Authors: Ioan Grillo
“Ah, so many mounted Rangers,
Just to take one Mexican!”
4
When rock ’n’ roll kick-started the modern recording industry, the door opened for Mexican music to hit the charts. Ritchie Valens (or rather Ricardo Valenzuela) turned a Mexican folk song into an international hit with “La Bamba” as early as 1958, followed by Carlos Santana’s blend of Latin music and rock in the sixties. But
corridos
found their true expression from three brothers and a cousin who trekked north to work as ranch hands in Southern California in 1968. Taking their name from an immigration official who called them Little Tigers, Los Tigres del Norte were playing at Sunday congregations in a plaza in San Jose, California, when they were spotted by impresario Art Walker (a limey like myself) and signed to his upstart Fama Records. This deal set off the mammoth career that would see the Tigres churn out forty records, win almost every major award on both sides of the border, and tour nonstop for the next four decades, earning them the title of the Mexican Rolling Stones.
Just as Jamaican legend Bob Marley was given a rock touch to market his music, Walker encouraged Los Tigres to use a pumping electric bass and drums alongside the earthy accordion. The result was a raging success, defining the new
corrido
sound that still plays today; the Tigres tunes were catchy and danceable while retaining the luscious melancholy tone and polka rhythm of the Mexican ballad.
The Tigres soon discovered the popularity of songs about outlaws, with their third single, “Contraband and Treason,” boosting them to success. The 1974 record, which is probably the first
narcocorrido
on vinyl, tells the tale of drug runners Emilio Varela and Camelia the Texan driving over the border at San Diego with pounds of marijuana stuffed into their car tires. After they arrive in a dark street in Los Angeles and hand over the herb for bags of cash, Camelia whips out a pistol and guns Emilio down, making away with the loot. The song shot to anthem status, inspiring covers from several rock bands and a 1977 movie. Listening to it now, it sounds like an innocent reminder of the good old days, like happy-go-lucky Mexican traffickers in Cheech and Chong films rather than psycho killers running around in ski masks.
While the Tigres were hesitant about showing off their narco side, an authentic gangster crooner emerged in Rosalino “Chalino” Sánchez. If the Tigres were the Rolling Stones of
corridos
, then Chalino was their Tupac Shakur—lovably crazy, proudly from the slums, and living a truly violent life. In and out of jail and caught up in various shootings, he was seen as a real villain, unlike the Tigres with their mullet haircuts and shiny suits. He unabashedly sang and swore about the trafficker lifestyle, pushing the limits of the genre, and became recognized as the godfather of the hard-core narco ballad.
In true outlaw style, Chalino’s own bloody life and death is surrounded by myth. It has been most thoroughly documented by
Los Angeles Times
reporter Sam Quinones, who traipsed from village squares to prison records to pen Chalino’s biography in the 2001 work
True Tales from Another Mexico.
5
His story begins with an episode remarkably similar to that of Pancho Villa himself. When Chalino was an eleven-year-old growing up on a Sinaloan ranch, a local tough raped his sister. Four years later, Chalino stormed into a party, shot the rapist dead, exchanged fire with the rapists’ two brothers, then fled to Los Angeles. For the rest of his teenage years, Chalino worked as a car washer, drug dealer, and coyote (migrant smuggler) before he was hit by the double trauma of seeing his brother murdered and getting tossed into Tijuana’s notorious Mesa prison in 1984.
The death of his brother propelled Chalino on his path to fame. He composed his first
corrido
about his slain brother, then started charging fellow inmates to write ballads about them. Back on the streets of Los Angeles, he used his newfound talent to document the lives of the Mexican underworld, getting paid for ballads in cash as well as gold chains, watches, and embellished pistols. Seeing the success of his sound, he was soon dubbing his tapes and selling them out of a car trunk in true underground style. Word spread and suddenly he was performing in sold-out California clubs in front of thousands and signing with a major record label. It was the American Dream—for a glorious moment.
The bloody events of 1992 then turned him into a legend. First in a January concert in the California desert city of Coachella, a drunken reveler clambered onstage with a gun and shot at Chalino. True to his reputation, Chalino pulled out a pistol and returned fire, starting a shoot-out that left seven people injured and at least one dead. The incident flashed on ABC News and his sales skyrocketed. Four months later, after playing to a roaring crowd in his home state of Sinaloa, he was detained by men in police uniforms. The next morning his body was found dumped by a canal with two bullets in his head—one more Sinaloan killing that has never been solved.
Chalino was gone, but the sound he created exploded. While music critics lambasted his cursing and nasally out-of-tune voice, he was a sensation among the roughnecks of Sinaloa and the Chicano gangbangers in California. Soon hundreds of imitators from both sides of the border churned out hard-core
narcocorridos
. Brought up on gangster rap, the U.S.-born crowd immediately identified with the drug lyrics, guns on album covers, and parental advisory stickers. Shaved-headed urban gangbangers even began to dress in Chalino’s cowboy style—a white sombrero cocked to one side, a gaping belt buckle, crocodile-skin boots, and a pistol tucked in jeans. As Quinones sums up the crooner’s influence: “In Chalino’s hands, Mexican folk music had become dangerous urban dance music.”
Two decades after Chalino,
narcocorridos
are more popular than ever. On the streets of Culiacán, market stalls sell hundreds of CDs whose covers show artists with Kalashnikovs, clad in cowboy hats, ski masks, or paramilitary uniforms. The music screams out of luxury pickup trucks and shiny, white Hummers with blacked-out windows, which speed down the road jumping stoplights. It rocks nightclubs full of women with inch-long synthetic nails embedded with precious stones, and men with alligator-skin boots who fire guns in the air to the beat. And it is plucked by quartets of musicians hanging out on street corners waiting to be hired to play a few tunes in the house of some drunken or coked-up revelers.
With ballads in such demand, thousands of young artists are trying to make their name as the next Chalino or Valentín Elizalde. Culiacán alone boasts five labels producing
corridos
, and each one has about two hundred balladeers on its books.
I visit the studio of Sol Records, which is built out of a two-room house in the Culiacán suburbs. As I stroll in on a midweek afternoon, it is packed with dozens of musicians clutching handfuls of their CDs and laying down tracks for their new wannabe hits. In the soundproof cabin, a band records a ballad about the latest bloodshed in one have-to-get-it-right take. The singer unleashes his lyrics, then swings his arms in the air, miming the firing of an automatic rifle.
Sol’s producer, Conrado Lugo, is a chirpy, gargantuan man in his thirties who runs the label started by his father. He tells me about the surreal world of the Sinaloan
corrido
scene as an endless stream of musicians pass through. Conrado confesses that he personally preferred heavy metal as a teenager and didn’t like producing drug ballads at first.
“I used to be depressed and hate my job. Then my dad said, ‘Do you like having a brand-new pickup truck? Do you like having a gold watch? Then start liking
corridos
.’ He was right, and over time I have learned to love this music.”
It is certainly a good business for Sol Records. Rather than the label financing albums, the
narcocorrido
bands themselves or their patrons pay up front for the recording sessions. One of the bands’ main sources of income is playing at private parties, bashes often held by the very villains they sing about. Even midlevel groups can make up to $10,000 for a night performing for these gold-chained clients. Big stars can charge an incredible $100,000 for an evening’s entertainment.
But more crucially, traffickers actually pay composers to write songs about them. Every artist I talk to openly quotes the price they charge for penning a
corrido
about a gangster. While rookie composers ask for as little as $1,000 to write some verses about an up-and-coming thug, accomplished musicians can ask tens of thousands of dollars for a tune about a ranking cartel member. Though some traffickers have money to burn, they also see this as a good investment. A ballad in their name means prestige, and on the street this can mean respect and contracts.
“For the narcos, getting a ballad about them is like getting a doctorate,” Conrado says.
Conrado tells me the story of one low-level trafficker who paid to get a particularly catchy ballad made about him. Soon everyone played it on his car stereo.
“The crime bosses were like, ‘Bring me the guy from that song. I want him to do the job for me.’ So he rose through the ranks because of the song.”
“So what has happened to him now?” I asked.
“Oh, they killed him. He got too big. It was because of the song, really.”
I ask Conrado if he feels bad glorifying gangsters, if the music promotes the bloodshed that is now killing these same musicians. He gives me the identical answer that I hear from dozens of composers and crooners: they are just storytellers describing the reality they see around them; and they are giving the public what it wants. The same arguments are used to defend gangster rap. Perhaps they have a good point. Songs don’t kill people; guns kill people (although not according to the NRA).
“There is a lot of violence now. But musicians didn’t invent it. In most of the cases of these singers who were shot, it had nothing to do with their music. They had beefs about a woman or money or something. Or they were in the wrong place or with the wrong people.”
How about the singers with guns on their album covers? I ask him.
“That is just posing. That doesn’t mean they are a gangster. Anybody can feel good posing with a gun. I do myself.” He then yanks a cell phone out of his pocket showing a screen photo of him standing with an enormous high-tech-looking rifle.
Still, Conrado concedes, as the war has gotten bloodier, so have the songs.
Corridos
are released within days or even hours of breaking news stories, such as the killing of the Beard Beltrán Leyva or a major massacre. Several ballads tell the tale of a villain known as “the stew maker,” who dissolved the bodies of three hundred victims of the Tijuana Cartel in acid. A popular tune called “Black Commando” describes the ski-masked hit squads that kidnap and torture. To keep up with this brutality, a new subgenre has emerged called
corridos enfermos
, or sick ballads. One such
corrido
graphically describes killers going into a house and mutilating a whole family.
Conrado introduces me to one of the most hard-core new bands on the scene. The group’s name itself pulls no punches: Grupo Cartel de Sinaloa, or Grupo Cartel for short. It is not hard to guess their mafia affiliation.
“I wanted a name that said it like it is, with no disguise,” the thirty-three-year-old composer César Jacobo tells me. “We are not hypocrites like some of these stars. This is the life we lead.”
Grupo Cartel is not internationally known, but in Culiacán, it plays packed outdoor events with thousands of revelers. It is a classic
corrido
four-piece with a drummer, electric bass, twelve-stringed guitar, and accordion vocalist. The singer is just eighteen, with an incredibly powerful, melodic voice; the other musicians are in their twenties. When they turn up for us to take photos, they wear matching cream-colored suits and red shirts. César wears blue jeans and a trendy designer shirt beneath a well-trimmed goatee. He makes sure he is out of the photos. “Look mean for the camera,” he tells the band with a grin.
César is clearly in charge. As well as writing the songs, he oversees the money, connections, concerts, and everything else. He also seems to be the figure of authority among another dozen tour managers, roadies, and hangers-on. As we travel from studios to seafood restaurants over a couple of days, he keeps answering a pair of cell phones in a hushed voice. But he gives me his full attention and is pleased that I will be putting the group in my story for a British Sunday magazine.
“You are going to make us famous in London. People will be listening to Robbie Williams and Grupo Cartel,” he jokes.
The scene around Grupo Cartel illustrates the bizarre cross section of people in modern Sinaloan
narcocultura
. Kids from slums and poor ranches mix with private-school graduates. Sinaloan narcos have long sent their kids to expensive schools and mixed in high society. For other wealthy children it can be considered cool to dress up like hoodlums or hang around with the sons of capos. Just as in the United States, gangster culture has an allure that ascends class boundaries. In the new generation, you can find juniors from trafficking families looking like yuppies and the offspring of rich ranching families looking like traffickers.
Young Sinaloans in this hybrid narco culture are known as
buchones
and use a clothing style that mixes urban and rural, traditional and modern.
Buchones
like cowboy hats and ostrich-skin boots, but also sneakers and brightly colored baseball caps.
Buchona
girls typically dress in expensive tight dresses and boast ample jewels and breast operations, showing off the wealth of their gangster boyfriends.
César himself moved from rural poverty when he was ten to grow up in a Culiacán slum. He loves that middle-class and rich kids in Sinaloa listen to his music. “We played at this one mansion to the sons of a businessman. And they all treated us like celebrities.” He smiles. “That makes me feel great. Like we have achieved something.”