It’s six o’clock on a weekday evening in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Radios in the colonias, barrios, and cantinas are tuned to XEPZ 1190, Radio Norteña. A familiar jingle wafts over the airwaves; it’s ‘‘Hour of the Corridos,’’ with ‘‘el Abuelo Chabelo’’ (Grandfather Chabelo, a playful inversion of a popular Mexican television character, Chabelo, an adult dressed in children’s clothing who is the star of one of the main children’s programs).The phones start ringing. The first caller, a child, wants to hear ‘‘El Gato de Chihuahua’’ (The Cat from Chihuahua). El Abuelo asks the child to solve a riddle and...

Woody Guthrie once asked, ‘‘Why do people set down and write great songs and ballads about their outlaws . . . and never about governors, mayors or police chiefs?’’¹ The answer is easy. An outlaw is someone ‘‘disgusted with trying to live decent in the richman’s system,’’ who tries to ‘‘whip the world down to his size’’ and finds out he cannot, because the world is much bigger than he is. But he tries. He may die trying, but he tries—and ‘‘goes down shooting.’’ By contrast, ‘‘politicians don’t even try. They shoot the bull and the hot air, but...

Before reviewing research results concerning the interpretation of narcocorridos and the construction of the narcotrafficker persona, let us consider some basic questions and issues. Assessing narcocorridos and their representations of the narcotrafficker is a useful study in the process of cultural-image construction, dissemination, and transformation. In addition, however, such an assessment may inform broader questions concerning the interaction between poverty, viewed within a context of social stratification, and cultural processes. What does a shared, ongoing condition of poverty and subordinate status do with respect to the systems of signification, symbolic fields, identity, and notions of self, discourse, and day-to-day practice...

As a particular case in which some of the general concerns mentioned in Chapter 1 may be elucidated, the research on narcocorridos is intended as a preliminary investigation regarding their role, in combination with social conditions, in shaping the creation of a cultural archetype or persona—the narcotrafficker—and the pattern of action that ties violence, power, money, and drugs to political, social, and regional themes for which the narcotrafficker is known.¹ Produced and distributed through well-known yet ‘‘underground’’ channels, these songs feature archetypal heroes, or ‘‘big men,’’ who are involved in the drug trade, smuggling, drug use, or other...

Following the research plan (see Appendix 1), I collected interview and observation data in several domains, and I will report it here in a similar format: a brief narrative analysis of a sample of narcocorridos; listener interpretations; social context; the impact of mass media market on the nature of these corridos; and connections between the narcocorrido persona and personal action (i.e., practice). In Chapter 4 I shall discuss and synthesize the role of the narcotrafficker persona as a cultural figure, the social context in which that figure gains resonance, and a number of propositions about the role of such ‘‘cultural...

Using the data summarized in the previous chapter, we can now return to the research questions and draw some preliminary conclusions. First, are narcocorridos, and the narcotrafficker (narco) persona they feature, primarily a genre of representation that has arisen out of the world of the subaltern, the dispossessed, and the poor within a framework of social stratification? The answer to the question is a mixedyes and no. It would be easy to essentialize narcocorridos this way, under a schema wherein they are representations employing a traditional narrative form featuring a cultural persona that symbolizes resistance to the oppression of...