His parents named him Rosalino, but he thought it sounded too much like a woman’s name he preferred the nickname Chalino. He was born in a small village in Sinaloa. is based on his legacy,” says Angel Parra, the engineer who recorded most of Chalino’s albums.Ībel Orozco, owner of El Parral in South Gate, one of the big Mexican-music clubs, puts it this way: “Chalino changed everything.” “Without exaggeration, 50 percent of the music that’s recorded in L.A. But after Chalino died, everybody started listening to corridos. “The other kids were all listening to rap, so I guess we felt that if we listened to Spanish music we’d be beaners or something. “When we were small, we always wanted to fit in, so we’d listen to rap,” says Edgar Rodriguez. After Chalino, guys whose second language was an English-accented Spanish could pump polkas out their car stereos at maximum volume and girls would think they were cool. His career lasted just four years and he was killed when he was only 31, yet he’s an authentic folk hero and one of the most influential musical figures to emerge in Los Angeles in decades. How all this happened comes down to the story of one man: a simple, rough-hewn undocumented Mexican immigrant named Chalino Sanchez. The music is distinctly Mexican, but its creative hub is Los Angeles, where at least 30 clubs regularly present narcobands. In recent years, the corrido has been transformed into the narcocorrido, the Mexican equivalent of gangster rap, with themes of drugs, violence and police perfidy, and an abiding admiration for the exploits of drug smugglers.
It was the people’s tabloid, telling the tall tales of legendary revolutionaries and notorious bandits – those who had done something worth singing about. In the days before telephones and mass media, the corrido established itself in Mexican popular culture by bringing news to those who couldn’t read. They and their audience are part of a little-noticed but significant cultural shift among Los Angeles Mexican-American working-class youth, who in recent years have rediscovered and remade their parents’ folk music, including the traditional corrido. Mariano Fernandez and Edgar Rodriguez, both 21, grew up in Bell, graduated from Bell High School, listened to rap, speak an up-to-the-minute urban slang and, until recently, never condescended to sing Mexican country music. Nothing about the scene would suggest that Voces del Rancho are actually two Angelenos who see a Mexican village about as often as they see a bale of hay. Yet none of that – the hats, the album cover, the lyrics, even the music – has much to do with the singers’ life experience, nor that of their audience, most of whom are L.A. Their audience – about 300 tonight – is a mass of bobbing cowboy hats their latest album shows them in boots and white cowboy hats, sitting on hay bales in front of a barn. All the duo’s songs are polkas or waltzes – corridos about events in isolated Mexican pueblos.
While keeping true to its accordion-based polka beat, Voces del Rancho (Voices of the Village) have updated the corrido with an overlay of machine-gun fire. A drug smuggler in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Quintero was killed in a 1976 shootout, and his ballad – or corrido – is now a classic. Saturday slides toward Sunday at Rodeo de Medianoche, a cavernous nightclub in Pico Rivera, as the duo Voces del Rancho sing the story of how Lamberto Quintero died.
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