Accordions and AK-47s: Narcocorridos as Hidden Transcripts of Resistance

Music is a long time form of resistance, evident through scholarly journals about Gangsta rap for inner-city, African American youth. How does this translate to other minorities? Mexican drug ballads, known as narcocorridos, have been brushed off as violent and meaningless by the media since the 1930s. This thesis serves to redefine narcocorridos as another tool of resistance for the Latinx class, particularly drug traffickers and undocumented immigrants. As an attempt to provide insight into the living conditions, ideologies, and struggles of the voiceless Latinix class, this thesis analyzes a series of corridos (ballads) and narcocorridos. Theories of the hidden transcript, the badman, and the Mark of criminality were utilized to examine the lyrics of these corridos like its cousin genre, gangsta rap. Through the use of these theories, many counter-narratives and alternative histories of Latinx individuals were discovered. Narcocorridos in this thesis are argued as a tool used to resist negative dominant narratives and the Prison Industrial Complex was also concluded to be the main antagonist of those narratives.