Sones de Mexico's Juan Dies speaks about the art of corridos

It's Hispanic Heritage Month and many events are focusing on celebrating and uplifting Latino heritage and culture in the triad. WFDD’s Eileen Rodriguez speaks to Juan Díes, part of Sones de Mexico Ensemble, a two-time Grammy nominated folklore Mexican music band that will be playing at this year’s Fiesta event in Winston-Salem.

Díes moved from Mexico to the United States at an early age and formed the band while working in Chicago. He said he’ll teach the community how to write corridos, songs which he says are known as "newspapers of the people."  

Interview Highlights

Juan Díes on forming Sones de Mexico Ensemble:

"In Chicago, there's a very large Mexican community, and I met some musicians, we formed the group Sones de Mexico Ensemble in 1994, and right away as soon as we started doing this type of music it caught on very quickly. We play Son. It's the folk root of music that later evolved as Mariachi music or other types of Mexican music, but this is the equivalent of probably Appalachian music in the United States, or it's a regional music played in rural areas, the backwoods, and each region of Mexico has its own version of this music."

Why corridos?

"I felt that somebody needed to promote this Mexican music or some knowledge of the southern neighbor to The United States. Many people didn't seem to know very much about it ... They're journalistic, they're not romanticized songs, they're not meant to pull on your heartstrings. The singer is going to tell you the facts. Corridos tend to have a traditional structure. You begin with an introduction, a greeting, or you ask permission, or a headline, just like a news peg. You tell people your hook. So then the next stanza comes in, it tells you a little bit more about each person, then comes usually there's a foretelling, like a warning, something bad may happen. And our hero, because corridos are hero tales, usually that person dies in the course of the corrido. But, they die heroes in a sense. They're tragic heroes, they're folk heroes."

Díes on the stigma behind corridos:

"Corridos are heroic tales. And they're usually about defiant individuals. Corridos don't honor your neat and tidy George Washington type of hero. These are folk heroes, many times outlaws, but see ... this is the people's version. These songs are not coming from the top down, from the government of Mexico promoting their heroes to the populous."

This story was produced by a partnership between WFDD and La Noticia. You can read this story in Spanish at La Noticia.

Eileen Rodriguez is a reporter for both WFDD and La Noticia through Report for America, where she covers COVID-19's impact on Latino Communities.

Periodista de La Noticia y 88.5 WFDD, Eileen Rodríguez reporta el impacto de COVID-19 en la comunidad Latina en Carolina del Norte. Rodríguez es miembro del cuerpo de periodistas de Report for America 2021-2022