Corridos

For a story I am doing for Borderbeat I wrote about Celestino Fernandez and corridos.

A corrido is the Mexican musical genre that is a mix of a poem and a song. Corridos typically have musical accompaniment, usually a guitar.

Corridos are based on true events and can range from political topics to baseball players. The point of a corrido is that you try to and get a message across.

Something that was not included was about corridos on the radio.

Fernandez and I discussed how corridos had been shortened since when they first came around.

"No one wants to listen to a 10 to 15 minute song on the radio," Fernandez said. "So a lot of them have been shortened."

Typically a corrido that is heard on the radio last 3-5 minutes. In today's musical age, a corrido ca range from having mariachis or to the traditional single guitar.

Fernandez said that an untrained ear will not be able to tell the difference between a Hispanic song and a corrido.

He said the way to tell the difference is that a corrido will begin with an introduction that says that it is a corrido or it is a true story.

Fernandez told me that when corridos where first recorded they were recorded on 45 rpm records. The length of corridos then did not allow for the entire song to be recorded on one side of the record. So halfway through the corrido the listener would have to flip over the record to hear the end.

There are many different kinds of corridos. Narcocorridos are corridos about drug smuggling and migracorridos are about immigration.

Fernandez told me that the Border Patrol went so far as to hire a corrido writer to write five migracorridos to try and scare illegal immigrants from illegally crossing the border.

Here is a corrido from Valentin Elizade.


This video is goes a little bit more in depth about corridos with Tucson local Jesus Garcia and some more corridos.