ABSTRACT
South of El Rio Bravo, narcocorridos are political artifacts used in the war against drug cartels. This chapter investigates narcocorridos and repackaged violence from a US perspective, as a musical form culturally rooted in the transnational space that is northern Mexico and the US southwest but that is increasingly economically based in the United States, in particular in California. The fact that narcocorridos are produced in the United States complicates the genre’s relation to politics, law, and regulation. It also shapes narcocorrido aesthetics and its institutional milieu. Globalization is changing the relevance of the nation-state, of locality, and of problematizing the semantic system connecting territory to citizenship and order. One may even argue that territorial modernity is eroding, and this erosion is partly the result of the modes of production defining that very modernity. Narcocorridos are song and music, and each has a distinctive history. The song, the lyrical element of the narcocorrido, belongs to the history of the corrido.
