Notes on the wire: ballads,biases,and borders of performance journalism

Prelude

News stories have long been set to songs. In the ballad ‘La Toma de Matamoros’ (The Capture of Matamoros), balladeer Ignacio (Nacho) Montelongo (1954) versified reports on the fall of Matamoros decades after the New York Tribune printed them. In a similar sequence, The New York Times covered the ongoing Ciudad Juárez murders of female factory workers before the band Los Tigres del Norte (2004) performed ‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’ (The Women of Juárez). These stories and songs evoke the following questions: why might it be instructive to reconsider the collection, modification, and dissemination of news as processes that involve performers, performances, and audiences? What roles, if any, do corridistas – musicians such as Montelongo and Los Tigres del Norte – play in recasting the production of journalism?

A corrido, the participle of the verb correr (to run), is a running account of events. While balladeers relate stories of crime and catastrophe in their ballads, they also mention religious and folkloric figures, from extraordinary saints to ordinary sinners. Composers and performers write and sing about evil men, good cowboys, geographic regions, immigration, transportation, death, and working-class protests, as well as drug cartels, lords, and guerrillas in the narcocorrido sub-genre (Wald, 2001). Corridistas frequently recite news stories in their corridos, but they also convey unpublished narratives or fictional tales to their listeners (McDowell, 1981; McKenna, 1991; Villalobos and Ramírez-Pimienta, 2004).

Corridos emerged in the first decade of the 19^th century, immediately before the Mexican War of Independence. One news ballad from 1808, for example, critiqued King Carlos (Charles) IV of Spain. Mendoza (1939) traced the roots of corridos to the verses of romances – traditional ballads from Spain – while other scholars located their origins in Mexico and what would later become Texas (Avitia Hernández, 1997; Simmons, 1957; Stanford, 1974). Border corridos gained currency during the Mexican-American War, in part because of their descriptions of Los Rinches de Tejas (the Texas Rangers). The lyrics of several border corridos referenced battles in which the Rangers killed Mexican heroes (Williams, 1987). Not surprisingly, countless composers have featured heroes and villains in their compositions.

From the early 19^th century to the present, corridistas have promoted social justice and countered the hegemony of print journalism. Balladeers privilege communal testimony over institutional authority, and work to gain the public’s trust by questioning the truths of newspapers. Musicians regularly write and sing about issues that mainstream media institutions generally avoid, as Hernández remarks: “Composed, transmitted, and consumed by rural and urban working-classes – people distant from circles of power – the genre expresses viewpoints that often contradict or stand in direct opposition to dominant perspectives” (1999: 1). Many balladeers amplify the voices of the voiceless in response to a media landscape dominated by corporate executives and government officials.

Although they have been the subject of fertile inquiry in the fields of Latin/@ and Mexican studies, corridos have not appeared in media studies (for a notable exception, see Pedelty, 2004, 2010). Media historians have generally treated “ethnic news” unevenly, if at all, perhaps because of translation difficulties or mainstream tendencies. News ballads also interfere with objective reporting, an early 20th-century addition to the profession of journalism (Boudana, 2011; Muñoz-Torres, 2012; Schudson, 2001). Corridos, however, deserve the attention of media scholars for at least four reasons: first, running accounts illustrate the impossibility of complete objectivity; second, a musical press challenges the socially constructed association between permanency, print, and truth; third, corridos disrupt dualities of information or entertainment, facts or values, and official records or unofficial accounts, and bring them together so that readers, listeners, and viewers may reconsider the meanings and methods of journalism; fourth, news ballads remind journalism that its history began with speech and song.

The press originated in an ancient Roman publicity of accidents, deaths, rumors, and related beats accompanied by bells, drums, and other musical instruments in local gathering places. Town criers, for instance, used rhyme and rhythm to memorize the details of news stories over time; interestingly, their musical performances carried the credibility of public documents (Lord, 2000; Stephens, 2006). Nevertheless, standard histories of journalism have downplayed theories of performance and time, in part because of concerns with print and space (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001; Conboy, 2004; Starr, 2004). In the process of focusing on the spatial bias of print, media historians have forgotten the temporal bias of performance; both biases, however, are always present in society (Innis, 1950, 1951). The bias of time also merits careful consideration if media scholars hope to understand the ways in which news performers’ values affect and reflect the worldviews of audiences.

In his seminal essay “The Storyteller”, Benjamin recalled the relation between temporality and orality, noticing the ways in which “communication by the ear assures a reliance on time” (1968: 106). Filmer added that sound “takes on a much greater significance for time than in a social world in which visual culture, and thus literacy predominate” (2003: 92). By that line of logic, sight also plays a vital role for space. Orality suggests “time, closeness, and community incorporation … a gathering together and a drawing in from institutional authority to communal vulnerability” for subjective perspectives; literacy, in contrast, implies “space, and the spatial practices of division, separation, compartmentalization, and surveillance”, all of which demand “detachment and distance” for objective purposes (Conquergood, 1991: 183). Moreover, orality brings to mind the ritual model of communication and its emphasis on community, while literacy can be associated with the transmission model of communication and its affinity for efficiency. In that sense, corridos are not “directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time” (Carey, 1989: 18). Naturally, that claim complements sociological and anthropological traditions that interpret news performances as strategic rituals and social dramas (Tuchman, 1972; Turner, 1986).

An emerging area of scholarship on performance journalism – defined here as news performances created by performers for audiences – has referred to reporters as protagonists on stage or as active agents in the field (Atkinson, 2011; Liebes and Kampf, 2009). News spectacles dramatize social relations as performers tell stories in conflict–climax–resolution terms, despite or perhaps because of front stage and backstage theatrics (Goffman, 1959). Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, for example, may “do a better job performing the functions of journalism than journalists themselves”, though with few concerns for the profession’s ethical standards (Borden and Tew, 2007: 300). In their satirical performances, Stewart and Colbert test the limits of journalism’s neutrality, not unlike what corridistas accomplish with their corridos. Whether on a screen or on a street corner, these news personae exhibit journalism’s hidden history of performance.

This article connects theories of orality and literacy with biases of time and space in a study of corridos as performance journalism. Specifically, the article argues that corridistas balance the spatial bias of print with the temporal bias of performance in order to preserve the historical connection between music and news. Although corridistas may not think of their performances in these terms, the absence of such thoughts does not mean that corridos do not have the effect of maintaining that historical connection; indeed, it is the assertion of this article that they have that very effect. Critical thinkers will object that performance is not exclusively time-biased, and that print is not solely space-biased – music, of course, can be transmitted through the space-biased medium of television, just as the time-biased medium of stone may contain writing. While these objections are accurate, Innis’s relative distinction between the temporal bias of the oral tradition (to which corridos belong) and the spatial bias of the written tradition (to which newspapers belong) is one of degree more than of kind. Performance is primarily time-biased, bound to local tradition; print, on the other hand, is predominantly space-biased, open to global expansion. This article brings a new version of Innis’s (1950, 1951) distinction between time-biased and space-biased media to bear on a related conversation about the modern move away from collective (sung news ballads heard together in time) toward individual (printed newspapers read alone across space) news cultures, and on the necessity of allowing the proverbial pendulum to swing backward, if only for a short while, in an attempt to restore balance to society.

‘La Toma de Matamoros’ and ‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’ were selected for their similarities and differences. The first ballad’s anonymous author and known performer memorialized a battle in the 20th century, while the second song finds a composer and a band covering murders in the 21st century; the first corrido mentioned a particular day, but the second song’s story continues to develop after two decades. Despite their differences, both ballads demonstrate how corridistas “recuperate the saying from the said … from textualized space to co-experienced time” (Conquergood, 1991: 183). Drawing on that idea, this article’s textual analysis frames musicians as messengers who play a role in redefining media biases in temporal and spatial terms at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Just as a singer’s techniques are transferable, so is this article’s method, largely because the analysis highlights themes – multiple truths, contradictory facts, and historical omissions – of interest to critical readers who are open-minded enough to question what they claim to know about any subject of inquiry. The article’s method also calls attention to the fitness of news, defined here as the essence of what makes a story suitable for transference from the printed word to the performed verse. Like an ethnographic account of observations, the following textual analysis of auditions thickly describes the ways in which balladeers bridge orality and literacy, time and space, and subjectivity and objectivity with their news ballads. In particular, the analysis demonstrates how corridistas represent the inverted pyramid, reveal unreliable facts, and contribute valuable details to news narratives.

‘La Toma de Matamoros’

The Mexican Revolution emerged in 1910 from an agrarian crisis in which peasants rebelled against dictator Porfirio Díaz. As Gonzales wrote, Díaz “ignored peasants … and offered foreign investors attractive incentives to start businesses in Mexico” (2002: 2) as part of a larger initiative aimed at modernization. The dictator allocated to international investors land previously owned by local farmers, leaving rural workers with no choice but to overthrow the old guard. Reforms in the redistribution of land and the nationalization of industries followed the fall of Díaz’s dictatorship in 1911, yet poor working conditions, economic inflation, and bloody violence continued to plague the decade’s subsequent presidents (Calvert, 1978; Cumberland, 1988; Knight, 1986).

Francisco Madero assumed the presidency in 1911 and remained in power until a coup d’état in 1913. A major blow was dealt that year to incoming president Victoriano Huerta by Ernesto Zapata in the south and Venustiano Carranza in the north. These caudillos (political-military leaders and dictators) declared war against Huerta, though they lacked a strong base of support. The border city of Matamoros, attractive for its location and war matériel reserve, served as a stronghold for federalist huertistas until General Lucio Blanco and carrancista constitutionalists attacked and defeated the city’s garrison in June of 1913. Mostly young men, some 14 or 15 years of age, served under Major Esteban Ramos and defended their city with sandbags and stones, hoping to halt the charges of the constitutionalists’ cavalry. And yet the sheer number of Blanco’s troops overwhelmed federalist fighters; by the next day, their bodies were burned and buried (Samponaro and Vanderwood, 1992).

Alongside other newspapers, the Tacoma Times (1913) published its version of the Matamoros capture:

Following a twenty-four-hour battle, the federal garrison at Matamoras, Mexico, surrendered at 5 o’clock this morning to General Blanco, the Maderista commander. Heavy losses were reported on both sides, but no definite estimate of the death list can be made. Gen. Blanco immediately opened the town as a port of entry, and invited American physicians to cross the border and attend the wounded. Residents are flocking back to the city.

The article’s immediate lead told readers “the who, what, when, and where” of the story: the federalists surrendered to Blanco on the morning of 4 June at 5:00 a.m. in Matamoros, spelled and pronounced by some U.S. reporters with an “as” rather than an “os” ending. The “why” was implied several sentences later in the desire to open the town; “how” Matamoros became a port of entry was narrated in the body of the article. Maderista referred to Francisco Madero, Mexico’s president between 1911 and 1913. Following the inverted pyramid’s form, print journalists focused on the essentials before they shared any details with readers.

One account of this story was recited in ‘La Toma de Matamoros’, an anonymously composed piece that was performed by Ignacio (Nacho) Montelongo, a Texas-based corridista who learned how to sing and play the guitar at an early age. As one of several corridos that recounted reports of the city’s capture, the ballad effectively memorialized the battle’s significance. The song’s key players were the federalists and the constitutionalists who engaged in the conflict. ‘La Toma de Matamoros’ was performed in local gathering places near the border and recorded for future generations.

Montelongo (1954) represented the inverted pyramid with a reference to time and place evinced in the following excerpt from the corrido:

I am going to sing these stanzas; everyone pay close attention.

I am going to sing the ballad of heroic Matamoros.

On Tuesday, the third of June of nineteen hundred thirteen,

At ten o’clock in the morning, Lucio Blanco made his appearance.

He was bringing with him thousands of men, well armed and brave,

In order to take the city and make people run.

The balladeer amplified the voices of huertista refugees listening in from Brownsville after they escaped to the U.S. side of the border. Questions of “who, what, when, where, and why” were previewed straight away in the ballad: listeners discovered the subject (an attack) and gained a sense of the motive, which was to take the city. They also learned the identity of the lead attacker (General Lucio Blanco) and the date, time, and place of the battle: 3 June 1913 at 10:00 a.m. in Matamoros. The mention of troops numbering in the thousands served as an initial explanation for “how” Blanco could conquer the city.

Montelongo also revealed that journalists reported unreliable information to the public. Inconsistent “facts” surfaced on the timing of the attack: one paper reported that the battle lasted until “ten o’clock on the night of the fourth … without interruption since 10:30 a.m. on the third” (New York Times, 1913a), while another registered the hour of surrender as 5:00 p.m. the next day (Tacoma Times, 1913). From “four hours of furious fighting” (Hawaiian Gazette, 1913) to federals “slipping away” at 5 o’clock the next morning (New York Tribune, 1913b), reporters did not handle time in a standard way, though neither did the balladeer: “At ten o’clock in the morning,” he sang, “Lucio Blanco made his appearance.… By three in the afternoon … the regular troops were leaving for the United States.… And they executed them in the marketplace the next morning at six” (Montelongo, 1954). The sources of information for the ballad were not only reporters, but also community leaders; Montelongo depended on the latter, in addition to his own rhythmic license, when the former failed to resolve factual inconsistencies.

Furthermore, the corridista added useful details that were absent from newspapers to the Matamoros story. For example, carrancista sympathizers planned to sound the city bell to advise Blanco that he was winning before a huertista fighter rang the bell for another reason, as the musician remarked: “But an unfortunate ringing of the bells … encouraged the carrancistas, and Blanco turned back” (Montelongo, 1954). Bells have long signified communal rituals, from battles to funerals – at Matamoros, bells and leaflets heralded the start of a bloody battle. Interestingly, journalists did not report these particulars at the time, perhaps because of editors’ economic concerns over space. Regardless of the reason, corridistas shared details that were absent from all of the printed reports, which only underscores the need for scholars and reporters to scrutinize the news record as much for what it excludes as for what it includes.

An emphasis on time corresponded with the corrido’s farewell, heard as follows: “Now the hour has arrived, for the time limit has expired” (Montelongo, 1954). Deadlines did not apply to repeat performances of the news ballad, one reason why the idea of a time limit seemed destined for expiration, especially when listeners recognize the staying power of ‘La Toma de Matamoros’ (Paredes, 1958, 1993). The contrast between this corrido and the next one is noteworthy: ‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’ emphasizes the death of nameless and faceless women, not from a single day’s battle but from a two-decade struggle. This news ballad not only comments on the limits of what scholars can learn from the press as a source of information, but also speaks to the corrido genre’s continuing presence on the Mexico–U.S. border.

‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’

The Mexico–U.S. border has long been a site of femicide. Since 1993, at least 800 battered, raped, tortured, strangled, and stabbed bodies have been found by trash heaps, on the sides of river banks, near train tracks, or buried in the desert, though that number does not account for the thousands of women who have disappeared (Sarria, 2009). The victims are often young, poor, uneducated, and unskilled laborers at maquiladoras, factories that import raw materials and export finished products. More than half of these cases remain unsolved, with perpetrators permitted to escape by way of apathetic local authorities. As Fregoso notes, the Mexican government has “failed dismally … refusing to acknowledge the reality of systemic and calculated acts of violence against women” (2007: 37). Corruption has become an integral part of this never-ending story: files on the perpetrators have disappeared, and the state bureau responsible for investigating the murders has experienced a high rate of attrition in recent years (Lugo, 2008). Government officials ceased their investigations in 2006, though not without criticism or protest.

If not by the Mexican government, the Ciudad Juárez murders are still under investigation by researchers and artists alike (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010; Gaspar de Alba, 2010; Tiano, 2009). The UCLA Chicano Research Center has sponsored an international conference on the maquiladora murders, and the Organization of American States has created a commission on the rights of women. Victims have also been memorialized in theatrical performances and museum exhibitions around the world, including Escaping Juárez, Mujeres de Arena (Women of Sand), and Ni Una Más (Not One More). What one absorbs from these artistic productions is the realization that pipes, sticks, bottles, and garden hoses have been inserted into the orifices of victims whose bodies have decomposed beneath the desert winds and sands. As Biemann remarks, “many bodies are found wearing clothes that belonged to other missing women, thus emphasizing in literal terms the [disposability and] exchangeability of the bodies” (2002: 17). Exchange value is a byproduct of workers’ use value, measured in material terms of interchangeable parts by operators known for commoditizing the bodies of laborers, at least since the official signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.

Among other newspapers, La Opinión published the following story of the Ciudad Juárez murders:

In a Latin [American Studies] conference [for Women’s Rights] at UCLA, more than 300 female homicides were reported [while] Benita Monárrez continued her painful path in Los Angeles. Her daughter Laura Berenice disappeared on the 21st of September of 2001 and her body was found two weeks later in a state of decomposition, tossed on uncultivated terrain in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Since 1993, more than 300 women, the majority of whom are workers and students, have been injured and assassinated in Ciudad Juárez. (Macias, 2003)

This article publicized the pain of a mother, Benita Monárrez, who learned that her daughter Laura’s corpse was located in Ciudad Juárez two weeks after 21 September 2001. Although these observations answered the inverted pyramid’s questions of “who, what, where, and when”, an official identification of the cadaver and DNA tests failed to explain “why” or “how” the murder was committed. The young girl’s name added a concrete dimension to the longer story of the Ciudad Juárez murders, though Benita was not able to see Laura’s body with her own eyes. In the body of the article, Macias (2003) mentioned previously reported allegations that the killers were also drug smugglers.

A version of the Ciudad Juárez story – not necessarily of Laura’s murder, but of the longer narrative to which it belongs – was recounted in the verses of ‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’, a corrido composed by Paulino Vargas and performed by Los Tigres del Norte, one of the most popular norteño and conjunto bands in Mexico and the U.S. The Ciudad Juárez murders appeared in international newspapers before the ballad’s release, though the deaths did not dominate headlines enough to bring about a solution to the problem. In ‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’, the musicians channeled the voices of a local-global community of concerned citizens who criticized Mexican officials for their inaction. Key players in the ballad included the murderers, police officers, government officials, the victims, and their families. The corrido was performed at concerts inside and outside of the U.S. and recorded for posterity.

The following stanza illustrates how the composer and the band reproduced the inverted pyramid in the song:

Humiliating and appalling,

The untouchable impunity,

The bones in the desert

Tell the crude truth;

The dead [women] of Ciudad Juárez

Are a national shame. (Los Tigres del Norte, 2004)

Vargas and Los Tigres del Norte incorporated the pyramid into the ballad’s first stanza with a delayed form that fit an emerging news narrative. Women, the “who” of the story, were referenced by the “what” of death. No “when” was provided precisely because the murders continue to take place in Ciudad Juárez (the “where”). The “why” remained open to interpretation, in part because the motive resisted establishment in a single stanza. An elaboration of “how” citizens responded to the murders was left to the remainder of the corrido. In addition to presenting information in a strategic sequence, the ballad defies institutional authority and instead communicates a message of communal vulnerability – all female factory workers are potential victims unless citizens work together to solve these crimes.

The limits of an official truth seemed clear enough when the musicians revealed that journalists reported unreliable information to the public. Reporters documented an inconsistent number of sexual homicides that ranged from 75 (San Jose Mercury News, 2003) to 90 (El Paso Times, 2003); of course, 15 bodies did not seem like an insignificant difference between the reports, especially to the families of the departed. Los Tigres del Norte recognized that Mexican officials refused to share accurate statistics with reporters. The corrido’s lyrical voice indicated that “it wouldn’t have suited them”, meaning the government representatives who contributed to the cover-ups by not providing journalists with dependable information on the women or their killers (Los Tigres del Norte, 2004).

Furthermore, the Mexican government’s inaction motivated the composer and the band members to add their opinions to the story of the Ciudad Juárez murders. The musicians described, in no uncertain terms, the situation’s “shameful commentary”, and issued a call to “punish the cowards that offend these women” (Los Tigres del Norte, 2004). ‘Las Mujeres de Juárez’ thus instantiated the ways in which the corridistas brought their value judgments – the murderers have committed heinous acts and should be punished – to bear on the reception of this news story. And yet the band members’ judgments represented more than opinions: indeed, their good sense signified a universal reverence for the sacredness of human life.

The motives for the murders have not been established, postponed in part by social judgments on the victims’ morals – for example, fallen women who strayed too far from home – and deep structural inequalities in gender roles (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Corona, 2010; Salzinger, 2003; Tuttle, 2012). One view holds that the victims:

represent cultural values in decline and therefore may not be valuable enough in death to warrant much concern.… The logical conclusion is, therefore, not to seek the perpetrators of the crime as much as to restore the cultural values whose erosion these women and girls represent. (Wright, 2007: 188)

Acts of violence are expected to continue until women return to their homes, or until society changes its conception of gender. The slow evolution in social definitions of gender – what seems to be one contributing factor to the motives for the murders – is mirrored in the history of the corrido genre. As Herrera-Sobek affirmed:

There is nothing inherently male in the corrido or its structure, which can and does feature female protagonists.… It is perfectly feasible that in the future women will appropriate the genre and dominate it with female-oriented themes.… It is … a fact of history, not of necessity, that the majority of corridos have been written by males. (1990: xviii)

Corridos may participate in patriarchy, but they paradoxically promise the patriarchs’ defeat when male protagonists are killed, captured, or exiled from home. Perhaps the greatest growth potential for the corrido genre can be realized by opening it to new gender relations that may ultimately change social thought. One example of such an opening can be heard in the successes of female mariachi groups (Xóchitl Pérez, 2002). If the mariachi style, a traditional part of greater Mexico’s musical culture, can grow to celebrate female contributions, however slowly, then surely the corrido can as well.

Postlude

By representing the inverted pyramid, exposing unreliable facts, and contributing valuable details to news narratives, corridistas such as Ignacio (Nacho) Montelongo, Paulino Vargas, and Los Tigres del Norte have balanced the spatial bias of print with the temporal bias of performance in order to preserve the historical connection between music and news. These and countless other musicians have upheld a crucial oral tradition, considering that news ballads are among the “only surviving evidence of conditions of life as experienced in the subaltern strata” (Saldívar, 2006: 32). Readers who doubt the veracity of corridos need only take into account the ability of the musical press to survive and thrive over the last two centuries (Limón, 1992; Pedelty, 2004; Santana, 1931). Long before public or citizen journalism emerged in the late 20th century, news ballads brought performers and listeners together on the ground to exchange ideas and express feelings.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, neocorridistas (new ballad writers) continue to disseminate corridos in rural, urban, and digital environments. At the time of this writing, there are thousands of professional and amateur corrido videos on YouTube. As Pedelty (2010) notes, the mnemonic requirement of the musical press provides an important lesson for contemporary digital culture. Rhyme helps humans recall and retell events after the fact, creating grooves that aid in the processes of recollection and articulation. The literary device of rhyme becomes even more significant in a digital age when smart devices attempt to extend memory and, paradoxically, may threaten the ability of humans to remember important dates or codes without technical support.

Admittedly this article carries its own bias: it uses print, in no small part because publications generally count more than presentations in the academy, to call for balance in a culture that overvalues the written word. The global dissemination of knowledge has mimicked the very acts of imperial expansion tracked by Innis (1950, 1951) and Ong (1982) across space. Plato’s Phaedrus indicated that print distances humans from each other; Riesman added that “if oral communication keeps people together, print is the isolating medium par excellence” (1960: 114). For those who care about the future of community, both as a principle and as a practice, this statement should not be taken lightly. Humans must not sacrifice literacy for orality, of course, but would do well to gradually reinstate an oral tradition that transcends the domain of the fourth estate for the good of society. If this does not happen, then communities defined by oral communication will wither, and the permanence of print will continue to dominate other methods of inquiry, including but not limited to radio journalism, testimonials, and oral histories.

To be sure, print has its own epistemological limitations. Histories and news stories are not devoid of unreliable facts, to say nothing of the evidence that storytellers select. This reality leads one to wonder which eyewitness accounts are more truthful, by what measure, and for whom. Newsgathering, like archival research, attempts to produce authoritative versions of reality, but by no means to the point of perfection: think of newspaper retractions and revisionist histories. Reporters’ different treatments of the same event contest print journalism’s aura of authority and leave open to question the historical record that relies upon that aura.

For example, historians Samponaro and Vanderwood (1992) consulted the Brownsville Herald for information on troop numbers, casualty rates, and battle duration at Matamoros, yet the newspaper’s data were disputed by several other sources, such as The New York Times and the former New York Tribune. Reporters disagreed on the number of constitutionalist forces, from 100 (New York Times, 1913b) or 250 (New York Tribune, 1913b) to 800 (New York Times, 1913c) or 1800 (New York Tribune, 1913a). The quantity of federalist troops also varied, from 100 (New York Tribune, 1913a) to 300 (Hawaiian Gazette, 1913). Such wide-ranging discrepancies were not confined to Matamoros: Lippman and Merz (1920) found that The New York Times trusted anonymous sources, rumor, and biased interpretations for its foreign coverage from 1917 to 1920. It is a truism that scholars have relied on these newspapers, among other sources, to write histories, and, depending on how careful they have been, may or may not have found, and revealed to readers, contradictory “facts”.

Official statements released by corporate leaders or government officials can look or sound factual, but that must not prevent scholars and reporters from questioning them. In the case of the Ciudad Juárez murders, Chihuahua state representative Victor Valencia charged Los Tigres del Norte with spoiling the image of Ciudad Juárez, and banned the corrido from radio airplay because the band profited from its promotion. Vargas, the ballad’s composer, responded that Valencia “did not try to look for a solution to the problem” (Garcia, 2004: 12); lead vocalist Jorge Hernández added that if Valencia “really wanted to defend his city, he should have started a long time ago” (Gurza, 2004: E1). This disagreement points to the difficult position in which journalism finds itself, serving as a mediator of multiple truths among empowered and disempowered entities.

If the truths of news reports are contingent on all seen and unseen gatekeepers who shape news agendas, then ideologies also influence and are influenced by deceptions (Goldstein, 2007; St John, 2009; Zelizer, 2004, 2009). Reporters should engage conflicting ideologies more deeply than they already do to explore the possibilities and probabilities of more than one “capital – T Truth”. Facts may have conditional boundaries – x could be true in the case of y but not in the case of z – just as “the frontier between the apparently fictitious corrido and the historically documented newspaper report remains porous” (Chamberlain, 2004: 35). With their different degrees of verisimilitude, borderline truths are often axiomatic and pragmatic, grounded in the everyday values and practices of performers and listeners (Rosaldo, 1989).

This study’s implications for how scholars and reporters understand corridistas are significant. Like storytellers, musicians “offer us an opportunity to exchange experiences”; a balladeer “takes what he tells from experience … and makes it the experience of those that are listening to his tale” (Benjamin, 1968: 83–7). Corridistas uncover journalism’s hidden history of performance and unearth buried stories that remain in the recesses of one’s mind. News ballads symbolize “what is true of life and of human nature everywhere” (Park, 1940: 681), a truism that accounts for their continued importance in greater Mexico and in digital cultures around the world.

In order to approximate truths in a literate world, scholars must uncover the methods that reporters use to cover events, as Heidegger wrote: “Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand already were. Such uncovering is the kind of Being which belongs to ‘truth’” (1962: 269). Schramm (1949) insisted that the truths of a story are never contained in but rather reconstructed after the event, or after the fact – reporters go after truths in space as time elapses. Ultimately, verification and versification may offer equal opportunities to know a world where seeing is believing, but only when trusting means listening.