In the ranch corral
they managed to surround him.
A little more than 300 men
and there he gave them the slip.
There around Encinal
from all that they say
They had a shoot-out
and he killed another sheriff.
Gregorio Cortéz said,
with his pistol in his hand,
“Don’t run, you cowardly Rangers
from one lone Mexican.”
He turned toward Laredo
without a single fear,
“Follow me, you cowardly Rangers,
I am Gregorio Cortéz.”23
Taken together, the various variants of the Cortéz corrido have been described by the critic Raymund Paredes as “a kind of Mexican American epic that pulls together the basic themes of contemporary Mexican American writing: ethnic pride, a forceful rejection of unflattering Anglo stereotypes, and, through celebration of Cortéz’s marvelous vaquero skills, an affirmation of the Mexican American’s rootedness in the Southwest.”24
In 1876 Porfirio Díaz engineered a coup and became president of Mexico. In order to help finance the industrialization of agriculture, mining, and transportation, the Díaz government encouraged investment by North Americans, who were benefiting from the expansion of the U.S. economy during the decades after the Civil War. Industrialization and in particular the building of 15,000 miles of railroad track between 1880 and 1910 transformed the Mexican economy, bringing about the decline of the communal village and forcing many peasants to become migrant workers; increasingly these workers—called braceros—traveled across the border to work in the United States. These braceros often competed with freed slaves for work, and like the Chinese, they were identified by white Americans as equivalent to blacks and treated in a similarly discriminatory fashion. In addition, they shared with Chinese sojourners the sense that they were merely transient residents of the United States: according to Américo Paredes, “the Mexican immigrant’s sense of continuing to ‘pass through’ after twenty years or more of residence in the United States contributed to his problems, since he remained a perennial visitor in a foreign country, without children born in the Uiteed States in his own way of thinking.”25 The sufferings of the bracero were also captured in the stanzas of the corrido, which began to bear titles like “Los Deportados” (“The Deported Ones”), “La Discriminación,” “Los Enganchados” (“The Work Gang”), and “Tristes Quejas de Un Bracero” (“A Bracero’s Complaint”).
The outbreak of the Revolution of 1910 produced what Paredes calls “the Greater Mexican heroic corrido,” but the theme of border conflict continued to dominate Mexican American balladry. What the Mexican Revolution did produce was a massive influx of new braceros who would fill the need for cheap foreign labor created after the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, 1892, and 1902 and the U.S. government’s “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Japan in 1907—all of which combined to curtail the flow of working-class Asians into the Western states.
It is thought that as many as 100,000 Mexican immigrants entered the United States during the years surrounding the Mexican Revolution; with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, a second wave of immigration began that would bring over one million Mexican immigrants to the United States by the end of the 1920s.
I’m going to tell you, gentleman,
all about my sufferings.
Since I left my country,
to come to this nation.
It must have been about ten at night,
the train began to whistle.
I heard my mother say,
“There comes that ungrateful train
that is going to take my son.”
“Good-bye to my beloved mother.
Give me your blessings.
I am going abroad,
where there is no revolution.”26
These lines from the corrido “El Deportado” (“The Deportee”), recorded by Los Hermanos Buñuelos in 1929, are typical of the shift that occurred in the border ballad during this period of immigration. Throughout this period, as its subject shifted from the vaquero to the bracero, the corrido remained the primary cultural form through which the suffering of Mexicans in United States found expression. “El Deportado” concludes with these verses addressed to the people of Mexico:
Oh my beloved countrymen
I suffered a lot.
The light skinned men are very wicked.
They take advantage of the occasion.
And all the Mexicans
are treated without compassion.
There comes a large cloud of dust,
with no consideration.
Women, children and old ones
are being driven to the Border.
We are being kicked out of this country.
Good-bye beloved countrymen,
we are being deported.
But we are not bandits,
we came to work.
I will wait for you in my homeland,
there is no more revolution.
Let’s leave my dear friends,
we will be welcomed
by our beautiful nation.
Taken together, what “El corrido de Gregorio Cortéz” and “El Deportado” demonstrate is that the abiding theme of the Mexican American corrido is the racial oppression suffered at the hands of Anglo-Americans who sought to deny Mexican American citizens their rights and to exploit poor Mexicans seeking to better their fortunes in the United States.
Detribalization
In 1871 the federal government passed the first in a series of laws designed to assimilate Native Americans by weaning them from their tribal orientation, a process that would lead to the conferral of citizenship rights by the Dawes Act sixteen years later. What Congress did in 1871 was to endorse a policy that treated Native Americans as individuals and wards of the government, and ceased to recognize the legal standing of tribes. The weaning process continued in 1883 when the judicial powers of chiefs were dissolved and transferred to a system of federal courts. Finally, in 1887, the Dawes Act, which Theodore Roosevelt described as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass,” formally dissolved tribes as legal bodies and redistributed tribal lands among families and unmarried individuals.27 Heads of families were allotted 160 acres, individuals eighty acres, with the stipulation that the lands were to be held in trust for twenty-five years without taxation, so that the Native Americans could learn to profit from the land and to assume the responsibilities that land-holding entailed, including the payment of taxes. Once the twenty-five years had elapsed, the Native Americans would become full owners of their allotments, free to sell or lease