🇲🇽 MX · Mexico · Chapter 5 of 7
The Country and Western Music and the Ballad: The Border as Universe (1930–present)
There is a music in Mexico that the middle-class urban population often ignores or despises, which radio stations in Mexico City program with reluctance, and yet it is the one that millions of people listen to in the country and in the Mexican community in the United States. It is northern music: accordion, bass sextet, corrido, Sinaloa polka, narcocorrido.
It is also, if listened without prejudice, one of the most rich and honest musical traditions of all popular Latin American music: an epic folk that has documented over a century the lives, dreams, crimes and tragedies of people living in the world's most unequal border.
The corrido: the sung chronicle
The corrido — derived from the colonial Spanish romance — is the oldest literary-musical genre in Mexico that is still practiced in a living form. It is a narrative in verse, sung, that tells a story of a real or fictional event: a battle, a crime, a love, a feat, an injustice.
During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the corrido was the people's newspaper: songs about Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Adelita, and the battles of the north traveled faster than newspapers and reached places where no written paper ever arrived. The corrido was the collective memory of the people who could not read.
After the Revolution, the corrido survived as a popular genre in the northern regions — Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas — where the proximity to the border and to the United States created stories of a specific type: smugglers, migrants, cowboys, impossible loves between two worlds.
North music: the accordion that came from Germany
The central instrument of north music — the button accordion — arrived in Mexico in the 19th century with German and Czech immigrants who settled in the north of the country, especially in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. The Mexicans of the north adopted it, mixed it with the corrido and European polka, and created a genre that does not resemble any of its original sources.
The bajo sexto — a twelve-string guitar that provides harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment — completed the basic formation of the north music ensemble: accordion, bajo sexto, and voice. With those three elements, north music built a sonic universe that has survived more than a century without needing major changes.
Los Tigres del Norte: the bosses of bosses
The most important band of norteño music — and possibly of all Mexican regional music — emerged from Rosa Morada, a small village in the state of Sinaloa with the poetic name of "the purple rose". The four Hernandez brothers — Hernán, Luis, Jorge and Eduardo — learned their first songs from older musicians in their town without sheet music, without records, without access to the radio. It was the sixties and the Hernandez brothers began to play informally as a local group.
Emerging in 1968 in Rosa Morada, they moved to California in the early seventies, where they were discovered by Art Walker, an Englishman owner of a small record company, Fama Records, which produced their first recordings.
In 1973 they achieved their first success with their fifth album, Contrabando y traición. Since then they have recorded more than fifty discs, of which they have sold 30 million copies.
Contrabando y Traición: the birth of the modern narcocorrido
In 1972, a corrido written by Ángel González told the story of Camelia la Texana and Emilio Varela — a couple involved in drug trafficking whose story ends in betrayal and death. The version by Los Tigres del Norte was definitive: the song is seen as responsible for the subsequent popularity of the narcocorrido and for the revitalization of the corrido itself in Mexico.
"Contrabando y Traición" did not glorify narcotrafficking — it described it with the same epic logic with which the revolutionary corrido had described the battles of Villa and Zapata. The narco was the new bandit of the border, and the corrido was the natural way to tell his story.
Jorge Hernández explained it this way: "the corrido that we sing is a musical current that comes to form part of our culture and well it's simply a real story musicalized."
The Golden Cage: The Migrant Anthem
If "Contrabando y Traición" was the song that made them famous, "La Jaula de Oro" (1986) was a corrido that addressed the life of immigrants in the United States.
The song tackles the problems that exist in the families of immigrants starting from the second generation, "when the children no longer want to be Mexican because they live in another country, their way of thinking changes, in school they start learning English, and although they speak Spanish at home, there arise a series of problems that no one paid attention to."
"La Jaula de Oro" — — is the anthem of the millions of Mexicans who live in the United States with documents or without them, who built their lives on the other side of the border and who sometimes feel that the material prosperity they found is also a cage: the price of being away from their homeland, of seeing their children grow speaking English, of knowing that they no longer belong completely to either side.
Songs like "La Jaula de Oro", "El Emigrante", "Golpes en el Corazón" or "La Mesa del Rincón" capture the pain of family separation, discrimination, the struggle for the American dream and everyday resilience.
The narcocorrido: the debate that never ends
The narcocorrido — the corrido that tells stories about drug trafficking, its characters, its crimes and its code of honor — is the most controversial genre of Mexican music and one of the most listened to.
Its defenders argue that it is the tradition of the corrido applied to contemporary reality: just as the revolutionary corrido told the exploits of Villa without necessarily approving them morally, the narcocorrido tells the exploits of the drug lord without approving the drug lord. It is chronicle, not propaganda.
Its critics argue that it glorifies violence, romanticizes organized crime and offers young people from poor neighborhoods a model of success based on crime.
The debate is genuine and has no simple resolution. What is clear is that narcocorrido is a cultural phenomenon of a complexity that no prohibition has been able to suppress: several Mexican states have tried to ban its broadcast on radios and in public spaces, with the same result as all musical prohibitions in history — increasing its appeal among the public that felt represented by it.
Los corridos tumbados: the new generation
In the 2010s and 2020s, a new generation of artistsNatanael Cano, Junior H, Peso Pluma — took the tradition of the corrido and mixed it with American trap, autotune and the aesthetics of contemporary rap to create the corridos tumbados: a genre that is at the same time completely new and completely rooted in the tradition of northern Mexico.
Its influence opened the way by taking the northern party music from family gatherings to global stadiums, fusing it with external influences without betraying its roots, laying the foundation for the corridos tumbados and battle rap by showing that the genre can be transgressive, dynamic and global.
Peso PlumaHassan Emilio Kabande Laija — became in 2023 the most streamed Mexican artist in the world on Spotify, with laid-back corridos that blended the northern accordion with trap production and lyrics that continued the narrative tradition of the classic corrido. His collaboration with Bad Bunny on "La Zona" and with artists across the entire spectrum of Latin pop brought northern music to places where it had never reached before.
Editor's note: Los Tigres del Norte learned their first songs without sheet music, without records, without access to the radio, on a ranch in Sinaloa in the 1960s. Fifty years later, with over 70 albums, 30 million copies sold, 7 Grammys and 11 Latin Grammys, they have conquered the Hollywood Bowl, Europe, Asia and Latin America, even with a street in New York named after them. That journey — from Rosa Morada to the Hollywood Bowl — is the story of the corrido itself: a music that was born in the margins to speak about the margins and ended up being the most listened-to music of the Mexican community around the world. The corrido didn't need permission to get where it did. The margins, when they have enough truth, eventually become centers.
10 · 1 en DoReSol
Top 10 of Norteño Music and the Corrido
La Jaula de Oro
Los Tigres del Norte · 1984
The anthem of the Mexican migrant in the United States. The second generation that no longer wants to be Mexican, described with a precision that no sociologist has matched.
Contrabando y Traición
Los Tigres del Norte · 1972
The song that created the modern narcocorrido. Camelia la Texana as the most iconic character of all the narrative of contemporary corridos.
Jefe de Jefes
Los Tigres del Norte · 1997
The anthem of leadership in border code. The end of the twentieth century with a million copies sold in the United States.
La Banda del Carro Rojo
Los Tigres del Norte · 1973
The second major narcocorrido by Los Tigres. The red car band as an image that remained in the popular imagination forever.
El Sinaloense
Banda Sinaloense tradicional · S. XX
The state anthem of Sinaloa. The northern wind band in its most festive and irresistible form.
Pa' Todo el Año
Ramón Ayala · 1972
The king of the accordion in his most universal song. Ramón Ayala as the musician who defined the sound of modern northern accordion.
Ella y Yo
Peso Pluma ft. Natanael Cano · 2022
The laid-back corrido that brought the norteño to the trap global. The new generation taking the tradition and taking it where Los Tigres never could.
El Rey de la Carretera
Los Bukis · 1990
Los Bukis as the bridge between norteño and pop romantic. The music from the north reaching the urban middle class.
Amor Eterno
Rocío Dúrcal · 1984
The Spanish woman who became the queen of ranchera music. Juan Gabriel as composer, Dúrcal as interpreter: the perfect combination.
La Puerta Negra
Los Tigres del Norte · 1978
The love corrido in its most dramatic version. Los Tigres showing that the genre is not just narcotic: it is the entire human experience of the border.
🎵 Practice these songs in Doresol
The full series
Mexico
Mariachi, ranchera, bolero, corrido and chilango rock. A country that sings.
-
CAP 01
🇲🇽 Ch 01
The Roots: The Music of the Three Worlds (Pre-Hispanic–1800)
When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the territory we today call Mexico in 1519, they found civilizations that had developed musical traditions of a complexity and richness th
-
CAP 02
🇲🇽 Ch 02
The Mariachi and the Ranchera Song: The Golden Age (1930–1970)
There was a moment in the 20th century when Mexico decided on its national sound. It wasn't a decision made by a government or an academy: it was the convergence of radio, cinema,
-
CAP 03
🇲🇽 Ch 03
The Bolero: The Musician Poet and the Heart of Latin America (1920–1980)
There is a moment in any Mexican neighborhood bar — not the trendy bar in the historic center but the humble bar with Formica tables and barrel beer — when someone asks for an Agus
-
CAP 04
🇲🇽 Ch 04
The Mexican Rock: The City as a Laboratory (1960–2000)
During almost two decades, rock music was technically illegal in Mexico. Not in the strict legal sense, but in the practical sense: after the Avándaro Concert of 1971 — the Mexican
-
CAP 05 you are here
🇲🇽 Ch 05
The Country and Western Music and the Ballad: The Border as Universe (1930–present)
There is a music in Mexico that the middle-class urban population often ignores or despises, which radio stations in Mexico City program with reluctance, and yet it is the one that
-
CAP 06
🇲🇽 Ch 06
<b>Juan Gabriel and Vicente Fernández:</b> The Two Giants
There is a story that summarizes the relationship between the two most important artists of the second half of the 20th century in Mexico. In 1971, Juan Gabriel and Vicente Fernánd
-
🇲🇽 Ch 07
The Mexican Pop of the 21st Century: Roots and the World (1990–present)
There is a paradox in Mexican music of the 21st century: the artists who have reached the furthest globally are those who have dug the deepest into their own tradition.
You might also like
3 articles picked by editorial similarity
