The corrido, a type of narrative folk song, comes from a region half in Mexico and half in the United States known as the Lower Rio Grande Border. Corridos, which flourished from about 1836 to the late 1930s, are part of a long-standing ballad tradition that has roots in eighteenth-century Spain. Sung heavy reliance on familiar linguistic and thematic conventions served to affirm the cohesiveness of Border communities.
Corridos take their name from the Spanish verb correr, meaning to run or to flow, for corridos tell their stories simply and swiftly, without embellishments. Figures of speech such as metaphors are generally rare in corridos, and when metaphors are used, they usually incorporate everyday images that are familiar to the songs’ conventional and readily recognizable to corrido listeners, reflects and strengthens the continuity of the corrido tradition.
The corrido is composed not only of familiar images but also of certain ready-made lines that travel easily from one ballad to another. This is most evident in the corrido’s formal closing verse, or despedida. The despedida of one variant of “Gregorio Cortez” is translated as follows: “Now with this I say the corrido’s maker asserts that the task of relating an authentic Border tale has been accomplished.
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