Who Tells the Story? Narcocorridos, Social Media, and Self-Representation

By Martin Mulligan

The history of the Mexican corrido is not only a history of songs, characters, and violence. It is also a history of media. From oral circulation in rural communities to the contemporary ecosystem of social media, the corrido has continuously adapted to new technologies of production and dissemination. This trajectory can be traced through five interconnected stages—orality, the music industry, YouTube, social media, and self-representation—that gradually transform both the circulation of the corrido and the relationship between the song and the subject it represents.

The corrido emerged as an oral and vernacular narrative form capable of preserving events that might otherwise disappear from institutional history. In rural, mining, and border communities, songs circulated accounts of conflicts, crimes, battles, migrations, and violent deaths. In this sense, the corrido operated as a kind of musical newspaper and as an alternative form of collective memory. Its authority did not depend on an official archive. It depended instead on circulation: a story survived because it could be sung, heard, remembered, modified, and sung again.

During the twentieth century, however, this vernacular form became increasingly incorporated into the commercial music industry. Migration between Mexico and the United States was crucial to this transformation. The corrido traveled with migrant communities, while norteño music developed commercial circuits that eventually connected northern Mexico with Mexican communities in the United States. By the end of the century, the cultural corridor between Sinaloa and California had become particularly important to the development of the narcocorrido. The song was no longer merely an orally transmitted account of local events; it had become a reproducible commodity capable of circulating across a transnational market.

This commercialization also created a contradiction. As narcocorridos became commercially successful, they were simultaneously subjected to governmental censorship. Radio stations and live performances could be restricted, and performers could face sanctions for including narcocorridos in their repertoires. The development of YouTube therefore represented more than the arrival of another distribution platform. Beginning in the late 2000s, a new generation of corrido performers found in the platform a means of circumventing traditional gatekeepers. As my dissertation argues, YouTube allowed musicians to evade forms of governmental censorship while simultaneously restructuring the commercial possibilities of a historically marginalized genre.

The consequences were significant. The corrido could now circulate without depending entirely on radio programmers, record companies, or regional performance circuits. YouTube became particularly important for disseminating the new epic narcocorrido that emerged during the violence of the drug war. Songs about local actors could immediately reach audiences far beyond their places of origin, transforming figures such as Rodrigo Aréchiga Gamboa, “El Chino Ántrax,” into protagonists with both local and transnational visibility.

Yet social media produced a more radical transformation. YouTube expanded the circulation of the corrido; Instagram and other social networks altered the relationship between the protagonist and his representation. “El Chino Ántrax” exemplifies this shift. His public persona was constructed not only through songs composed about him but also through the images he circulated himself: luxury, travel, clothing, automobiles, friendships, and an urban, cosmopolitan lifestyle. His narcocorridos and social-media presence began to function together, producing what the dissertation describes as an “aesthetics of accumulation” and an aspirational model for younger participants in narcoculture.

At this point, the historical relationship between corrido and protagonist changes. The nineteenth-century bandit depended upon others to preserve his story. The traditional narcotrafficker could commission or inspire a corrido, but the composer and performer still mediated his public image. The social-media narcotrafficker acquires something different: the technological capacity for self-representation. He can participate directly in constructing the visual archive through which his life will be interpreted. In the case of “El Chino Ántrax,” the combination of corridos and social media enabled the construction of his own biography as a popular figure.

This new agency also produces a paradox. Visibility generates cultural power, but it simultaneously generates vulnerability. The same digital exhibition that magnifies the protagonist can reveal identities, relationships, locations, and patterns of behavior. The narcocorrido’s media history therefore culminates in a tension between visibility and secrecy.

The sequence orality → music industry → YouTube → social media → self-representation should consequently not be understood simply as technological progress. Each transition redistributes the power to narrate. The corrido moves from collective oral memory to commercial circulation, from commercial mediation to digital dissemination, and finally toward a space in which the subjects of narcoculture can participate in producing their own mythology. The transformation of the medium ultimately transforms who possesses the power to tell the story.

Author’s Note: This article is an autonomous work developed through subsequent research that revisits, expands, and reformulates materials and arguments from my doctoral dissertation, Corridos en La guerra contra el narco: Estéticas necropolíticas en México (University of Missouri–Columbia, 2021).