Songs For The Holy Coyote: Cristero Corridos and Immigration Politics On The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Lozano, Teresita D.

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Songs For The Holy Coyote: Cristero Corridos and Immigration Politics On The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/x059c850f

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of a new phenomenon of corrido (ballad) composition and performance that narrates the lived experiences of undocumented Mexican migrants and their miraculous encounter with the ghost of Saint Toribio Romo. According to migrant testimony and corrido texts, Saint Toribio Romo, a Cristero martyr who died in 1928 and who migrants have adopted as the Holy Coyote (Smuggler) and Patron Saint of Immigrants, smuggles migrants safely across the border, ensuring they survive their journey northward. Cristeros were post-Revolutionary Mexican Catholic rebels who participated in an armed rebellion against the Mexican government (1926-1929) in response to anticlerical laws and perceived encroachment on religious liberty, a resistance that would be encoded in corridos as forms of oral history. Cristero corridos have been continuously sung in Jalisco and the greater Cristero heartland of west-central Mexico as sources of inherited cultural memory. The Jalisco-based ensemble, Mariachi Los Cristeros performs Cristero corridos as part of their musical dramaturgy, including new Cristero corridos that reimagine and reinterpret inherited Cristero memory. While new corridos composed by Mariachi Los Cristeros take place in the 1920s like their historical counterparts, corridos dedicated to Saint Toribio Romo, which I define as ghost smuggling ballads, relay the experiences of present undocumented migrants, including themes of Saint Toribio Romo’s ghost aiding in border-crossing and migrants promising to return to Saint Toribio Romo’s Shrine in Jalisco in thanksgiving for his intercession. This dissertation explores how ghost smuggling ballads function as survivor testimony, counter-narratives to imposed criminality, and religious devotion. Saint Toribio Romo corridos sanctify the transborder migrant journey as a pilgrimage that is protected by the Holy Coyote, contextualizing the migrant experience within the religiopolitical legacy of La Cristiada, the Cristero Rebellion.

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