After the ecstasy comes the hangover. Following the golden summers of 2022 and 2023—when regional Mexican music reached its highest peak of global visibility, crossing borders with sold-out shows, media prestige, and transatlantic attention—2024 and 2025 are shaping up to be a kind of purgatory. As the popular saying goes: “After the pleasure, comes the blow.”
But this blow is not only cultural: it’s strategic, legal, diplomatic, and symbolic. For the first time since its postwar consolidation as a binational industry, the corrido is under Washington’s microscope. Embassies, federal agencies, immigration algorithms, and digital platforms all seem to have deciphered the language that for decades danced between cheeky chronicle and epic allegory.
Tensions rose after the kidnapping of Mayo Zambada, a key figure in drug trafficking, and the subsequent war in Culiacán between his son and the Chapitos. More than a violent clash, it carried aesthetic resonance: the corridos went silent in the streets, and the cultural merchandise that had nourished popular narcoculture for years lost its meaning. Suddenly, what was once sung as bravado became complicity; what once sounded like identity now sounds like evidence.
To this, we must add the discovery of Rancho Izaguirre in Jalisco—filled with mutilated bodies and forcibly recruited youth—which placed the Jalisco New Generation Cartel at the heart of horror. The response was not only judicial, but cultural. The incident in which Los Alegres del Barranco performed “El del Palenque” two weeks later in Guadalajara, in tribute to the CJNG leader, sparked public outrage. Since then, the genre has been trembling.
Today, many artists prefer to stay silent. Alfredo Olivas delegates the corrido to the audience, turning it into a communal chant. Others, like Julión Álvarez, pay the toll to exit the blacklist, only to be placed back on it at great financial cost. Some—like Luis R. Conriquez, Tito Doble P, or Gabito Ballesteros—are rumored to be next. The punishment is no longer mere censorship: it’s visa revocation, concert cancellations, symbolic closure. The lists are no longer just on Spotify: they’re on OFAC.
In this climate, the corrido singer faces an existential dilemma: Who do I sing to? And why? What was once celebration or catharsis now feels like a minefield. The industry no longer only tracks audience size—it tracks consequences.
The State’s gaze has shifted. It no longer separates music from symbol. As Herlinghaus foresaw, this is not a war on drugs, but a war on affection. It’s not about censoring a genre—it’s about surveilling a sensibility. It’s no longer enough to regulate violence: now, its representation must be domesticated.
As Rancière would put it, the sensible is being reorganized. What was once song is now evidence. What was once festivity is now proof. What was once identity is now suspect.
The corrido tumbado—the most visible, bold, and millennial—now bears the weight of an entire genealogy: from the novohispano trickster to the tamborazo martyr. Today, the question is not only aesthetic, but political: Can the genre transform without betraying its roots? Or are we facing a new cultural war, where rhythm and tuba become the next battleground? The day will come—as the prophet once said—when singing will also mean resisting.
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