Corrido+Workshop+Resources

The Art Institute program //A Thousand Words// uses visual images to help students increase language ability, build shared cultural experiences, and make connections across different areas of the curriculum. To support these goals, we have incorporated a Mexican //corrido// songwriting class with teaching artist Juan Díes of [|Sones de México] into the program.

=**What is a //Corrido//? **= A //corrido// is a Mexican epic ballad that tells a tragic story based on a true event. //Corridos// emerged in the mid-1800s and flourished during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 as a ‘chronicle of the people.’ During the songwriting class, students learn that subscribing to form is a key element of good storytelling, and that the //corrido// provides a narrative formula for telling tragic stories. These songs are a respectful homage—though not always devoid of humor—to a person’s tragedy.

To learn more about the language, structure, and content of //corridos//, download the What is a Corrido? information sheet from The Kennedy Center or click [|here].



Juan Díes teaches this class as a two-hour workshop in which a group of students writes //corrido// based on a local tragedy with the instructor's help. Topics may range from the loss of lunch money to the loss of a relative. //Corridos// for this class may be written in Spanish or in English. Students are encouraged to research all the facts of the story. They learn about rhyme, meter, and following a story outline.

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=The 8 Narrative Sections of an Ideal Tragic //Corrido// according to Juan Dies =


 * The best subjects for //corridos// are preventable tragedies where the victim showed courage and defiance and then lost tragically in the end.
 * The victim protagonist is always protagonist the of the tragedy. The story revolves around him/her.
 * Corridos are written in the third person (they are not personal anecdotes)
 * Each stanza music describe the following plot elements

1. Headline: Who What When Where How Why (in a nutshell) 2. Introduction of the Characters 3. Warning 4. Defiance 5. Confrontation/Exchange 6. Tragic Outcome 7. Moral 8. Farewell

**Watch the video**  **How to Write a Corrido in 8-Steps** LINK:  @http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/e1/uds/pd/711930521/711930521_4540143322001_4540128175001.mp4

**Read the Article** The Atlantic: **How to Write a Corrido in 8-Steps**  @http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/how-to-write-a-mexican-corrido-in-8-steps/433053/

//**Corridos** // **and Visual Art** ====<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">Small-, medium-, and large-sized songbooks or //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">cancioneros //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">, and single ballad sheets with printed //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">corridos //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">(narrative songs dealing with recent political and historical events) and //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;"> canciones // <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">(lyric songs, often amatory in nature), usually containing only folk and popular song texts and not the corresponding melodies (song tunes were included only sporadically in these ephemeral publications), have been published throughout Mexico and the southwestern United States (especially in Los Angeles and San Antonio) since the nineteenth century. ====

====<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">Containing examples of all popular and traditional music forms known at the time in Mexico, these publications often included lithographic and woodblock illustrations designed to illustrate the story of the songs and to aid sales. Illustrators such as José Guadalupe Posada, working for publisher Vanegas Arroyo, illustrated //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">corridos //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">and //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">décimas //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">such as //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">El mosquito americano //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">, //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">Versos de Valentín Mancera //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">, //L// //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">egítimos versos de Lino Zamora //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">, and //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">El Corrido de los 41 //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">. As popular literature, most of these ephemeral publications were intended for a quick sale and were related to events of the day. the popularity of well-known songs such as the "Himno Nacional Mexicano" (music by Jaime Nunó), "La golondrina" (music by Narciso Serradell, text by Niceto Zamacoix), "La paloma" (music by Sebastián Yradier), and "Perjura" (Miguel Lerdo de Tejada); and //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">corridos //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px;">such as "La adelita," "La rielera," and others was reinforced by the constant appearance of these song texts in many of these //<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.72px; line-height: 1.5;">cancioneros. //====

(Excerpt from //Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico//, Michael Werner [2001])
To learn more about printmaking in 20th century Mexico, read the following excerpt from the exhibition catalogue //[|What May Come: The Taller de Gráfica Popular and the Mexican Political Print]//(2013).



This exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago featured twenty-four works representing linocuts and lithographs from the heyday of t<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">he //Taller de Gráfica Popular// (Popular Graphic Art Workshop), which sought to create prints, posters, and illustrated publications that were popular and affordable, accessible and politically topical, and above all formally compelling. Founded by the printmakers Luís Arenal, Leopoldo Méndez, and American-born Pablo O’Higgins, the TGP ultimately became the most influential and enduring leftist printmaking collective of its time.

=//A Thousand Words// Image Set Connections=

//Your classroom's// A Thousand Words //image set contains a number of works that tie into the history of illustrated ballad sheets in Mexico!//

=<span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 1.5;">Image Set #69, <span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">[|José Guadalupe Posada, Mexican, 1852-1913, //Grand Electric Calavera as a Present to You, A Calavera of Pure Electricity//, 1907] =

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">José Guadalupe Posada was the most prolific and influential broadside illustrator working in late-19th- and early-20th-century Mexico. He illustrated thousands of colorful, eye-catching broadsides—cheap, ephemeral handbills directed at urban working- and middle-class audiences—that addressed current events, social and political scandals, and curiosities. Mexican broadsides also kept alive more informal oral traditions. Like the European ballad sheets, the text of many broadsides fixed or introduced verses or songs, especially //corridos//, the popular ballads of heroes, bandits, and current events. //Grand Electric Calavera as a Present to You, A Calavera of Pure Electricity// (1907), while not a //corrido//, nonetheless forms part of the illustrated ballad sheet tradition, containing verses and a relief engraving showing a large electric skeleton hypnotizing a group of skulls with an electric streetcar in the background.

<span style="color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">

===<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> Image Set #60, __[|Leopoldo Méndez, Mexican, 1902-1969, //Posada in His Workshop// //(Homage to Posada)//, 1953]__ ===

<span style="color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Leopoldo Méndez was a cofounder of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, its ostensible leader and premier printmaker. This large-scale linocut is a technical tour de force and one of the key works in his oeuvre. It depicts José Guadalupe Posada, the turn-of-the-century broadside illustrator, as an artisan-revolutionary and summarizes the critical example of Posada to the Taller as a creator of popular, socially conscious art. This idealized image shows Posada at work, burin in hand, preparing a plate through laborious hand engraving. He contemplates a scene of violence outside his window, representative of the abusive regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Waiting expectantly behind Posada are his printer and the Flores Magón brothers, two early Mexican revolutionary thinkers, one of whom holds a tract denouncing the practice of conscripted labor. Méndez inscribed his own birth date, 1902, in the calendar banner above Posada’s head, further underscoring the image’s construction of artistic and political lineages. <span style="color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> <span style="color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> <span style="color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">

===<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Image Set #99, <span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">[|Alfredo Zalce (Mexican, 1908–2003); Leopoldo Méndez (Mexican, 1902–1969), published by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Mexican, founded 1937), //Calaveras estranguladoras// (//Strangling Calaveras//),1942] ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">On the Day of the Dead the Taller de Gráfica Popular produced //calavera// sheets, continuing the tradition popularized by Posada. In this energetic, collaborative four-page broadside from 1942, several Taller artists took up the //calavera//’s dark humor to lionize military heroes, satirize murderers and the press, and reveal local scandals and international incidents. The broadside’s overarching theme of strangulation was inspired by the recently captured serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández, the first such criminal to receive extensive coverage in the Mexican press. On the pamphlet’s front page, insectlike reporter-//calaveras// swarm Cárdenas as he kneels in his jail cell. The interior pages expose the deadly effects of tainted milk and expensive medication and display skeletonlike caricatures of Hitler and French collaborationist leaders Pétain and Laval. In contrast, on the back page, Méndez depicted the heroic, mounted //calavera// of General Seymon Timoshenko, who led the Soviet Red Army against the Nazi siege of Stalingrad, as a new Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary leader.

<span style="color: #1155cc; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> =<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Practical Information: =

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">On the day of your scheduled workshop, please ensure the following are provided in your classroom for the teaching artist:

 * ====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Projector ====
 * ====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">White surface to project onto ====
 * ====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Chalkboard/whiteboard or chart paper ====