El Corrido de Ricardo Aldape Guerra: Form,History,and Resistance

This essay examines two corridos composed about Ricardo Aldape Guerra, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was wrongfully convicted and given a death sentence for the murder of a white Houston police officer in 1982. It shows how the corridos, “Soy Inocente” and “Al Filo de la Muerte,” are stylistically and thematically influenced by both the heroic corrido and victim corrido art forms. Although the use of the heroic corrido style and thematics is significant almost a century after the form lost prominence as a cultural and ideological expression of resistance, and while the double influence of the heroic corrido and postwar victim corrido forms on “Soy Inocente” and “Al Filo de la Muerte” is significant for its disruption of strict dichotomies between the two forms, I am interested in a deeper reading of the two corridos. I am interested in what the meaning of the relationship between the artistic form and the historical conditions from which the form emerges suggests about the conditions of existence for undocumented Mexican immigrants living and working in the United States today.