And where is Junior H?

Mexican regional music rests on cockroach wings: fragile, trembling, luminous in their precariousness. Three shadows close in on it: the Mexican government, the United States government, and los señores del narco. Together they trace a triangle of vigilance that leaves no room to breathe. The corrido—an ancient form of recounting life and death—has become a hostage of power.

The cancellation of visas for musicians, both minor and renowned, is more than an administrative procedure: it is a sign. The popular voice is regulated, interrupted, turned into suspicion. Tito Doble P and Netón Vega, just as they reached the summit, now face the edge of doubt: to continue or to renounce? Peso Pluma, resident of Los Angeles, advances with caution, lowers his profile, measures each gesture. His collaboration with Los Plebes del Rancho de Ariel Camacho is an act of memory: remembering through a narcocorrido. But to remember, in these times, is to provoke.

Someone speaks the name of Junior H and places him among the silenced. I believe otherwise: Junior H inhabits another dimension. His corridos were lightning strikes at first, but his true weight lies in sad sierreño. With Sad Boyz 4 Life I and Sad Boyz 4 Life II he invented a new language: nostalgia turned into genre. Three generations listen to him as if listening to their own emptiness. He does not need to reinvent himself; his task is different: to surpass his own reflection, to give birth to a third classic that converses with the first two.

Junior H has absorbed the sounds of the regional: not so much the accordion, but the guitars, the charchetas, the trombones. He is distilling again, like an alchemist in search of quintessence: not a genre, but a form of sensitivity. His challenge is not to survive censorship or politics, but to survive himself.

Today the corrido, caught between censorship and violence, exists in a state of exception. It is memory and wound, song and silence. Its future is uncertain, like the flight of the cockroach: clumsy and luminous, always on the verge of falling, always returning to the shadows.