald’s mold? Maybe not, but in this way Springsteen both contemporizes the corrido and improves it. Louisa, the woman in the holding pen in “The Line,” is central to the story of that song. She seduces without deceit. Her eyes remind Carl of what he’s lost, and his feelings are not without complication. She has a child and a younger brother, and she asks Carl to do something that costs him something. These characters feel real.

Image courtesy of Julyan Davis (ballad series)

Raw Sound and a Strange Voice

Elijah Wald discusses the prevalence of the unschooled vocal technique – the “strange voice” – of many Sinaloan corridistas. He was, in that passage, discussing most specifically the sound of Chilino Sánchez and Pepe Cabrera. He could very well be talking about Bruce Springsteen – or Dylan or Guthrie. Springsteen’s voice is indeed distinctive, and the rough, ragged quality of the voice feels well matched for the lives about which he sings.

Here’s Chilino Sánchez (YouTube); and here is Pepe Cabrera.

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