Mexican-American music

Ed. Note: This the first in a series of biographies of artists based on information provided by family members, friends, or colleagues who contacted us by email (agurza@ucla.edu) or through our blog’s Comments sections. Most of the artists who will be featured in this series did not achieve wide success in the record business. However, their stories show how true folk music reflects the lives and culture of the common folk who make it. Without the input provided by listeners who reached out to us, their stories would most likely never be formally documented. Please continue to share your knowledge and family histories with us!

            The recording career of Margarita La Chaparrita was modest and short-lived but remarkable, nevertheless. After struggling through a series of traumatic relationships and raising seven children with meager resources, the late-blooming performer decided to start her own band in the midst of middle age, when most other mothers are winding down to retirement.

            “I remember always hearing her singing in her kitchen while she was making dinner and I knew that music was a secret passion of hers,” said her daughter, Diana Benavides-Arredondo. “Once she finished raising all her children, she went for it.  When she was in her late 40s and found herself an empty-nester, she started a small Mexican band and Margarita La Chaparrita y Su Conjunto was born.”

             Her musical career, both as amateur and professional, spanned some 20 years, starting in the mid-1970s through the mid-‘90s. But commercial success in the record industry eluded her; the singer’s total discography includes at most half a dozen singles recorded in the 1980s, her daughter says. Still, she was active and well-known within San Antonio’s tight-knit musical community. She made the rounds of local lounges, nightclubs, and restaurants, selling her records wherever she played.  She was frequently featured as a local celebrity at popular festivals, such as the “Diez y Seis Parade” for Mexican Independence Day and the city’s historic Battle of Flowers Parade.

            “She was a very strong, determined woman,” says Benavides-Arredondo, a retired school district employee who still lives in San Antonio.  “Although she only had minor success, I knew this made her very happy. I always admired her nerve to get up on stage and sing in front of an audience.”

             La Chaparrita was born Margarita Montoya on February 24, 1936 in Crystal City, Texas, a town of less than 10,000 people located about an hour’s drive from the Mexican border. She was raised in the city, also known as the Spinach Capitol of the World and the birthplace of La Raza Unida Party in the early 1970s. She started singing by the time she was eight years old.  She never finished grade school.

             Montoya’s early life was troubled and tragic. Her mother died when she was still a toddler, and her father was shot and killed a few years later, according to her daughter. Margarita and her sister, Santa, were then raised by their paternal grandparents, who were “not so very nice,” Benavides-Arredondo states.

             Montoya was 18 when she became a bride. It would be the first of three marriages, all to men who were abusive alcoholics, according to her daughter. She had a total of seven children, six with her first husband, though one son died at a young age. She gave birth to her daughter, Diana, during an affair with a married man while separated from her first husband. She ultimately returned to her husband and Diana blended in comfortably with her half-siblings.

             Daily life was difficult, however. Montoya collected welfare and food stamps when her kids were little, and she supplemented her income by working as a waitress in a Crystal City bar. Yet, the household was always rich with the aroma of her homemade flour tortillas and the joyful sounds of music.

           “There was always music in the house!” says Benavides-Arredondo. “The radio was usually on when we got home from school, while she made dinner, always on her favorite Tejano stations (KCOR or KUKA). She liked corridos, polkas, rancheras, and cumbias. She liked music that told a story.”

            Montoya finally divorced and left Crystal City, her brood in tow. The family moved to San Antonio to start a new life, recalls Benavides-Arredondo, who was approximately six years old at the time. As a single mother, Montoya struggled to get established, moving her family for a time into government-subsidized housing.

            Montoya’s second marriage also ended in divorce after 13 years. She then met and married her third and final husband, Julio Perez, an Army sergeant whom she considered “the love of her life." After just three years, he committed suicide while stationed in Germany.

            In the early 1980s, soon after her husband’s death, Montoya poured her energies into her career, forming her band and making her first recordings. Keeping her late husband’s surname, she appeared in her promotional materials as Margarita Perez.

             Despite all the instability, Montoya managed to maintain her sense of humor, and her determination.

             “Considering she only had a third-grade education, she did pretty well for herself,” recalls her daughter. “[She was] not rich by any means, but she managed to own a house and occasionally a new car. Somewhere along the line, she taught herself to read and write English, and she learned to pay her bills and tried her best to balance her checkbook.”

              Montoya was in her mid-40s when she started her band, Margarita La Chaparrita y Su Conjunto. She also performed with other groups and mingled with prominent Mexican-American artists in the active San Antonio music scene. The producer on her Chief Records single is Santiago Jimenez, Jr. of the Tex-Mex dynasty that includes Santiago Jimenez Sr. and the world-renowned accordionist Flaco Jimenez.

              “We were not aware of the recording contract,” her daughter recalled. “She just showed up one day with a ‘complimentary’ 45-rpm of her recording and gave it to me as a souvenir.  I was truly surprised and impressed she had actually recorded a record. I don't think she even had a manager.”

                The Frontera Collection holds only two singles by the singer, whose stage name, La Chaparrita, roughly translates as “little shorty.” Both releases are on relatively obscure labels that were based in San Antonio, Texas. On Chief Records, she is accompanied by her own band on two numbers written by Frank Nuñez: “Te Sigo Amando” backed by “Eres Todo Para Mi.” And on TVT (an imprint of Custom Recordings), she performs with El Conjunto de Eddy Torres on two traditional rancheras: “Delante de Mi” by Dolores Ayala (credited as Dolores Mata) and “Laguna de Pesares” by José Alfredo Jiménez.

                For a period of time in 1982, Montoya performed every Sunday on a live, hour-long broadcast on KFHM-AM (“La M Grande”), which had switched to a Tejano/Latino format four years earlier, reflecting the growing popularity of regional music at the time. 

                Margarita La Chaparrita received many awards and trophies for her performances over the years, and some made the local newspaper. In October 1978, for example, the San Antonio Express-News reported she had won first place for her Diez y Seis Parade performance. It marked the eighth time in five years that she had been recognized by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center with a trophy, ribbon, or certificate for her vocal performances during the annual festivities.

                 Nothing gave her greater satisfaction, however, than performing for seniors at charitable events sponsored by the Royal Palace Ballroom in San Antonio’s southside barrio. In a 1991 Express-News story, La Chaparrita and her band were mentioned as one of the venue’s “most popular conjuntos.” At the time, the paper reported, she had 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

                 By the end of the decade, Margarita La Chaparrita had retired from music. She passed away of ovarian cancer on April 23, 2016, and is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, along with her military husband. She left behind a notebook of hand-written lyrics to songs she had written.

                 As with many other barrio artists who labored in relative anonymity, Montoya’s recordings will be preserved for posterity in The Frontera Collection. Recently, Benavides-Arredondo contacted us through this website to express gratitude on her mother’s behalf.

                “My mother was a little vain and she would have loved to know she was included in this important archive,” Benavides-Arrendondo said. “She would have been showing it off to all her friends and family!”

– Agustín Gurza

Part 4: Corridos of the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution of 1910, with its epic heroes facing life-and death struggles, ushered in a golden age of the corrido. In the introduction to his 1954 anthology, “El Corrido Mexicano,” corrido historian Vicente T. Mendoza asserts that the narrative ballad achieved its “definitive character” during Mexico’s decade of Civil War, acquiring “its true independence, fullness and epic character in the heat of combat.”

American adventurer and historian Edward Larocque Tinker had a front-row seat to the creation of a corrido on that revolutionary battlefield. In 1915, Tinker was a civilian observer with Pancho Villa’s troops during the fabled Battle of Celaya, a major defeat for Villa that signaled a turning point in the revolution. On the evening after the battle, Tinker describes hearing voices and guitars as he wandered along the boxcars where Villa’s tired, bedraggled troops were quartered. Looking for the source of the music, he came upon a group of men and women around a campfire, “listening in the moonlight like fascinated children to the singing of three men.” He gives the following account: 

“I too was fascinated and thought they sang some old folk tale. As verse after verse, however, took the same melodic pattern I suddenly realized that this was no ancient epic, but a freshly minted account of the battle of the day before.... It was a corrido – hot from the oven of their vivid memory of the struggle between Villa and Obregon – the first one I had ever heard.”

The battle of Celaya is well documented in corridos, with at least a dozen renditions in the Frontera Collection, including three, two-part recordings on 78s. Several of these ballads about the battle are also included in a compilation issued by Arhoolie Records in 1996 as a box set: The Mexican Revolution: Corridos about the Heroes and Events 1910-1920 and Beyond! The collection features corridos about other important battles, typically titled after the city that is taken in battle, such as “La Toma de Torreón” (my hometown and one of Villa’s center of operations), as well as the taking of Zacatecas, Guadalajara, and Matamoros.  There are also many corridos written about revolutionary figures, major and minor, on both sides of the civil war, including Emiliano Zapata, the iconic agrarian reformer, and Porfirio Diaz, the overthrown dictator.

As we have seen in previous parts of my series on the genre (linked below), corridos as an oral tradition pre-date the invention of recorded sound. And the earliest recorded corridos also pre-date the 1910 uprising. Those seminal recordings, made in Mexico City, include two famous corridos, “Heraclio Bernal” and “Ignacio Parra,” about rebels active in the late 1880s during the Diaz dictatorship. Both were recorded by singer Rafael Herrera Robinson in 1904, on cylinders for the Edison recording company.

A few years later, Herrera re-recorded many of his early cylinder tracks for the Victor and Columbia labels, which had also set up subsidiaries in the Mexican capital. However, the singer did not reprise his original recordings about the two rebels, who the government discredited as common criminals (“bandidos vulagres”). Why the omission? The late James Nicolopulos, one of the leading corrido experts in the U.S., argued that political pressure had forced the artist to abandon these rebel ballads due to their “seditious undercurrent.” In other words, corridos were censored as a voice of dissent.

In those days, Nicolopulos explains, the nascent recording industry based in Mexico City was “geared to the tastes of the ruling classes.” The industry and the social elites shunned the corrido as subversive, not to mention aesthetically unworthy. This entrenched social prejudice, combined with the high cost of discs and record-playing equipment, largely excluded the genre from recording studio rosters because it was considered inferior music for the country’s marginalized classes.

Two factors, one historical and one technological, converged to stimulate the commercial recording of corridos, and in the process, turn the American Southwest into a mecca for the folk art form.

First, the Mexican Revolution had led to a mass migration of the country’s poor north into the United Sates, as people fled the chronic violence and sought some social stability. During the same period, meanwhile, a technological revolution transformed the old mechanical methods of sound recording. With the advent of the electrical recording process in the 1920s, recording equipment became less expensive and much more mobile. As a result, record labels could more readily take their recording equipment to where their artists and audiences were located.

These social and technological developments led to a boom era for corrido recordings, between 1928 and the 1940s. Cities all along the Sunbelt -- El Paso, San Antonio, Los Angeles -- became the new capitals of the corrido recording industry. One side effect of this cross-border shift was the creation of a market for the corrido that was immune to the upper-class sensibilities and censorship of Mexico City’s centralized music business.

These changes gave corrido composers and performers on the U.S. side of the border a creative advantage they did not have in their native country – freedom of expression. “The shift of technology across the border had created the discursive space necessary for the expression of sentiments that could not have been undertaken in Mexico,” writes Nicolopulos,  who was a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Songs about the exploits of Pancho Villa, the revolutionary leader operating in northern Mexico, constitute an entire sub-set of the genre known as “corridos villistas.” According to Nicolopulos, the earliest of these was made in New York in 1918; as such, it was also one of the first revolutionary corridos recorded in the United States. The seminal Villa ballad came two years after the revolutionary leader mounted his daring raid on Columbus, New Mexico, prompting the U.S. to send 10,000 troops across the border to capture him. The song lionized Villa’s Zorro-like ability to elude the American force, led by Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, who was mocked for his failure despite his superior military strength.

Villa ballads cover a wide range of subjects. They herald his favorite horse (“El Siete Leguas”), his elite cavalry (“Los Dorados de Villa”), his strategic use of trains to move troops ("Ahí viene el tren"), his wily guerilla tactics (“La Persecución de Villa”), and of course, his ambush and assassination in 1923 (“La Muerte de Pancho Villa” and “La Tumba de Villa”).

The Frontera Collection also has a two-part corrido entitled “Pancho Villa and Carranza,” by the duo Genaro Rodriguez y Juan Chavez, a clear precursor of subsequent songs about the Pershing expedition. Like other two-part ballads of the era, this 78-rpm recording on the Okeh label includes a few additional verses that don’t appear in later versions.

By far, the most popular song about Villa is the iconic “La Cucaracha,” which became a revolutionary anthem, “the Mexican equivalent of America’s Yankee Doodle,” as one blogger puts it. The catchy tune is filled with metaphors alluding to rivalries between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps. Though it has roots in medieval Spain, its adaptation during the revolution added most of the stanzas familiar today. In the pro-Villa versions, according to one common interpretation, the cockroach represents President Victoriano Huerta, a traitor who helped plot the assassination of Francisco Madero, the country’s first revolutionary president. An alternative, though rare, interpretation holds that the cockroach (which “can no longer walk”) represents Villa’s car, which his men had to push when it ran out of gas. In still other versions, lyrics were re-written to favor Huerta, or some other faction.

One of the earliest recordings of the song in the Frontera Collection is performed by the Mexican Bluebird Orchestra, a scratchy 78 on the Bluebird label. The lyrics, sung by a chorus, include the famous opening stanza about the cucaracha being unable to walk because it ran out of marijuana (“porque no tiene, porque le falta, marihuana que fumar”). With a refined orchestral arrangement, the song mocks the forces of Venustiano Carranza, a revolutionary leader who broke with Villa and was a common target of the song’s satirical rhymes.

Today, there are scores of recordings of the perennial ditty, with both political and non-political messages, and some instrumentals with no lyrics at all.

Another revolutionary classic, equally familiar to most Mexicans, is “La Adelita,” a corrido about the women warriors who went to battle alongside the men, also known as soldaderas. There are various versions of the Adelita theme, but the most famous has a peppy, polka-type melody suitable for instrumentals and fun for dancing. The famous lyrics to the song – as performed in this nicely arranged version by Los Hermanos Zaizar with Mariachi Mexico de Pepe Villa – reduces the female fighter to an object of desire for the male troops. The catchy chorus would today be considered a stalker’s anthem, as her besotted sergeant vows to follow her “por tierra y por mar” (by land and sea) if she were to leave with another man. The song appears in a collection of revolutionary tunes, “Cantares de la Revolución” on Mexico’s Peerless label, with a cover that highlights the woman’s sexuality, not her bravery in battle.

One notable exception is a more recent corrido titled “El Rebozo Balaceado” (The Bullet-Riddled Rebozo), about a soldadera who gives her life in Villa’s battle for Torreón, felled on the battlefield with her rifle and her bloody Mexican shawl. It’s sung as a male-female duet by composer Victor Cordero “y su Soldadera.”

The Frontera Collection contains corridos about other revolutionary figures, such as Emiliano Zapata, Benjamin Argumedo, and Valente Quintero. In a previous blog, I wrote about the fascinating Frontera recordings related to the rise and tragically quick fall of Madero.  Some are historic re-enactments of actual events, such as Madero’s triumphant entrance to Mexico City. But there are also two corridos about Madero worth highlighting.

In “El Nuevo Corrido de Madero,” by the duo Camacho y Pérez, Mexico’s first revolutionary president is depicted as a courageous man who, among his first official acts, went immediately to the prisons and released the inmates, presumably held unjustly by the overthrown dictatorship. The bold act establishes Madero’s character in the second verse, and the corrido goes on to tell of the political betrayals and intrigue that eventually cost him his life. In his essay defining the genre, corrido expert and UCLA Spanish professor Guillermo Hernández used this song to illustrate the character of the corrido protagonist, “who generally serves as a model of conduct under extraordinary circumstances.”

The archives contain three recordings of the song, Okeh 16696, Columbia 4863, and Vocalion 8696. They are essentially the same recording made by the duo in Los Angeles around 1930. Manuel Camacho, half of the team, is credited as the author. As with many early corridos, the accompaniment is simply two guitars.

Madero’s heroic death is recounted in another corrido, “El Cuartelazo,” or coup d’état. All three versions in the archives – by Hermanos Chavarría, Dúo Atasoseno, and the duet of María y Juanita Mendoza – tell the same general story, with more or less detail. All of them include the verse in which an opposing army officer, the nephew of deposed dictator Porfirio Díaz, orders Madero to resign or face execution. Madero defiantly refuses, setting up his tragic downfall. Additional verses expanding on Madero’s principled resistance are offered only in the version by Hermanos Chavarría, a longer, two-part corrido on a Columbia 78-rpm disc. This version adds two verses that heighten Madero’s heroism.
 

                        Madero les contestó,

                        “No presento mi retiro.

                        Yo no me hice presidente,

                        Fuí por el pueblo elegido.”

                        Madero answered them,

                        “I will not resign.

                        I did not make myself president,

                        I was elected by the people.”
 

All versions recount the horror of the ten-day siege to depose the doomed leader, describing fear that gripped the city with scenes of dead and injured on the streets. Curiously, there are variations in the description of which part of the populace reacts with tears. When government forces start bombing the Citadel (La Ciudadela), the Dúo Atasoseno notes that people were crying (“estaba gente llorando”). But the rendition by sisters Juanita and María Mendoza notes only that “the women were crying” in reaction to the same assault: “Otro día por la mañana / las mujeres llorando / de ver la ciudadela / Que la estaban bombardeando.”

Corridos of the revolution remained popular for decades after the civil war subsided. And the topical song continued to capture the Mexican imagination. In 1956, Mendoza, the corrido scholar, devoted an entire book to the ballads of that violent era: El Corrido de la Revolución Mexicana, published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Top Mexican artists, including Antonio Aguilar and Los Alegres de Terán, continued to record albums of corridos well into the 1970s and ’80s, more than half a century after the events. The Mexican actor Ignacio Lopez Tarso became known for his spoken narrations of Mexican revolutionary corridos, recorded in the 1970s with musical accompaniment behind his emotive, baritone delivery.

The Tarso recordings are now available on the streaming service Spotify, a digital development which represents a revolution of another kind.

--Agustín Gurza

Additional reading:

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 1: Defining the Genre

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 2: Border Bandits or Folk Heroes

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 3: Two-Part Corridos

Part 3: Two-Part Corridos

During the first half of the 20^th century, the corrido went from an oral tradition to a recorded, commercial art form. But in making that transition, corrido artists had to adapt their long narrative ballads to the recording technology of the day, primarily the old 78-rpm shellac discs.

In those early years of the recording industry, before the introduction of the long-playing (LP) record in the 1950s, it was common practice to record corridos in two parts. That’s because only a limited amount of music could fit on one side of a 78-rpm record, which was essentially a single. To tell the whole story, and get to the all-important climax where the protagonist often dies heroically, corridistas had to use both sides of the record. The listener would play side A, which sometimes ended in a cliff-hanger, then flip the record over for the climax on side B.

These double-sided ballads became a special focus of Frontera’s founder Chris Strachwitz. On his record hunts through­out the years, the assiduous collector picked up every two-part corrido he could get his hands on. As a result, the Frontera Collection boasts 183 two-part corridos, one of the largest such collections in the world. In many cases, they are one-of-a-kind items, the only surviving copies of certain songs. (For a complete list of the collection’s two-part corridos, see Appendix I of The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, a guide to collection I co-authored with Strachwitz and Jonathan Clark.)

The discs from this era, especially from the 1920s through the 1940s, represent the golden era of the corrido, which first emerged along the border following the U.S. war with Mexico.

Many of the early oral ballads from the late 1800s – which, as we saw in my last installment, celebrated border bandits and folk heroes – were later recorded as two-part corridos. They include, for example, the “Corrido of Joaquín Murrieta,” a real-life rebel who was captured and beheaded in Northern California during the Gold Rush years.

Often, however, the historical facts of a specific corrido, especially those about ordinary people, remain unknown or unverified. In one rare case, recent research unearthed additional details about events described in a corrido, and even identified the likely composer, who remains uncredited on the record labels.

The case involves "Contrabando de El Paso," one of the most notable of the two-part ballads in the collection, considered a precursor to the popular narcocorridos of today. The song is written as the first-person account of a prisoner who describes being transported from El Paso to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was to serve a sentence for smuggling. The exact type of contraband is not specified, but the song was written at the height of Prohibition (1920–33), when smuggling liquor from Mexico was a booming underground trade. It was first recorded in 1928 by the duo of Leonardo Sifuentes and Luis Hernández, pioneer corridistas from El Paso, Texas.

In a paper published in 2005, the late corrido expert Guillermo Hernandez documented the historical events surrounding the anonymous smuggler on that prison train. Hernandez, a Spanish professor who helped bring the Frontera Collection to UCLA, identified the likely composer as Gabriel Jara Franco, a Leavenworth inmate. Hernandez found records showing that the prisoner had corresponded with Sifuentes, half of the musical duo that recorded the ballad for the New Jersey-based Victor label. Relying on sketchy information in the lyrics, Hernandez even recreated the likely itinerary of the prisoner train, stop by stop. (A short video about Hernandez and his corrido research, produced by the Arhoolie Foundation, is viewable online.)

The Frontera Collection lists dozens of versions of the song, including relatively recent renditions by Los Alegres de Terán (1970) and Lorenzo de Monteclaro (1976), the latter on the Los Angeles-based Fono Rex label. Some use an alternate spelling of the original title, “Contrabando del Paso,” substituting a contraction for the proper name of the Texas border city.

The most significant versions continue to be the early ones, recorded as two-part corridos on 78-rpm discs. The archive lists five such versions on different labels, including the origi­nal by Hernández y Sifuentes on the old Victor label with the scroll design and the logo of the gramophone and the dog above the slogan “His Master’s Voice.”

Not all long corridos, however, took advantage of both sides of a disc to tell the full story. In some cases, inexplicably, extended narratives were restricted to one side, truncating the story or eliminating the climax altogether. Such was the case with a recording of the tragic story of “La Delgadina,” a heart-wrenching tale of father-daughter incest. This historic corrido, with direct roots in the romances of medieval Spain, is about a lovely and noble young woman who pays the ultimate price after refusing her father’s sexual advances.

In the version by the Cuarteto Carta Blanca (Vocalion 8677), however, the story ends on one side of the record with the father ordering servants to imprison his daughter for her refusal. Strangely, it ends without ever reaching its tragic conclusion. Instead, side B features the unrelated track, “En el Rancho Grande.”

Today, new versions and interpretations of “Delgadina” appear on the Internet, a mod­ern-day amplifier of the ancient oral tradition that gave rise to corridos. Several versions are now posted on YouTube, including some by contemporary record­ing artists such as Irma Serrano and the San Jose–based group Los Humildes.

Ironically, the evolution of technology forced the corrido to get shorter in the last half of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1950s, new versions of old corridos were released as 45-rpm singles, the format that replaced the 78s. But 45s were used primarily to promote hit tracks from LPs. The singles had to be kept short, usually less than three minutes, for radio play. So the old epic tales had to be edited to fit the new medium. Lost were the detail and the drama of the narratives. In other words, the shorter versions don’t tell the whole story

A good example is the corrido of Los Tequileros, one of many ballads about tequila smugglers who thrived along the border during Prohibition, which outlawed alcoholic beverages in the United States during the 1920s. This song, another precursor to the modern narco-corrido, is a simple story about a trio of tequileros who are ambushed and killed by Texas Rangers, pronounced “rinches” in the local vernacular. The confrontation between the smugglers and the Rangers sets up the song’s central drama; the denouement allows the smugglers to die as heroes at the hands of the merciless “rinches.”

In the longer, two-part version by Los Hermanos Chavarria, we learn that a snitch had betrayed the Mexicans, so the Rangers were lying in wait and “spying on them.” (Como estabn denunciados, ya los estaban espiando.)  A more recent, shorter version by Los Alegres de Terán, simply says the Rangers “must have known” that the smugglers were coming, with no mention of the snitch that tipped them off.

More importantly, the shorter version eliminates some of the crucial dialog considered one of those unique characteristics of the classic corrido. In the long version, the lead Ranger approaches the last smuggler, gravely wounded, and starts interrogating him. The agent asks for his name, and where he’s from.  

             "Me llamo Silvano García, soy de China, Nuevo León.”

The answer resonates with that defiance and sense of national pride. Though his two partners have been killed and he lies close to death, the last smuggler is still asserting his identity, and bravely accepting his fate.

             Silvano con tres balazos, todavía seguía hablando 
             "Mátenme rinches cobardes, ya no me estén preguntando." 
             (Kill me, cowardly Rangers, just stop asking me questions.)

In the shorter version, we are told the Ranger walks up to the wounded smuggler, and “seconds later” he’s dead. The interrogation isn’t mentioned, so the response loses its context, and its punch. At almost twice the length, the older two-part version has room for the expanded dialog, thus enhancing the heroic qualities of the smugglers and turning their deaths into a brave act of nationalism and defiance.

Los Tequileros has yet another classic corrido element – the farewell, or despedida. Before saying goodbye, the narrator addresses the Rangers directly, trying to deny them credit for the kill.

            No se las recarguen, rinches, por haberles dado muerte 

            No digan que los mataron. Los mató su mala suerte.

            Don’t go bragging, rinches, for having brought them death 

            Don’t say you killed them. What killed them was their bad luck. 

The lasting legacy of these narrative ballads, from oral tradition to YouTube videos, highlights the multi-generational appeal of the Mexican corrido as a genre, now well into its second century. These timeless songs endure because, as Hernandez states in his essay, they “touch the most sensitive chords in lovers of the genre.” And he gives credit to the often anonymous corrido composers, such as the author of “El Contrabando de El Paso,” whom he managed to name after more than half a century.

“Gabriel Jara, although unknown and forgotten, recovers for the rest of us a touch of human existence and sensibility,” Hernandez wrote. “That is, perhaps, all we can ask of art in any time or place.”

--Agustín Gurza

Additional reading:

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 1: Defining the Genre

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 2: Border Bandits or Folk Heroes

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 4: Corridos of the Mexican Revolution

Part 2: Border Bandits or Folk Heroes

As we saw in Part 1, the corrido developed as an oral tradition in the last half of the 19th century. The narrative ballad was cultivated along the border, fueled by the cultural conflict left in the wake of the U.S. War with Mexico. These early border ballads, which reached their peak between 1860 and 1910, depicted the exploits of protagonists caught up in these culture wars, often through no desire of their own.

Cultural differences also defined the ways the protagonists were depicted, as heroes or villains, depending on the point of view. To Anglos, they were bandits and outlaws who deserved to be tracked down and imprisoned or killed. To corrido fans, however, they were folk heroes locked in a heroic struggle against the prejudice and brutality of Anglo society. For many Mexicans, the corrido became the expression of cultural resistance against the advancing dominant Anglo culture driven by Manifest Destiny.

Up until the time of the Mexican Revolution, the early corridos were populated by these modern-day Robin Hoods. One such corrido spread the news of daring actions by Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, a Mexican politician and military leader who led guerilla raids along the Texas border to avenge the mistreatment of his countrymen. Corrido scholar Américo Paredes called Cortina “the first corrido hero” to emerge from the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

The Frontera Collection has multiple recordings of corridos inspired by these border rebels who became legends throughout the Southwest. Among the most notorious of these heroic outlaws is Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican-American tenant corn farmer who shot and killed a Texas Ranger in what he considered self-defense.

The incident took place in 1901 in Gonzales, Texas, when Texas Rangers, who were investigating a horse theft, came to question Cortez and his brother, Romaldo, at the ranch where they worked. The investigation took a violent turn as a result of a linguistic misunderstanding between Cortez and a translator for the Rangers, referred to as “rinches” in the phonetic vernacular of border language. In the confusion, a Ranger shot the brother, and Cortez returned fire, killing the Ranger before escaping. This deadly failure to communicate underscored the tension between the increasingly marginalized Mexican-American population and the overtly racist Anglo power structure along the border's cultural hot zone.

Though hated by Anglos in South Texas, corridos depict Cortez as an innocent farmer goaded into fighting “outsiders” and defending the honor of his countrymen. He is lionized for his ability to repeatedly elude capture, covering more than 500 miles as a fugitive, on foot and on horseback. At one point, he was pursued by a posse of 300 men, one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history.

Yo no soy Americano pero comprendo el inglés.

Yo lo aprendí con mi hermano al derecho y al revés.

A cualquier Americano hago temblar a mis pies.

Por cantinas me metí castigando americanos.

"Tú serás el capitán que mataste a mi hermano.

Lo agarraste indefenso, orgulloso americano."

I am not an American but I understand English.

I learned it with my brother, backwards and forwards.

And any American I make tremble at my feet.

Through cantinas I went punishing Americans.

"You must be the captain who killed my brother.

You took him defenseless, you boastful American."

The story of Gregorio Cortez, documented on the front pages of newspapers in both languages, is recounted in detail by Paredes in his 1958 book, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero “Gregorio Cortez.”  It was also turned into a television movie in 1982, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, starring Edward James Olmos.

The corrido ends with the hero’s capture, but there’s much more to the story after that. Cortez was almost lynched while in jail, and his case provoked mob attacks on the Mexican population of the Rio Grande Valley. The racial tensions were inflamed by a sensationalist Anglo press that called Cortez an “arch fiend” and lamented the fact that he had been spared from being lynched. Decades later, the animosity was still so intense that a Texas Ranger threatened to shoot author Paredes after the publication of his book on the outlaw.

Cortez was convicted, exonerated on appeal, tried again and eventually sentenced to life. Amazingly, he was pardoned by the Texas governor after an appeal for clemency from a most unlikely source, Abraham Lincoln’s daughter. He was released and then remarried for the fourth and final time shortly before dying in 1916. The official cause of death was pneumonia, though his family always believed Cortez was poisoned.

Another famous corrido from this era tells the story of Joaquín Murrieta, a 19th century Mexican immigrant whose severed head was put on public display in mining towns throughout the state. The daring outlaw, often pictured with long dark hair blowing in the wind, was also the subject of alarmist newspaper articles, dime-store novels and a book that became a Hollywood movie, “The Robin Hood of El Dorado,” released in 1936.

Historically, not much is known about Murrieta, who came from Sonora as a young man to join the California Gold Rush. The corrido chronicles his transformation from an immigrant seeking his fortune to an outlaw seeking revenge on “vain Anglos” for killing his wife and his defenseless brother in cold blood. For author Manuel Peña,^[1] this corrido perfectly exemplifies the genre as vehicle for expressing the Mexican side of the inter-ethnic clash. And it shows that heroic corridos of the era were not limited to the border region.

“It depicts a larger-than-life hero who either defeats the Anglos or goes down before overwhelming odds,” wrote Peña in the October 1992 issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. “This corrido, if its origin can ever be pinpointed, may yield proof that the Californios—themselves experiencing pressure from the Anglos—were in the vanguard in realizing this important folk music genre.”

In these heroic corridos, the inter-cultural conflict is often dramatically played out in the dialogue between the protagonist and his enemies, especially the hated “Rinches.”  In the Murrieta ballad, the protagonist admits killing thousands in revenge, but he explicitly decries the “unjust” laws that label him a bandido. Instead, he sees himself as the prototypical Robin Hood, robbing from the “avaricious rich” and “fiercely defending the poor and simple Indian.”

A los ricos avarientos, yo les quité su dinero.

Con los humildes y pobres, yo me quité mi sombrero.

Ay, que leyes tan injustas por llamarme bandolero.

                        From the avaricious rich, I took their money.

                        With the humble and the poor, I take off my hat.

                        Oh, what unjust laws for labeling me bandolero.

The Frontera Collection has three versions of the corrido of Joaquín Murrieta recorded in two parts on 78-rpm records, all by some incarnation of Los Madrugadores, or The Early Risers. The 1934 recording on the Vocalion label was also released on Columbia with somewhat better fidelity. A slightly different version (same lyrics, different arrangement) was released on Decca by Los Hermanos Sánchez y Linares, composed of the two original members of Los Madrugadores, the brothers Jesús and Víctor Sánchez, along with Fernando Linares. The group has its own compilation CD on Arhoolie, Pedro J. González and Los Madrugadores, 1931–1937 (Arhoolie 7035), which features the two-part Murrieta corrido.

As if to extend the Murrieta narrative, a second drama unfolded related to Pedro Gonzalez, the leader of Los Madrugadores. The group had a popular predawn radio show in Southern California, which served as an alarm clock for Mexican field workers during the Great Depression. The show also featured commentary by González, who spoke out against the mass deportations of Mexicans at that time. In a case of life imitating art, the corrido’s message of injustice was reinforced when González was himself sent to San Quentin prison on trumped-up rape charges. That was in 1934, the very year Los Madrugadores recorded the song.

The musician/activist was released in the early 1940s after appeals by two Mexican presidents and huge public protests organized principally by his wife, Maria. He was deported to Mexico and settled in Tijuana, where he immediately reassembled a band and took again to the airwaves. Undaunted, González continued to use his radio show to speak out against injustice, blasting broadcasts across the border for the next 30 years.

Eventually, González was permitted to return to the United States. In 1985, when he was 90, PBS aired a documentary on his life and career, ''Ballad of an Unsung Hero,'' which was later turned into a TV movie, "Break of Dawn" (1988), starring Mexican folk singer Oscar Chavez. Ten years later, González passed away at a convalescent home in Lodi, California. The headline of his obituary, which ran in the New York Times on March 24, 1995, called him, appropriately, a “folk hero.” He was 99.

It’s not hard to see how such harrowing stories would become the stuff of legend and how ballads about them would be passed down through generations. Peña notes that Joaquín Murrieta “actually came to the attention of modern scholarship in the 1970s” after Strachwitz included a version of the song in a corrido compilation (Arhoolie LP-9004, 1974).

The revival of interest in the defiant Murrieta was also fueled by the surging political and cultural awakening of the Chicano Movement, which embraced him as a symbol of resistance and rebellion against the Anglo establishment. At UC Berkeley in the early 1970s, for example, a Chicano student organization, Frente de Liberación del Pueblo, established a unique Chicano student dorm named Casa Joaquín Murrieta. The rebel’s famous image was emblazoned on the building, which also served as the activist group’s base of operation. (Disclosure: I was a member of Frente and edited the group’s newspaper at the time.)

“Corridos have an amazing life,” says Strachwitz. “They are written about events that took place decades ago, but they still resonate with people as if they were hearing them for the first time.”

In the next installment: Historic two-part corridos.

--Agustín Gurza

Additional reading:

The Mexican Corrido: Ballads of Adversity and Rebellion, Part 1: Defining the Genre

Part 1: Defining the Genre

The corrido is often described as a narrative ballad, which is an accurate though insufficient definition. Narrative ballads exist in many countries, including the United States. But the form that developed in Mexico in the late 1800s is deeply rooted in that country’s specific cultural history, and especially the inequitable relationship with its conquering neighbor to the North.

The corrido is considered one of the foremost folk expressions of Mexico’s rural, working-class culture. These historical ballads were shared at first as an oral tradition then propagated as part of the record industry on both sides of the border. Since the late 19th century through the present day, corridos have documented the actions and exploits of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous everyman. These dramatic ballads have served as newspapers for society’s oppressed and dispossessed, a first draft of history told from the perspective of the poor.

Emerging as an art form during a tumultuous century marked by war and revolution, corridos often provided an eyewitness to historic events in Mexico and helped define its modern, national identity. The corrido captures Mexican values and ideals through the actions of the genre’s epic protagonists: bandits and folk heroes, traitors and patriots, iconic revolutionaries and lowly recruits.

Today, the corrido is a trans-national art form. Composers, known as corridistas, touch on topics from the War with Mexico to the Gulf War in Iraq, from the assassination of Pancho Villa to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, from the spurned lover who shoots down his rival to the local hero who dies attempting to save his town.

The Frontera Collection is one of the world’s most comprehensive repositories of this essential Mexican folk art. The archive encompasses virtually the entire 100-year lifespan of the recorded genre itself.  A search of the archives yields almost 10,000 items identified as corridos, or one of its subgenres. (Some of the tracks are duplicates of the same song on different labels or different media.) But the most valuable part of Frontera’s corrido collection lies in its extensive selection on 78-rpm discs recorded during the genre’s golden era, the first half of the 20th century.

These tales of tragedy and daring-do have been passed down through generations, with verses added and subtracted as tradition and technology dictated. Different versions of the same song have been released, sometimes by the same artists, on old 78-rpm discs, then on 45s, LPs, cassettes, and finally on modern digital media. Fans can’t get enough of the corrido stories and their moral lessons.

“Corridos have an amazing life,” says Chris Strachwitz, record producer and founder of The Frontera Collection. “They are written about events that took place decades ago, but they still resonate with people as if they were hearing them for the first time.”

Top 40 charts in the United States have seen a fair share of hits in the story-telling ballad tradition. In 1959, Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” started with the line: “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl.” The cowboy’s romantic obsession, over a woman named Faleena who danced in a cantina, would lead to his demise. And in 1967, Bobbie Gentry sang the “Ode to Billie Joe,” a tragic tale of young love, suicide and a secret never revealed.

Broadly speaking, such folk ballads could be described as English-language counterparts to the corrido. They already fit important elements of the Mexican genre: a strong, specific sense of time and place, and a tragic conflict at the core. In both songs, as in many corridos, someone dies.

However, while all corridos are narrative ballads, not all ballads are corridos. What is missing is that crucial cultural context that makes corridos uniquely Mexican.

Strachwitz, an avid collector of U.S. blues, country, Cajun, and folk music recordings, is in a unique position to compare the corrido with what is known as American roots music. He finds nothing comparable to the corrido’s distinct combination of elements: the journalistic style, the direct dialog between protagonists, the clash of opposing forces, and the lasting impact and relevance over generations.

“I haven’t encountered anything close to the Mexican corrido,” Strachwitz says.

Experts agree the corrido has its roots in the narrative poetry of Europe, transplanted to the Americas by Spanish conquistadors through the romance español. The oldest known corridos in the Americas are from Argentina and Chile, predating those in Mexico, according to the late Guillermo Hernandez, a Spanish professor and corrido expert who was instrumental in bringing the Frontera Collection to UCLA.

“It was probably a continental phenomenon, but in Mexico it really exploded as a genre,” said Hernandez.

Mexico’s unique corrido style evolved during the 100-year period between two major internal upheavals: the War of Independence of 1810 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In between, there was the U.S.–Mexico War of 1846-1848, a defining historic event, both for the country and the corrido.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 ended the war and established the current border. Mexico surrendered half its territory in the bargain. The United States, with its resounding victory, could claim vindication for its racist rationale for war: that Manifest Destiny preordained white Americans to claim the continent from coast to coast and that Mexicans, viewed as a barbaric and inferior breed, were just in the way.

The corrido was created in the crucible of this violent inter-cultural conflict, according to Américo Paredes, one of the leading corrido scholars in the United States. Paredes saw the border region as a cultural flashpoint, a geographic scar that painfully underscored the vast disparities of wealth, power, and customs between the two countries. The corrido emerged as an expression of cultural resistance against the advancing dominant Anglo culture. It was a musical response to hostile conditions: the foreign invasion, the loss and occupation of territory, the treatment of Mexicans as second-class citizens.

As Paredes puts it, the Mexicans’ "slow, dogged struggle against economic enslavement and the loss of their own identity was the most important factor in the development of a distinct local balladry."

A seminal book on the genre is the 1939 study by Mexican musicologist Vicente T. Mendoza (1894-1964), entitled El Romance Español y el Corrido Mexicano. Mendoza, who spent his life exploring the song form, identifies six formal ballad conventions that define the corrido. They are:

            1. The initial call to the public by the corridista, sometimes called the

                 formal opening

            2. The setting of time and place and naming of the protagonist

            3. The arguments of the protagonist

            4. The message

            5. The farewell of the protagonist

            6. The farewell of the corridista

Nowadays, corridos no longer hew to this formal structure. Even in the old days, not every corrido contained every defined element. But, as noted by the Handbook of Texas Online, every corrido must tell a story of either local or national interest: “a hero's deeds, a bandit's exploits, a barroom shootout, or a natural disaster.”

In his introduction to another important Paredes study, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, Richard Bauman writes, “For Paredes, the true corrido tradition centers around a spirit of heroic bravado, of defiant manly self-confidence, and this spirit is rooted in the emergent sense of Mexican nationalism…”

The bravado and “manly self-confidence” were evident from the very first corrido on record, “El Corrido de Kiansis,” about the early cattle drives across Texas to Kansas. In this case, the conflict is not violent but professional, depicting the Mexicans as better cowboys than the hapless Gringos. Paredes calls this cowboy ballad “the oldest Texas-Mexican corrido preserved in a complete form,” dating from the 1860s or early 1870s.^[1]
 

Quinientos novillos eran, todos grandes y livianos,
y entre treinta Americanos no los podían embalar.

Llegan cinco mexicanos, todos bien enchivarrados,
y en menos de un cuarto de hora los tenían encerrados.

Esos cinco mexicanos al momento los echaron,
y los treinta Americanos se quedaron azorados.

Five hundred steers there were, all big and quick;
Thirty American boys could not keep them bunched together.

Then five Mexicans arrive, all of them wearing good chaps;
And in less than a quarter-hour, they had the steers penned up.

Those five Mexicans penned up the steers in a moment,
And the thirty Americans were left staring in amazement.

In the next installment: Early corridos about Mexican folk heroes considered border bandits by the Anglo public.

                                                                                                                                                                                       -- Agustín Gurza

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Los Madrugadores (The Early Risers) became the most popular group in Mexican-American music in the U.S. The folk ensemble was started​ by Pedro J. González, a controversial and charismatic personality considered the founder of Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles in the late 1920s. Its name – which comes from “madrugada,” the Spanish word for dawn – refers as much to the band as to its blue-collar audience, those “early risers” who listened to them perform live on the radio from 4 to 6 a.m. as they got ready to go to work. For a group that was marginalized, disdained, and persecuted during the Depression, the moniker also conveyed a certain sense of pride because it carried the connotation of being “hard workers” and “go-getters.”

González, a musician and songwriter who was also a social activist and commentator, became even more closely identified with his immigrant audience when he was denounced for speaking out against the mass deportations of the day. The radio personality was framed on trumped-up rape charges, sent to prison, then later was himself deported to Mexico where he quickly returned to radio, broadcasting from Tijuana.

González was born in the northern border state of Chihuahua in 1896. He was 14 years old at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when he was forced at gunpoint to join the rebel forces of Pancho Villa and conscripted as a telegraph operator. In 1923, according to The New York Times, he came to Los Angeles and found work as a longshoreman.

“His habit of singing while he worked led to his own Spanish-language radio show, one of the first in the nation,” states the Times story. “His broadcasts, during which he raged against mass deportations of Mexicans, were popular with Mexican field laborers but feared by the authorities, who accused him of being a rabble-rouser and tried to have his broadcasting license canceled.”

The history of Los Madrugadores dates to these radio broadcasts from the early 1920s in Los Angeles, for which González began organizing musical groups. From the start, the ensemble featured a revolving door of singers and musicians. Although González enjoyed performing, his radio audience soon preferred his accompanying singers and musicians, especially the popular band of brothers Jesus and Victor Sanchez, who also recorded separately under their own names. Singer Fernando Linares joined the group in the early days, creating another moniker for the ensemble as Los Hermanos Sanchez y Linares. The personnel expanded to include other singers and guitarists, such as Narciso Farfán, Crescencio Cuevas, Ismael Hernandez, Jesús Alvarez and Josefina “La Chata” Caldera.

Los Madrugadores became so popular that several groups used the same name, apparently by mutual agreement, to record and perform on stage and on the radio. They included Farfán and Cuevas, who became known as Chicho y Chencho, the most popular act spun off from Los Madrugadores. Collectively and individually, their popularity eventually spread throughout Mexican-American communities in California and the Southwest, where the daily radio broadcasts served as alarm clocks for workers in farms and factories. Groups by the same name continued to work all along the border up into the 1970s.

The Frontera Collection contains scores of recordings by Los Madrugadores, including many found under the name of Pedro J. González, who was also a songwriter. (Not to be confused with Los Madrugadores del Valle, a more recent norteño group that recorded many singles and LPs for the Joey and Del Valle labels of Texas.)

Frontera founder Chris Strachwitz cited the group’s version of the classic “Zenaida” (Vocalion 8596) as one of his 50 favorite recordings from the collection, ranking it No. 15.

“I can’t get this wonderful melody out of my head—I try to sing or hum it constantly,” writes Strachwitz on this blog. “Los Madrugadores were the first to record this story about Zenaida, and they did it in two parts. Great singers, they were very popular in the mid-1930s and the song soon gained widespread popularity as well.”

In various configurations, Los Madrugadores issued numerous singles in the 1930s that enjoyed strong record sales and jukebox play. Their canciones and corridos emphasized close harmonies and accomplished guitars as accompaniment, although some of the early discs also have piano. The group recorded over 200 songs for both multi-national and independent labels, including RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, Vocalion, Bluebird, Imperial, and Tricolor.

All the while, González continued to use the airwaves to agitate for social justice, soon drawing the attention and ire of the authorities. In 1934, at the peak of his career, González was sent to San Quentin prison on rape charges. Although the alleged victim later recanted, saying she had been coerced by prosecutors to lie under oath, the conviction was ​allowed to stand and González served six years.

The musician/activist was released in the early 1940s after appeals by two Mexican presidents and huge public protests organized principally by his wife, Maria. He was deported to Mexico and settled in Tijuana, where he immediately reassembled a band and took again to the airwaves. Undaunted, González continued to use his radio show to speak out against injustice, blasting broadcasts across the border for the next 30 years.

Los Madrugadores documented the tragic case of their leader in a two-part ballad, the “Corrido de Pedro J. González.” It was a case of life imitating art, since around the same time the group had also recorded the corrido of another Mexican-American folk hero, Joaquin Murrieta, a 19th century outlaw whose severed head was paraded on display in mining towns throughout the state. As American studies professor Shelley Streeby noted,  “...the story of the unjust treatment and criminalization of a Mexican immigrant (Murrieta) in the United States must have taken on new and tragic resonances for that working-class audience during these years of intensified nativism and forced repatriation, especially in light of González’ harsh experiences with the law.”

Both two-part corridos – Joaquín Murrieta and Pedro J. González – are part of the Frontera Collection and included in the compilation CD, “Los Madrugadores - 1931-1937.” (Arhoolie 7035).  

 Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, other events forced changes in the lineup of the original Madrugadores, especially the deaths of Narciso Farfan in 1939 and Jesus Sanchez in 1941. Despite the setbacks and challenges, the group stayed true to the determined spirit of its immigrant audience, continuing to record and perform until the 1960s.

Eventually, González was permitted to return to the United States. In 1985, when he was 90, PBS aired a documentary on his life and career titled Ballad of an Unsung Hero, which was later turned into a TV movie, Break of Dawn (1988), starring Mexican folk singer Oscar Chavez. González and his wife are both featured in the 30-minute documentary, interviewed at their modest home in the border town of San Ysidro, California. González devoted one room of the home to a museum of his life, featuring old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and even an old telegraph key.

The show sparked a renewed interest in the aging activist among Mexican- American community activists, who started visiting the home like a shrine, according to a New York Times article about the documentary, published January 7, 1985.

“He represents an important part of cultural past and tradition,” Lorena Parlee, a historian and co-producer of the program, told the newspaper. “And the film represents not only the plight of immigrants from Mexico but from other ethnic groups who experienced discrimination and deportation.”

Ten years later, González passed away at a convalescent home in Lodi, California. The headline of , which ran in The New York Times on March 24, 1995, called him, appropriately, a “folk hero.” He was 99.

-Agustín Gurza

Enter our humble Mexican-American duet, Andrés Berlanga y Francisco Montalvo. They have two songs on that disc of extras, both recorded in San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday, November 26, 1936. Online reviews list the titles as “Ay! Que Bonitos Ojitos” and “Que piensas tu que mi amore” even though that latter wording is grammatically incorrect in Spanish. (Reviewers, in fact, spell the title two different ways, including “Que Piensas tu que me Amore,” which besides being grammatically wrong uses inconsistent capitalization.) In that same San Antonio recording session, according to annotations in yet another review, Johnson laid down the track “32-20 Blues" (referring to Winchester ammunition) for the Oriole label.

There’s also an alternate version of one song with a slightly different title that identifies the color of the woman’s lovely eyes, “Ay! Que Par De Ojitos Negros,” (Oh! What a Pair of Little Black Eyes), also on Vocalion but with a scratchier sound. The label on this recording adds an interesting tidbit in parentheses: The duo apparently used the nickname Los Guapos, which means “the handsome ones.” 

Strachwitz also did an audio interview with Berlanga, also in San Antonio (and he estimates around the same time as the films). In it, the singer remembers playing outlaw beer joints during Prohibition, which inspired this popular corrido about bootleggers. He also recalls riding freight trains as an itinerant troubadour during the Depression. And he gets nostalgic remembering the marathon dances that went from dusk to dawn: “They just keep playing and the people just keep drinking and dancing. Man, those were wonderful days.”

Ya me voy de este pueblo maldito.

Donde quedan mis sueños dorados. 

I’m getting out of this rotten town, 

Leaving behind my hopes and dreams.