With those books as guides, I set out in May to find Chalino’s legacy to dive into the world of Mexican regional music, a hugely varied landscape of which narcocorridos are the most notorious part. In it he explained how Chalino’s raw style helped to turn narcocorridos into “the rap of modern Mexico and the barrios on el otro lado” the other side, the United States. The book argues persuasively that emigrants like Chalino have been building a newer version of their country, more daring and dynamic, north of the border.Įlijah Wald, a writer and musician, traveled the length of Mexico and Mexican America to write “Narcocorrido” (2002, Rayo/HarperCollins), a definitive exploration of the genre as told by its composers and singers.
Sam Quinones, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, gave Chalino a chapter in “True Tales From Another Mexico” (2001, University of New Mexico Press). I first learned about him from two journalists. Maybe like Johnny Cash, if Johnny Cash truly had been Folsom Prison material. Comparisons are superficial, but you could think of him as part Billy the Kid, part Bill Monroe. Mexicans know him as a valiente, a brave one: armed, dangerous and doomed. Chalino was the nickname of Rosalino Sánchez, one of the most influential composers and singers of narcocorridos. Many of these songs will be narcocorridos, stories of bandits and outlaws updated to the age of drug cartels and AK-47s, and known to some, because of their grim authenticity and bad reputation, as “the rap of modern Mexico.”Īnd in all these places, even if you listen only a little while, you will hear Chalino, or someone trying to sound like him. “Corridos are part of the literature of the common people,” wrote Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie Records and has spent a lifetime collecting and studying traditional Mexican music. In clubs, bars, swap meets and concert halls, from car radios and ringing cellphones, you will hear corridos, old-time folk ballads in the banda and norteño styles. Wherever you go in this rich, sprawling terrain getting off the freeways, driving through downtown and then heading generally south and east to suburbs like Vernon, South Gate, Lynwood, Huntington Park, El Monte, Pico Rivera you can follow the sounds of the Mexican countryside. You might think that would be impossible to do in Los Angeles, a landscape far too huge, too varied, too dizzying to ever sort out.īut if you stick to the Los Angeles that has been remade by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the parts shaped by waves of immigration, assimilation and reinvention, you travel on remarkably stable ground. But one way to get to a city’s heart is to immerse yourself in its music. There are many ways to know a city through its restaurants or museums, its landmarks or outdoor spaces. It was a short ride deep into the heart of Mexican Los Angeles, never far from the long shadow of Chalino Sánchez. With that we followed our new friends along wide, dark boulevards across Florence Avenue, up South Broadway to South Main Street, through a low-rise industrial terrain of concrete and stucco, past empty strip malls and auto shops, our route stitched by the glow of light poles, which far outnumbered royal palms this far south of downtown. After politely cautious small talk no, I wasn’t with Immigration they suggested we go together. No bands were playing tonight, the men said, but we could try the El Dorado Night Club, a couple of miles away, in South-Central Los Angeles.
We had a short Spanglish discussion about the situation. After a while I went out for air, and started talking with two men smoking by the back door. The only performers there were hostesses, lined up at the bar waiting to trade close attention for expensive drinks. It was enjoyable a toe-tapping beat at bone-shaking volume but we wanted live musicians. The jukebox was playing banda, Mexican brass music in the Sinaloa style, an oom-pah band wailing away in waltz time. Pablo, Omar and I got Tecates and a table.
The place was mostly empty couples here and there shared private islands in the gloom. We walked under its arching neon sign, past the steel-bar door into pulsing darkness.