E3W Literature | University of Texas

The Migrant Border Ballads Project
The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
University of Texas at Austin

Reviewed by Lydia Wilmeth

The early months of 1979 saw Carla Hagen and Dan Dickey, along with their photographers, Maria Flores and Scott Van Osdol, traveling throughout southwest Texas in search of song. Hagen, the principal researcher behind The Migrant Border Ballads Project, says that she was inspired to search the south Texas landscape for migrant laborers and corridistas by listening to the songs both on the radio and at the University of Texas under the mentorship of Américo Paredes. The Mexican and Mexican-American corrido is a highly formulaic ballad that performs several functions in the community: one song may communicate information, entertain, and deliver a profound message. Each cassette tape in the archive generally begins with a song and settles into an accompanying story, supporting Paredes’s observation about the corrido tradition that “after the song is sung there is a lull. Then the old men, who have lived long and seen almost everything, tell their stories.” These stories, evoked in song, are what Hagen and her colleagues sought to explore. Over the course of one year they found that they had not only found stories, but had forged relationships. That tale, ultimately, is the one The Migrant Border Ballads Project tells.

The project, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was designed to explore the personal and poetic side of an undertaking often viewed as primarily economic. The archive thus encompasses several media: a manuscript of approximately 400 pages offers background material from an academic perspective as well as an appendix with lyrics and translations of each of the corridos; a series of cassette tapes documents the interviews with each of the songwriters/poets; and, finally, two collections of photographs provide a visual narrative of the lives and locales under investigation.

The manuscript, written by Carla Hagen, outlines the context in which The Migrant Border Ballads Project was conceived, as well as the researchers’ findings. As their relationships with the informants progressed, Hagen admits: “We realized that migrants are as varied as people themselves; that their experiences ranged from tragic to comical, from suffering to mild prosperity.” Part of the goal of the manuscript, then, is to document the reasons—historical, cultural, and geographical—for that variety. Beginning with a discussion of migration and farm work, Hagen documents the various ways in which immigrant and migrant workers have established themselves in the United States and the tradition of song that has emerged from that experience. Examining three different groups—the lives of Mexican-Americans whose families had lived in areas along the border for generations, the braceros, and los indocumentados—Hagen offers brief histories of each experience in order to better convey the way each has been represented in the songs of the fields and on the road. Hagen then moves from a brief ethnography of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas to an extensive discussion of “the corrido” generally. She provides a history of the corrido tradition, touching on the work of seminal scholars such as Américo Paredes and María Herrera-Sobek, then provides an exhaustive breakdown of corridos according to their thematic content. Among the major themes are homesickness for Mexico and Texas, union activities, migration as a journey, La Crisis (The Great Depression), and racism and injustice. Each theme reflects the variety of the im/migrant experience. Noticeably absent from this section, however, are many of the voices that appear on the cassette tapes; rather, Hagen focuses more on such commercially successful talents as Esteban Jordan or Eulalio Gonzalez. With the notable exception of the poet, Arnulfo Castillo, the men that Hagen and her colleague, Dan Dickey, interview remain generally excluded from the manuscript despite the fact that it was inspired by their stories and songs.

But the reader always has recourse to the cassette tapes themselves. The tapes include conversations, recitations, and performances from the more than fifteen men Hagen and Dickey interviewed. Originally seeking ten informants, the researchers found that each acquaintance led to an entire network of new experiences. The most fruitful of these connections was to be found in the Veterans of Foreign Wars center and the Texas Farmworkers Union. For example, one of the seven tapes documents interviews from a TFW march from Muleshoe to Austin in late 1979. Five of the tapes record the stories, songs, and poems of migrants, former braceros, and corridistas such as Salinas and Castillo. The final tape offers examples of some of the commercial recordings discussed in the manuscript, as well as performances by Los Pinguinos del Norte, a band from Piedras Negras, Coahuila.

Finally, the photographs round out the experience. Three folders offer the work of three different photographers: Maria Flores, Scott Van Osdol, and Dan Dickey. Each group of glossy black-and-whites provides a visual narrative to accompany the audio cassettes. Flores’s photos, for example, begin simply with pictures of some of the older workers, Salinas among them, at the Amigos del Valle social center in Edinburg. Juxtaposed with these, however, are pictures of industrial plants—the Texsun juice plant and a carrot processing plant, for example—where younger im/migrant workers continue to labor. This set is rounded out with pictures of laborers standing, most laughing and smiling perhaps at some recently told joke, at the International Bridge in Hidalgo, Texas.

Van Osdol’s photos create another narrative. Rather than explicitly documenting the working conditions of the informants and townspeople as Flores does, he illustrates the divide between the workers and songwriters he meets and more affluent residents. Thus, images of Los Pinguinos playing in their homes and bars in Piedras Negras and the guitarist and songwriter Rumel Fuentes playing at his home are juxtaposed with images such as those entitled, “Wealthy House, Eagle Pass, TX.” Van Osdol concludes his set with striking images of the Texas Farmworkers’ arrival in Austin for their march from Muleshoe. In contrast, perhaps because he was documenting the interviews, Dickey’s photos appear more casual and convey less of a narrative. Rather, his pictures portray Carla Hagen speaking with Santana Morales and Roy Posada, two of the musicians they interviewed. He also provides pictures of some of the other musicians and workers with their families and in their homes.

Taken as a whole the archive seems overwhelming, yet its immensity proves absolutely necessary. Through its variety of media, the archive accomplishes what mere words on a page cannot: as the researcher becomes reader, viewer, and listener, the lives of the workers begin to take shape. In the context of the current debates on “the immigration issue” and “border control,” The Migrant Border Ballads Project also invites contemporary research. For example, in her 2006 documentary about the role of corridos in immigration, Al otro lado, Natalia Almada refers to corridos as “musical newspaper[s].” As demonstrated in this 1979 study, those musical newspapers provide intimate accounts of an experience outside the reach of the mass media. Above all, the project heightens one’s awareness of the human side of current and past conflicts over immigration and migrant labor. As Arnulfo Castillo so prophetically stated, “ … Adelante una persona va a querer saber que fue la vida de un trabajador.” Now that time has arrived.