Notes on the wire: ballads, biases, and borders of performance journalism

Abstract

Performance plays a lead role in the story of journalism. From the speeches of town criers to the spectacles of television comedians, the news has always relied on performers. Media scholars, however, have largely accounted for journalism’s history with a bias toward space and print at the expense of time and performance. This article argues that corridistas (balladeers) balance the spatial bias of print with the temporal bias of performance in order to preserve the historical connection between music and news. Corridos (news ballads) induce scholars and reporters to rethink the role of objectivity in journalism with methods that show more than one truth. A textual analysis of two ballads from different centuries illuminates the importance and relevance of performance journalism today.

“Los Músicos”: Mexican Corridos, the Aural Border, and the Evocative Musical Renderings of Transnational Youth

“…Corridos have largely been understood as a form of social protest and as a medium to challenge the status quo (Simonett, 2001b). With its roots in the nineteenth century, the corrido tradition-considered a "border rhetoric" (Noe, 2009)-amplified forms of repression and countered the hegemonic discourses of print journalism in Mexico (Paredes, 1958;Westgate, 2013). Corridos chronicled the histories of those who were being systematically dispossessed by US expansionism and of Mexican communities' collective defiance of US colonial domination (Paredes, 1958;Saldívar, 1993).…”

Toward aCorridistaConsciousness: Learning From One Transnational Youth's Critical Reading, Writing, and Performance of Mexican Corridos

“…Since the 19th century, corridos have amplified issues of repression and contested the hegemonic discourses of print journalism in Mexico (Paredes, 1958;Westgate, 2013). Corridos, which have historically been written in Spanish, have long been central to the self-determination and literary landscape of Mexican people (Paredes, 1958).…”

“…Despite the popularity of corridos, there have been very few investigations of the adolescents who read and write corridos as a literacy practice. There have been, however, extensive inquiries into corridos as an adult activist literacy practice in Mexican American and Chicana/o Studies (Herrera-Sobek, 1993;Paredes, 1958), rhetoric and composition studies (Noe, 2009), folklore studies (McDowell, 2012;Simmons, 1957), and media studies (Pedelty, 2004;Westgate, 2013). Within the field of adolescent literacy, there remains a paucity of research on the academic affordances of corridos in the lives of bilingual transnational young people.…”

El corrido mexicano en tiempos de YouTube: memoria colectiva, agencia cultural e hibridación en el caso Ayotzinapa

“…Realizar esta indagación es relevante, dado que el corrido es un género que se puede prestar a movimientos sociales contemporáneos globales como ruta alternativa de construcción de relatos. Incluso, cuestionan la hegemonía de versiones institucionales, para también considerar testimonios comunitarios de gran valor periodístico e histórico en la exploración subalterna de hechos (Westgate, 2013).…”