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• 1 media/mariachi.jpg 2018-09-01T19:12:46-07:00 NORTENO & TEJANO 97 THE MUSIC OF NORTHERN MEXICO AND MEXICAN-AMERICANS image_header 2026-06-01T12:02:07-07:00 Header image: Chris Goldberg on Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

  
  
  
  MEXICAN AMERICANS

  Mexican Americans are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. Mexican Americans are the largest Latino ancestral population and one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that about 25% of foreign-born immigrants are Mexican. U.S. Census Bureau reports from 2010-2019 found that there are approximately 32 million Americans of Mexican heritage, representing 61.5% of all Latino Americans. Seventy-one percent of Mexican Americans were born in the U.S., and 60% reside in California and Texas.
  
  In the 1960s and 1970s there was an anti-assimilationist movement by young Mexican-Americans, especially students, to reclaim Mexican culture and identity. They rejected the term Mexican American as assimilationist and a means of "Whitening" and referred to themselves Chicano/a, a term that had previously been used as a slur. The movement demanded changes in education to include the history and culture of Mexicans, agitated for political opportunity, and promoted mexicanidad, or "Mexican-ness." Leaders of the movement and demonstrations by Chicanos were met with violence and murder by the police and Texas Rangers.

  Most Mexican Americans are of varying degrees of Spanish and indigenous descent, with numerous communities descending from immigrant populations from a wide range of countries across the world. Others are indigenous or primarily descended from one or more of over sixty indigenous groups in Mexico. Approximately 10% of the current Mexican American population, including Tejanos and Californios, are descended from early colonial Spanish settlers, and became U.S. citizens in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Mexicans living in the United States after the treaty was signed were forced to choose between keeping their Mexican citizenship or becoming an American citizen. Few chose to leave their homes in the States. The majority eventually adopted English as their first language and became Americanized.

  Although most of the Mexican American population was deemed White by the Treaty, many continued to face discrimination in the form of anti-Mexican sentiment, rooted in the idea that Mexicans were "too Indian" to be citizens. [Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies, NYU Press] Despite assurances to the contrary, the property rights of formerly Mexican citizens were often not honored by the U.S. government.^[24][25][26] ... During the Great Depression, Mexican Americans were subjected to an ethnic cleansing campaign of  mass deportation, which affected an estimated 500,000 to 2 million people.^{[27][28][29][30]} In violation of immigration law, the U.S. government allowed state and local governments to unilaterally deport citizens without due process. An estimated 85% of those ethnically cleansed were United States citizens  and 60% were birthright citizens. ^{[30] [Wikipedia, "Mexican Americans"]}

   

  TEJANO

  Video Presentation: Tejano 1 - Introduction to Mexican-American Music

  
  European immigrants in Mexico fled to Texas during the chaos and war that was set in motion by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). In Texas the dance music of the new European refugees mixed with the songs of Mexican Americans in a music that would eventually be called Tejano ("Texan") or Tex-Mex.
  
  Narciso Martínez, who was raised in the small Texas town of La Paloma, brought a new virtuosity to accordion playing. Martínez, the "father of Tejano conjunto," started to record in the 1930s when local radio stations began to broadcast Norteño and Tejano.  A conjunto is an ensemble based on the accordion and bajo sexto, as described in the following section. By the mid 1950s Tejano conjunto, influenced by Big Band music, expanded into larger ensembles — bandas and orquestas — that included various wind instruments and the standard jazz drum set.

  Oscar Martínez's banda was made up of the instrumentation that established the template for the banda — two trumpets, alto and tenor saxophones, guitar, bass, and drums. This type of banda peaked in the 1970s. [Brittanica]

  Martinez' song "El Tejano Enamorado," featured on his 1965 album "El Gallo Copeton," hit the radio before Martinez knew anything about the industry or what royalties were. It became popular with musicians across the country and has been recorded by more than 40 artists. He also has his own English version, "The Texas Playboy."
  [Michael Zamora, "Preserving Tejano's History," San Angelo Standard-Times, November 2011]

  A third type of ensemble, grupo, originated in the 1960s. Grupos were based on electric  instruments -- guitar, bass guitar, keyboards -- and drums. 

  NORTENO

  Norteño, also called música norteña, is a popular-music genre of Northern Mexico that developed in the late nineteenth century as a mix of regional Mexican music and the folk music of German, Polish, and Czech migrant workers and immigrants to Mexico. Norteño is closely associated with the music for polka (a Czech folk dance), waltz (a descendant of German folk dance) and corridos, ballads about love, everyday life, crime, and social problems. Norteño is one of three major genres under the umbrella term Mexican Regional Music. The other best-known categories are mariachi and Banda. The differences are summarized in this video.
  
  The accordion and bajo sexto are Norteño's most characteristic instruments. 
  
  The type of accordion played in Norteño is the diatonic button accordion (DBA) — diatonic because it can only produce the notes of the diatonic scale. The player operates the instrument by pressing buttons that allow interior reeds to vibrate as the bellows part of the instrument is pushed and pulled. (The buttons on the right-hand panel produce the melody, those on the left-hand panel produce supporting chords.) The DBA is favored in Norteño because it is relatively lightweight, nimble in operation, and because its bellows construction allows for an emphatically rhythmic style of playing dance music.
  
  The bajo sexto (literally, "bass sixth") is a member of the guitar family. The name refers to the low-pitched range of the bajo sexto (an octave lower than guitar), and to the six pairs (or courses) of strings. 
  
  The bajo sexto, like many string instruments built by Mexican artisans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was modeled on early types of Spanish guitars. The bajo sexto reached its full development in the nineteenth century and migrated northwards, where it became a popular instrument for weddings and dances. By 1930 the bajo sexto joined the accordion in the initial pairing that was to give rise to conjunto (literally, group or ensemble). Flaco Jimenez of San Antonio, Texas is a major figure in Norteño, having earned six Grammys over a sixty-year career.
  
  Flaco Jimenez and Max Baca play "Margarita", "La Paloma," and "Cada Vez Que Cae La Tarde"
  A conjunto Norteño is a Mexican folk ensemble that adds snare drum and a bass instrument to the DBA/bajo sexto pair. The instrument may be string bass, or tololoche as in this video by Norteños de Río Bravo, or electric bass guitar as in this live performance by Los Tigres del Norte. (The bass guitar is played by the vocalist in the foreground). A more recent substitute bass instrument is tuba, as in this corrido by Calibre 50. Cuban tumbadoras (conga drums) and bongó are also included in some modern conjuntos, such as "Mas Fuerte que Hercules" by La Leyenda (2012).
  
  Conjunto became popular within the transnational Mexican communities of the borderlands primarily through local radio stations in the "golden age" of the conjunto in the 1940s and early 1950s. Also, some conjuntos from Mexico — Los Alegres de Terán (active 1948-2007), Los Huricanes del Norte (1969-present), Los Rieleros del Norte (active 1984-present) — relocated to the United States. From the rural areas of its origin Norteño achieved popularity in urban centers and eventually in many Latin American countries. 
  
  
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  THE CORRIDO

  One of the enduring legacies of Norteño is corrido, a genre that recounts stories, often of heroic outlaw figures. The corrido has a long historical record stretching back to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 with songs praising revolutionaries such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. During a period when the vast majority of the rural population was illiterate, corridos served to spread news and to idealize the Revolution. Following the Revolution, the stories told in corridos often recount episodes involving smuggling, centering on the illegal importation of tequilla during Prohibition in the U.S. A subgenre, the narcocorrido, recounts stories of drug smugglers, praising the bravery, resilience, and wile of small-time dealers as well as famous drug lords for their ability to foil U.S. authorities in the "War on Drugs." Narcocorridos were often critical of the corruption of the Mexican government and drug interdiction officials on both sides of the border. Drug traffickers are known not only for violence, but also often for building schools, roads, and hospitals, and other philanthropic acts that improve the lives of the people in the community where they operate, while the government does nothing to help raise the people out of poverty.
  
  But the corrido is flexible in terms of subject matter. An important function of corridos is to tell of the trials and adversities of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, and the experiences of the Mexican-American working class. Corrido narratives are often critical of immigration policy and discrimination in the U.S., and encourage a sense of pride and community among Mexicans and their compatriots and descendants in the United States. Other corridos tell stories of romantic relationships.
  
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  "Los Tequilleros" ("The Tequilla Smugglers") by Los Alegres de Terán is an example of a classic corrido, consisting of three main sections: an introduction that places the story in a particular time and place and presents the main figures; the story itself; and a "farewell," a closing section that rounds out the form and summarizes the message of the story. The version by Los Alegres de Terán condenses the original into a short song in order to accommodate the format for early recordings, which could only contain a few minutes of music. (Click CC (closed captions) on the video screen for English subtitles.)
  
  Los Alegres de Terán (literally, "the happy ones from Terán") was a conjunto featuring Eugenio Abrego on accordion and Tomás Ortiz on bajo sexto. Founded in 1948 in the town of General Terán in the state of Nuevo León in northern Mexico, Los Alegres performed together for nearly sixty years, recorded over one hundred albums, and were the masters and chief exporters of Norteño music.
  
  Los Alegres achieved a number of “firsts." The duo became the first Norteño act to break out of the genre’s regional boundaries in northern Mexico and gain wide popularity on both sides of the border. They were the first to combine harmonizing vocal duet with the accordion and bajo sexto, rather than accompanying vocals with solo guitar. And Los Alegres were “the first to tap into the massive migrant market because they were a part of it. They modernized the themes of the traditional corrido, making the music more relevant to migrant workers who were not only moving north across the border into the US but were also flooding urban centers such as Mexico City in the mid-20th century.” [The Arhoolie Foundation and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center]  Cathy Ragland in her book, Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation Between Nations. writes that “the working class community in Mexico embraced (them) because of the group’s ability to merge sophisticated vocal harmonies and arrangements with an updated corrido narrative form that, in addition to love songs, included themes of travel, alienation, and nostalgic images of rural and ranchero life.”

  The regional success of Los Alegres coincided with the growth of the Mexican record industry in Mexico City. The duo ­– with its blend of country and romantic styles showcased in polished arrangements – drew the attention of producers in the capital [city], who historically had looked down on the working-class music of the border regions.  Musical trends in the capital were driven at the time by wider cultural forces in a country rapidly developing within a proud, post-revolutionary climate. Record executives sought out acts that reflected a modern, nationalistic, urban ethos. Los Alegres, who had already modernized the rustic, rural sound of norteño music, fit the bill.
  
  In the country’s highly centralized capital, the duo became beneficiaries of the industry’s powerful promotional machine, which vastly enhanced their international profile. They joined the famous “caravanas artísticas”—a caravan of stars composed of a rotating bill of major acts that hit the road as a touring attraction. The lowly country musicians found themselves rubbing shoulders and sharing stages with first-rate luminaries. [Compare the performances in this excerpt from a movie starring Lola Beltrán, Juan Gallardo, and other internationally famous Mexican singers/actors of the period].
             
  Traveling with the caravans throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s, Los Alegres appeared at premiere venues, from the capital’s Teatro Blanquita to The Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles. They also made cross-genre inroads, invited as guests at the first international polka festival held in Chicago in the early 1960s, where they shared the ethnic bill with other immigrant musicians from Eastern Europe, Germany, and elsewhere. They scored a long line of hits.

                     [The Arhoolie Foundation and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center]         
  
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  The most famous Norteño group still working today is Los Tigres del Norte ("The Tigers of the North"), whose songs represent the working-class Mexican-American population and speak of the experiences of Mexican immigrants. Los Tigres have done more than any other Mexican or Mexican-American artists to internationalize and modernize Norteño. The members of Los Tigres were born in Mexico but are now all naturalized American citizens. Over the past fifty-plus years the band has produced more than 50 albums and sold more than 35 million albums. Their honors so far include seven Grammy Awards, seven Latin Grammy Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Los Tigres consistently sell out stadium shows in Mexico and the U.S., commanding high-price tickets, with shows lasting for hours past the official close. (Their longest running concert lasted twelve hours, ending at 9:00 AM.)
  
  David Montgomery, writing for the Washington Post  in his report on the band's performance at the 2013 immigration rally in Washington D.C. writes that "Their lyrics are like news bulletins from the lives of immigrants." One such corrido,  "La Jalua del Oro" ("The Golden Cage") is described in the article as "the drama of a heartsick, undocumented immigrant. He feels trapped in his home, afraid of deportation, pining for Mexico, needing his American job, while his children forget their Spanish and don’t care about their roots." This video is of a performance of "La Jalua del Oro" during a show that Los Tigres gave at Folsom Prison in 2018. An English translation of the lyrics can be found here.  "Somos Más Americanos" ("We Are More American"), released in 2001, is one of the band's most famous songs and an example of the political bent that corridos often take. Representative of the narcocorrido genre is  "Muerte Anunciada" ("A Death Was Announced") about the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. (Click CC on the video to activate subtitles.)
  
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  Sam Quinones, in True Tales from Another Mexico, claims that Chalino Sanchez "democratized" the corrido by writing about common men he met in prison, street toughs, and low-level drug dealers in corridos like "Beto Lopez." The rail-thin, 5'8" Mexican from the drug-producing state of Sinaloa spoke no English and had only two or three years of education. When he was 11 his sister was raped and left naked on the doorstep of the family's home. Four years later he publicly shot the rapist to death and fled the city. En route to the U.S., he worked on farms and was for a time jailed in Tijuana on low-level drug charges, where he met his cousin, a guitarist. Chalino began singing corridos about the fellow prisoners, accompanied by his cousin. In 1984 he reached Los Angeles, married, and started to write corridos on commission from local Mexicans. In a few years he began to record the songs and sell them as cassette tape recordings, by hundreds at a time, at the local swap meets that were a staple of an Mexican-American unofficial economy in the L.A. area. In 1989 Chalino had found permanent band mates, and signed with a tiny local independent label. Although radio stations would not touch his material, his sales rocketed to the thousands.
  
  At the time, Mexican pop music "put a premium on puff and polish ... [Stars were expected to] lose any vestige of the rancho, of poverty. Male singers looked like playboys and tried sounding like opera stars." The Mexican and Mexican-American music industry, centered in big cities, was too distant to understand the people of the villages, hills, and ranches of the countryside.  But by 1990 Chalino, with his raw, unpolished style, began drawing huge crowds to Mexican clubs in L.A. His audiences were working-class Mexican-Americans and immigrants. Chalino made it cool for a young generation to reclaim a Mexicanidad, a sense of traditional Mexican culture reflecting rural roots instead of the bourgeois idols and images promoted by the recording industry. He helped revive rancheras, the traditional love songs of rural Mexico, such as his ranchera "Nieves de Enero" ("Snows of January"). Suddenly it became fashionable to wear cowboy hats and boots. Bands that had never been to the Mexican countryside started to picture themselves in videos and on album covers with donkeys and bales of hay.
  
  Chalino demanded money upfront for his songs instead of agreeing to royalties (a percentage of sales of recordings). He sold all rights to his songs for about $115,000. Royalties are now worth several millions, none of which his family will recover. In 1992 Chalino agreed to play a concert in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. He was kidnapped, driven out to a remote area and was later found shot in the head. He was 32 years old.
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  Calibre 50 is a Norteño quartet from Sinaloa founded in 2010. In keeping with some other modern Norteño groups, Calibre 50 features a drummer with a full drum set, and replaces the tololoche or bass guitar with tuba. The name of the band refers to the 50-caliber armor-piercing bullet, a metaphor for the strength that they hoped would propel them to transnational fame. The band gained a certain notoriety on YouTube for "El Tierno se Fue," leading to their 2011 breakout album "De Sinaloa para el Mundo." The band has been recording and touring at a furious pace ever since. Calibre 50 has a versatile portfolio of songs, including corridos, narcocorridos, Colombian/Mexican dance music known as cumbia, rancheras, and polkas.  Last year the group "broke the record for for the most number-one songs on the Billboard Regional Mexican Airplay chart with 17 songs." Calibre 50 has produced twelve albums. In 2018 the band became the first artists (along with J Balvin) to reach 1 billion streams on Pandora Radio. Several of their songs have topped the radio charts for Regional Mexican Music in both Mexico and the United States. [Information from "Calibre 50," Wikipedia and Thom Jurek, "Calibre 50," AllMusic]
  
  One of Calibre 50's chart-topping songs was released in 2018. "Corrido de Juanito" is the true story of an undocumented Mexican working in the United States, the family he left behind, and his own children.
  
  English translation of "Corrido de Juanito" lyrics
  
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   MODERN CORRIDOS

  jyDelgado provides a brief summary of the evolution of the corrido from the 1980's to the 2020's in this short video.