In the second season of Breaking Bad an episode is introduced by a mariachi band singing about the exploits of Walter White and his chemically perfect meth. I had originally thought that the song was simply written for the show but in fact there is an entire genre of music based around lyrics depicting drug traffickers and cartel hit men as folk heroes in Mexico. These songs are the most accurate depiction of what is happening along the U.S./Mexico border and reflect upon these issues with firsthand experience. The singers of these Mexican drug ballads (or narcocorridos) try to emulate the same image as the traffickers themselves, wearing cowboy attire and often taking pictures with a gun on their hip.

Chalino Sanchez
The Tupac Shakur of this strange mariachi gangster polka scene was Chalino Sanchez. But if you compare the two, Sanchez makes Tupac look like a bitch. Both had multiple murder attempts in their life, but when Sanchez was attacked by a cartel death squad on stage in Coachella California, he pulled out a gun of his own in self-defense, killing two and injuring five. I mean sure, Tupac got shot, East coast West coast, whatever. But he didn’t even manage to shoot anyone back. In my opinion, white suburban kids should be walking around with Chalino Sanchez airbrushed on their XXL black t-shirts instead of Tupac or Biggie. Just like Tupac and Biggie, Sanchez was eventually killed and the murder was never solved. The most recent killing within this musical community was of Sergio Vega, one of the few singers in this genre to experience any success in the United States. Apparently, there were rumors that he had been killed before hand and as a result of announcing these rumors as falsehood in a radio interview; cartels northern Mexico hunted him down and killed him after a dramatic car chase through a small village in Sinaloa.
There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between gangster rap and narcocorridos. Their creation allowed for more artists preaching a similar message to get noticed. Artists like N.W.A. and Ice-T became bigger within mainstream culture in the late eighties, allowing artists like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to thrive in the early nineties. Songs about gang life and drug dealing were simply a reflection of the world around them at the time. After the eighties, the drug trafficking routes through the Caribbean had been cut off by the United States government; as a result the focus was put on the Mexican border as a means of shipping their product into the U.S. This caused a massive wave of violence and turmoil in Mexico that goes on to this day. This has caused for Mexican narcocorridos to have a new relevance near the border. In fact, once these songs made it into the U.S. it didn’t take long for them to get banned from the airwaves like they were singing “Fuck the Police” or some shit. The other side of this is the influence the music has had on youth within the area. Old white people in Washington blamed the crack epidemic on rap groups that were apparently promoting a criminal lifestyle and a similar judgment has been made towards their Mexican counter parts. Narcocorridos have been banned from the airwaves throughout the Southwest for the same reasons. It’s pretty obvious that although there is some influence from the music, poverty is the biggest motivator.
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Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman
Head of the Sinaloa Cartel, was ranked 41st on the list of most powerful people in the world by Forbes and was counted as the 701st richest person in the world, listed among people like the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the heir to the Campbell Soup empire. With numbers like this it is obvious that drug culture is what‘s causing the creation of mariachi music, instead of vice versa. Music is simply a reflection of what is happening around the people producing it and to say that they are the cause of it is illogical. It’s not as if these musicians (be it gangster rappers or the singers of narcocorridos) are creating these issues, because if these problems in society didn’t already exist there would be nothing for them to write about and N.W.A. would have never caused the Focus on the Family organization to piss themselves. To think that a rap group was put on the FBI watch list is absurd in hindsight, but it adds mythology to the genre and they definitely sold a couple million records as a result. Ultimately, the government and different religious organizations will always use music as a scapegoat for problems they are often the cause of. By blaming N.W.A. for the rise in gang activity and banning narcocorridos from the airwaves to quell the influx of drugs into the U.S. the government takes the responsibility of solving these problems off their shoulders. It’s a pretty weak tactic that rarely fools anyone other than the same demographic that voted for Bush, twice.

-ALEX ROIBAS

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