Mexico, the Revolution and Beyond: The Casasola Archives 1900–1940
Documenting the Revolution: Casasola and Corridos

We have two people for our next presentation. We have Dr. Celestino Fernández, who is a professor in the Sociology Department here at the university. He teaches courses and conducts research on various topics and issues pertaining to culture and diversity, including popular culture. He has published over 40 articles and book chapters in topics ranging from education to Mexican immigration and social media in Mexican musical dramas, such as corridos, which are ballads. In addition, he has composed corridos for over 20 years.

And he will be joined with Guillermo Sáenz who is originally from Chihuahua, Mexico. He lives in the Phoenix area, teaching Spanish and music and performing. He holds a BA in music and Spanish at the University of Arizona. He has participated in Univision's OTI festival and Tucson Meet Yourself.

He is very involved with corridos and Mexican ballad tradition and has performed and composed corridos related to the Poetry Center's annual contest. And I'll mention, for you teachers, in your packet is information about that. He has also taught student corrido workshops for the Western Folk Life Center and the Poetry Center.

His compositions were included as part of the soundtrack for the film "La Mujer Que Cayó del Cielo: The Woman Who Fell from the Sky." Mr. Sáenz has often collaborated with Dr. Fernández on corrido composition.

And I will give it over to them. I believe they have some slides for you and some music.

[sings "Corrido Villista"]

Ya llegó, ya está aquí
Pancho Villa con su gente,
con sus Dorados valientes
que por él han de morir.

Yo soy soldado de Pancho Villa
de sus Dorados soy el más fiel
nada me importa perder la vida
si es cosa de hombres morir por él.

[applause]

Buenas noches. Bienvenidos. Muchísimas gracias a todos los colaboradores que apoyaron este proyecto. Muchísimas gracias; bienvenidos.[Good evening. Welcome. Thank you to all who have put together this project. Many thanks. Welcome.] What we're going do tonight is just give you a little flavor for the corrido tradition, especially the corridos of the period of the Mexican Revolution. But, I want to touch a little bit, just on corrido tradition itself.

And throughout, we're going to have Guillermo play just a few verses from some of the corridos. At the reception, you'll be able to listen to the entire corrido, if you like. And there are a lot of collections. If you want to purchase collections of corridos from this period, they're available—or, for that matter, collections of different topics/themes of corridos.

Well, if the photographs of Casasola are the images of the Mexican Revolution, the corridos are the sound of the Mexican Revolution. And for those of us that grew up in the tradition, it's very difficult for us to... I'll give you my main point here, in case anybody falls asleep later on when I'm talking. Here's my main point, and that is that these two, the images and the sounds, are inseparable.

For those of us who view a photograph of the Mexican Revolution, whether we hear the music in reality or not, it's playing in our head. And if we hear a corrido, we're seeing images from the Casasola collection.

What's a corrido? Well, the words itself comes from the verb correr. So, it's a running account. Basically, the way to think about it is, a corrido is a story. Live corridos begin, "Este es el corrido." Right? "This is the corrido about. This is the story about. This is the ballad."

Because corridos are about the words. OK. Today you hear corridos with Mariachi, Norteño, Banda, you name it. But, the tradition was like Guillermo. One voice. One guitar. And the idea, when you said, "Señores pongan cuidado." "Ladies and gentlemen, lend me your ears."

Why? Because you've got to pay attention to the story. Pay attention to the words. Lots of corridos end, "Asi termina el corrido," or something such as, "Because, here's the end of the story." Now, you can go back and talk and do whatever you want. Corridos are not dance music. They're not elevator music. They're not background music. They're music to listen to.

Jim Griffith is here, my good friend Jim Griffith. Where are you Jim? Back there, Big Jim and I wrote a paper and we talk about the corrido as the editorial page of El Pueblo Mexicano. Why? Because and editorial takes a fact, an issue, an event, a real situation ‑ talks about it, provides a perspective, and frequently, there's a moral to the story.

Corridos are always from the perspective of the pueblo. They're never written from the perspective of the elite. So, that's always the perspective. They're generally based in fact... I say, "generally," because, on occasion there are corridos that are not.

So, the corridos of the revolution are very factual in terms of dates, locations, personalities... There's a book by Merle Simmons that uses the corrido as the source document for the study of the Mexican Revolution, for example.

Topics? You name it. Give me enough time, I'll find you a corrido. [laughter]

Natural disasters. Fernando Valenzuela in the 1980s, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, recruited from the state of Sonora, didn't speak English. I don't collect those corridos. I have six. El Zurdo de Oro, for example. First year, he won Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year, went to the White House. Didn't speak English. But, there's corridos about him.

Natural disasters, revolution, war, you name the war, there are corridos about those. Horses and horse races. And one of the most famous El Moro de Cumpas, that everybody has performed, everybody who knows or sings corridos, or famous recording artists. All of them have recorded that corrido. It was made into a feature‑length film. I'll talk about El Caballo Blanco in a minute.

Miraculous events. Malverde, well the narco saint. But, then there's also the Santo Pollero, San Toribio Romo. If you leave Guadalajara today, the very last gas station on your right, as you're heading north, there's a statue of San Toribio Romo, full of rosaries. He is the protector of undocumented migrants.

Immigration, I collect those. I have well over 100 corridos that deal with immigration. Narco corridos, I have a paper on narco corridos. Assassinations, whether it was John F. Kennedy— When John F. Kennedy, very popular president with Mexican‑Americans and Mexicanos en Mexico. When he was assassinated, literally overnight, there's 16 or 17 corridos composed.

Luis Donado Colosio, there's a lot of corridos about him as well, when he was assassinated. Presidents, you name the president, there's corridos about him, including several about Barack Obama.

Hometowns and regions and so on. Sputnik. 9/11Nine‑eleven. Las Torres Gemelas. The Twin Towers is a name of a corrido. The deaths of the women in Ciudad Juárez and on and on.

De un cuento nacen cien. In other words, the corrido inspired... It's a story. Right? And stories inspire other stories. And, here's just an example, the very, very, famous corrido; it's not from the Mexican Revolution. It’s called the corrido del Caballo Blanco. I wrote an entire paper on this corrido alone. And inspired a parody, kind of, from Lalo Guerrero and this is Una Burra Negra... Una Burra Nortena. This burra starts out in Tijuana. It gets photographed with kids sitting on it and it ends up in Guadalajara, which is where the Caballo Blanco, right?

But, in 2009, this year, The Crazy Pimps, a group from Texas came out with El Low Rider Blanco. [laughter]

It is about a car that starts out in San Anton, San Antonio, and tours around Texas and wins all these trophies and so on. [laughter]

And then, later, you can ask Big Jim there the joke about El Camello Blanco. [laughter]

See there's some recent corridos. Some very recent corridos. Michael Jackson just died. There are several corridos already about Michael Jackson and his life and death and so on. When President Obama was campaigning in Texas in 2008, there was one released with a Mariachi called "Viva Obama 2008." But, there's another Corrido Obama, Corrido a Barack Obama. Viva Obama, that's a different one, actually Norteño music.

There's a CD that the border patrol commissioned an ad agency and they developed a five‑corrido CD. It's called "Migra Corridos." [laughter]

 I have a copy of that. [laughter] And the issue there was to scare off potential migrants. In terms of the revolution, I don't think anybody's ever counted them. I'm sure there's well over 100 corridos. There are hundreds of these photographs. And we think about embedded journalists in modern wars. Well, for a period of time Pancho Villa had an embedded corridista, if you will.

And so, a lot of the corridos that deal with Pancho Villa are very favorable to him. Because if you're paying the composer... It's like, a lot of these narco corridos are paid for... Somebody pays these individuals to compose a corrido for them so they look good, right. The protagonist looks good in this story.

¿Continuamos con otro? A little more here.

"La Tumba de Villa."

[sings]

Cuántos jilgueros y cenzontles veo pasar
pero, ¡ay qué triste cantan esas avecillas!
van a Chihuahua y a llorar sobre Parral,
donde descansa el General Francisco Villa.

Lloran al ver aquella tumba
donde descansa para siempre el general
sin un clavel, sin flor ninguna,
sólo hojas secas que le ofrenda el vendaval.

[applause]

I think from an analytical perspective that there's, perhaps, no single event, other than the revolution... That there is much for Casasola in his fame and likewise for the corrido in terms of preserving this musical poetic form forever in the life of the Mexican spirit, if you will. And the corrido is fully engrained in these photographs, as I mentioned, as I said before, as the photographs are engrained in the words of the corrido. Let me continue...

In the old days, and this is even before the Revolution, these are from the Revolution, but trovadores, the performers of these corridos, went from plaza to plaza, from the ferias, wherever people gathered, outside of church, and basically carried the news of the day.

And, what they did is, they sold these broadsides, or broad sheets. And many of them were illustrated and that's how they made a living. A lot of the corridos were anonymous, dominio publico.

In fact, when Jim Griffith and I interviewed Don Leonardo Yañeas, “El Nano,” the composer of el Moro de Cumpas and asked him why did he put his name in the corrido, at the end. He put his name in there. So, everybody who sings it, and nobody can steal that. And he said, "Well, because I composed another one and somebody said it was theirs. I didn't put my name on it and they stole it."

But, in the old days, nobody put their name on it. And as someone heard it and might have memorized it... Remember Bill talking about illiteracy? Where people memorized the words, but they might have heard a word that actually wasn't said. So, next time they sang it, they sang the word they heard, when, in actuality, a different word...

So, over the course of time, one has these variants of verse here or somebody added a verse or deleted and... OK.

So, you heard just a list. There are literally, as I said, hundreds of these corridos. And the CD that'll be played, not tonight, because Guillermo's going to perform live. But, in the CD that will be played with the images... It's two hours long. [laughs] Two hours of corridos of the Mexican Revolution or of that period. So, you can imagine how many there are.

OK. There are lots of CDs, books... In fact, about this... I want to talk a little bit, just briefly... Let you know that the tradition is alive. It's alive here in Tucson. We, through Tucson Meet Yourself, annually have El Gran Concurso de Corridos in October. And, here at the University, now for about 11 years, the Poetry Center has been sponsoring a corridos contest in all of the high schools throughout Arizona. In fact, the deadline’s coming up this month or maybe it's passed already.

And then, the radio stations have something called La Hora del Corrido, lots of them, actually, in fact for some of them actually it's two hours. We're gonna end with... This corrido is not from the period, but it is about the Revolution and you'll listen to some of the words in terms of... Basically, the composer is saying, "Look the job is not done." You know. "The job is not done. We're asking Pancho Villa to come back and finish the revolution."

[sings "Pablo del Monte"]

Este es el corrido
de Pablo el que siembra
de Pablo el que sueña
de Pablo del Monte.

Este es el corrido
de Pablo el que sufre
por eso con cruces
escribe su nombre.

Sus padres murieron
peleando en la raya
en plena metralla
de los federales.

Querían que sus hijos
tuvieran parcelas,
un cacho de tierra
pa' hacer sus jacales.

Dile a Pancho Villa
que vuelva y termine
que vuelva y termine
la revolución.

[applause]