John Holmes McDowell’s ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast is a collection of ballads from the western coast of the Mexican state of Guerrero. The preface opens by asking “Why do young men kill?” which foreshadows the book’s themes. McDowell argues that western Mexican corridos are symbolic models of local masculinities. With roots in the Iberian romance tradition, they have become their own genre of “tragic corridos,” which blossomed in the early twentieth century during a defining historical and political era: the Mexican Revolution. That the themes echo present day realities is brought home in McDowell’s epilogue, where he reminds us of the drug wars that have consumed Acapulco and of the 2014 kidnapping and murder in Guerrero of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Teacher’s College.
The extended introduction analyzes the corrido genre and the nature of performances, which are often interspersed with another popular and more danceable genre, chilenas. Indeed, McDowell speculates that the minor keys that distinguish especially Costa Chican corridos south of Acapulco might be due to the influence of chilenas, which have origins distinct from the Spanish romance tradition. Corrido performances might take place wherever people gather and ask for a song. They typically include a prologue, a song, and an epilogue. During the prologue and the epilogue, the musicians interact with the audience, for the stories told in the corridos are not just abstract. They reference the local, and performances are participatory. Because the corrido tradition celebrates, regulates, and heals violence, the performances are something of morality tales. They speak to a local macho code of honor according to which heroes “act forcefully in the face of mortal threat” (21). But they are also forms of collective memory--oral histories in traditionally non-literate communities.
The bulk of the book’s 436 pages consists of clusters of music and lyrics organized around McDowell’s twenty-five years of field excursions from the 1970s through the 1990s, principally among African-descended peoples. McDowell recorded some 300 performances, with 107 songs reproduced here. Full performances are in the Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIA) and on YouTube. Lists are in the appendix. The corridos are grouped into seven sets from Cruz Grande, Ometepec and Cuajinicuilapa on the Costa Chica south of Acapulco, the city of Acapulco and surrounding towns, and the Costa Grande north of Acapulco. Each section includes an introduction to recording sessions and artists, and an analysis of the set with commentary on each song. The lyrics are presented in standard Spanish with McDowell’s English translations and Carlos Fernández’s musical transcriptions. Because many lyrics are not written, McDowell describes transcribing the vocals as the most demanding task, in large part because of the distinctive phonetic features of local Spanish and the local vernacular for names. Although the Spanish versions are poetic, the English versions are not. The result “is an English translation that gives a feel for the aural expanse of the original verse while sticking to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the Spanish semantics” (19).
The analysis begins with the standard version of “Simón Blanco,” one of the few nationally known corridos from Western Guerrero. It tells the story of the young man Simón Blanco from Tres Palos (near Acapulco), whose mother warns him not to go to a dance but who goes anyway. There he is shot to death by a group of men that includes his own compadre (a ritual kin relation). Justice is then visited on the killers, who mysteriously die, perhaps from the witchcraft of Simón’s own mother, as local people speculate. Thus, violence and retribution are the central themes. The local version is longer than the national one, and much more meaningful locally. Events and persons are known: Tres Palos is a town and Simón Blanco is a “kid from the village” (26), a land dispute is mentioned, the town is in conflict, Blanco is described as honorable, and the man who gave the orders is a “Don” (possibly someone of high status). Nationally, however, Blanco is not a kid involved in a local dispute. He becomes a legend--a Zapatista or a Mexican Robin Hood.
The corrido presentations are interspersed with McDowell’s rich commentary on performers and places, as well as with photographs by Patricia Glushko, who captured many lively scenes. Readers familiar with Guerrero’s western coast will likely recognize family names, places (towns, rivers, and even cantinas), situations (agrarian conflicts, military, police, local political feuds), and events.
There is some misinformation--for instance that “bride capture is a frequent occurrence on the Costa Chica” (283), which is no longer true. This perhaps results from McDowell’s reliance of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s now-dated ethnography (1958), based on fieldwork in Cuajinicuilapa in 1949. But this leads to a more general point. While the focus on masculinity is valuable and accurate, and while McDowell gives some attention to women (and to gay men), women are still almost ignored. Their presence includes mothers and girlfriends who warn sons and boyfriends, young women kidnapped and raped, barmaids, occasional victims of murders, girls who fetch guns for men, and teenagers whose coming out parties are ruined. Perhaps the next generation of scholars can attend to the femininities that complement and help shape the masculinities at the heart of the songs and at the heart of traditional violence.
¡Corrido! is a companion to McDowell’s Poetry and Violence (2000) which focuses more on regional culture and history. For full immersion, then, one would want to consult the recordings, this volume, and Poetry and Violence. Taken together, this is the life’s work of a dedicated and talented scholar, and a treasure trove for anyone researching the region, especially its music, masculinities, and violence. McDowell has therefore done a great service to historians, social scientists, performance studies scholars, and ethnomusicologists of Guerrero and beyond. Indeed, thanks to him, Guerreran corridos can now be added to the Northern and border region ones for which Mexico is more famous.
Works cited:
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. Cuijla: Esbozo Etnográfico de un Pueblo Negro. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958.
John Holmes McDowell. Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
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[Review length: 1028 words • Review posted on June 21, 2018]