The Border Heroic Corrido, the Mexican Revolution, and Greater Mexico

Based on the foregoing argument, Paredes also offers an implied thesYis to explain the relative absence of a heroic corrido tradition in Mexico's interior during most of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he implies an explanation for the heroic corrido's relatively sudden emergence in Central Mexico during the period of the Revolution.

Earlier, following Paredes, I suggested that certain enabling socio-cultural conditions for the corrido did not obtain in the Mexican interior prior to the Revolution, among these a collective adversarial consciousness, a prolonged social conflict, a sense of a violated communal social order, an orally based culture, heroic actions by local heroes, a sense of a "lost cause" in the face of a fundamental cultural

transformation, and, finally, of course, the general if latent sense of a ballad tradition awaiting the appropriate social conditions to foster its emergence. While these conditions did not prevail throughout most of the nineteenth century, they did coalesce during the period of Revolution, set in motion by the same fundamental international political economy that had affected the Lower Border. The same essentially North American capitalist forces had been at work in Mexico since Porfirio Díaz came to power in 1876. The late nineteenth century was a period of intense political centralization and economic development in Mexico, but the development was of questionable benefit to Mexico as a whole. It was a time "in which foreigners, with U.S. entrepreneurs at the forefront, took over much of the economy": "The state did not merely submit to foreign pressures on the debt: it threw open the doors to foreign investment in an attempt to marshall sufficient capital and technical expertise to generate significant economic growth for the benefit of domestic and foreign monopolies" (Cockcroft 1983:87).

With the huge exception of Mexico's poverty-stricken laboring masses, "almost all bourgeois and large-landholder interests prospered from vast increases in production and trade" supported by the Díaz dictatorship, which "institutionalized a repressive apparatus and an ideological system emphasizing political stability, science, technology, and material progress" (Cockcroft 1983:87)—but only for a few and to the massive social detriment of many, particularly the large poor rural sectors. The latter's social condition, always precarious, worsened under the Díaz regime (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458). Through legal coercion and state power, these large sectors lost what remained of their traditional landholdings. In southern Mexico, "by the early twentieth century most of the villages in rural Mexico had lost their ejidos [commons] and some 134 million acres of the best land had passed into the hands of a few hundred fantastically wealthy families" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458).

In the north, traditionally a region of small, individually owned ranch holdings (not unlike those of pre-1848 south Texas), "tendencies to concentration of landed property . . . had been fierce"; in Chihuahua, "by 1910 seventeen persons owned two-fifths of the state," while "95.5 percent of all heads of families held no individual property in land" (Wolf 1969:33). After some postindependence reform, the oppressive hacienda (plantation) system of the Spanish colonial period was reinstituted, in the north and south, and "over one half of all rural Mexicans

lived and worked on the haciendas by 1910" (Meyer and Sherman 1979:458). Severe social deprivation also befell the other half, the "free," itinerant, easily exploitable labor force that moved from hacienda to hacienda. And, as might be expected, their urban counterparts fared no better (Cockcroft 1983:88–94).

Such deprivation in complex modern societies goes hand in hand with high rates of illiteracy among the dominated—at least until such time as technological advancement requires an "adequately" literate labor force. Estimates of illiteracy during the Porfiriato range as high as 84 percent (Cockcroft 1983:88). Therefore, one can reasonably assume that among the most deprived social sectors, orality continued to be a primary mode of communication and artistic expression. An important difference between this period of class orality and others earlier in Mexican history was its predominantly Spanish character; that is, by the late nineteenth century Mexico was predominantly a mestizo, Spanish-speaking nation (Heath 1972:53).

During the late nineteenth century, then, Paredes's three initial critical conditions—the political disruption of a rural, communal social order; a period of prolonged and intense social domination; and a predominantly Spanish-language, class-based, mestizo oral culture—came together as never quite before. Politically, they led to the Revolution of 1910; aesthetically, to the emergence of the heroic corrido in the Mexican interior.

Three other important factors also contributed to the emergence of both revolution and balladry. First, in response to the massive scale of oppression under Díaz, the popular participation in rebellion was massive as well, distinguishing this period of revolution from others in Mexican history, when the most deprived sectors of the populace participated on an inconsistent and piecemeal basis. The Revolution of 1910 was truly a popular, peasant rebellion (Wolf 1969:3–50). Second, the vanguard of the Revolution, unlike earlier Mexican leaders drawn from the more elite elements, was composed of men close to the people and to folk traditions like the corrido. Finally, we must note the decisively northern character of the Revolution. With few exceptions, such as Emiliano Zapata of the southern state of Morelos, the strongest leadership and the strongest participation came from the northern Mexican states (Cline 1969, Knight 1986:11–62).

This last point is critical because it lends even greater strength to Paredes's thesis concerning the border origins of the heroic corrido. As

he notes, "It would be little short of wonderful if the corrido had suddenly come into being at two different places and two different times. Either the Lower Border corrido owes its existence to the Greater Mexican form, or the Greater Mexican corrido is indebted to the more localized Texas-Mexican ballad" (1958b:105). The latter option seems more likely. As Villa's norteño soldiers sang their ballad around the evening campfire near Celaya in April 1915, it is likely that they were singing in a form they had learned in their home region of Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande from Texas. It was a form that their regional neighbors in the Lower Border states and likely their kinfolk, the TexasMexicans, had been employing in their struggle against Anglo domination since the 1850s. A parallel set of social conditions in central Mexico later in the century provided further nurturance for this poetic form, which, like much of the revolutionary energy, came down into Mexico from the north. Formed through an earlier experience with social domination along the Lower Border, the heroic corrido became an expressive form for all of greater Mexico during the Revolution.

The United States continued to support the Porfiriato, and early on the Mexican Revolution "in terms of the key interests of peasants and workers . . . was defeated " (Cockcroft 1983:112). This defeat added the final ingredient to the forging of the corrido on the southern side of the border—the sense of a lost, though just, cause. After the war many of Mexico's poor went north, crossing the border and making their way principally to the Southwest but also to the Midwest and to Pennsylvania. Most of these immigrants were from the northern Mexican states, where the fighting had been particularly harsh. They established permanent residence in the United States and joined earlier generations of Mexicans who had settled here. As they moved beyond Texas, they introduced the heroic corrido into California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as the Midwest.

In this amalgamation of greater Mexican peoples, we also find an amalgamation of many distinct, though closely related, cultural forms, among them the heroic corrido. For the corrido continued to be sung wherever Mexican people traveled and settled. The corrido corpus now included ballads of Lower Border conflict and those newer ones from the Revolution. A corridista singing in the central market area of San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s would sing of both Celaya and Cortez, as would his counterpart in a plaza in Guadalajara, Jalisco, for people and songs also moved south when workers returned home. North and

south of the border, audiences continued to be fascinated by the theme of strong men fighting for their rights and for their people, a theme cast in a complex poetics. It is this imagistically powerful unification of the personal, the artistic, and the social that appealed to the predominantly male corrido community and made the corrido a master poem of social struggle.