NO DRUGS, NO TRAFFIC

With Exhibits Like This, Union Station Doesn't Need Enemies.

AS TOLD TO TONY ORTEGA

The last place the Strip figured to find a controversy this past week was
at the Smithsonian Institution exhibit Corridos Sin Fronteras, which opened
recently at Union Station. But after this slab of prime paid the exorbitant
$9 admission fee and began strolling from one dull, politically correct
display to the next, its footsteps echoing in the otherwise empty hall, the
Strip wondered to itself ... Where the hell was Chalino?

The Strip has spent numerous wonderful nights in huge concert halls,
surrounded by Mexican lovers of the corrido as they drank beer by the
bucketful and danced close on a jam-packed parquet floor to a driving
oompah beat.

It's really something to see more than a thousand young people -- nearly
every guy wearing a cowboy hat, the women squeezed into tight dresses --
singing along as the corridista onstage spins a vivid tale of drug
smugglers shooting it out with authorities in the blood-soaked streets of
Mexico's dusty towns.

For more than a century, the corrido was a quaint, folkloric relic, a
ballad style that spoke of heroes like Pancho Villa and gunslingers who
fought over women or horses. It gained a new popularity south of the border
in the early 1970s, after Los Tigres Del Norte gave it a boost with
"Contrabando y Traición" ("Smuggling and Betrayal"), a song about a
drug-trafficking Mexican-American woman. The song became so famous that
movies were based on it.

But the real boom -- the one that convinced an entire generation of
youngsters growing up in the United States that the corrido was more than
the country-bumpkin music of their parents and the old country -- came more
than a decade ago, after the legendary Chalino Sanchez gave the music a new
gangsta gloss.

A marginal singer who barked his lyrics, Chalino gained a following because
he was so authentic, looking and sounding as if he'd just stepped out of
the Sierra Madre Mountains. Drug dealers -- and those who just wished they
lived like drug dealers -- commissioned Chalino to write ballads about
their own valor and ballsiness.

Chalino eschewed fancy duds and wore a pistol, even when he was performing.
And he proved that it was no prop when he returned fire from the stage at a
1992 concert in Southern California. A couple of months later, he was
assassinated in his home state of Sinaloa. Suddenly, the narcocorrido --
brash singing about drug trafficking and gunfights -- took on a badass
quality and exploded in popularity.

But where, at the Smithsonian exhibit, was Chalino? Only after searching
hard did this meat patty locate a small photo of him on a wall, identifying
him only as one of several important corrido writers in recent years. The
narco phenomenon -- the one fueling the art-form's current revival -- was
relegated to a single panel describing the old 1970s Los Tigres Del Norte
hit that started it all.

It was bad enough that the panel of professors responsible for putting
together the show had reduced the cool-as-shit corrido experience to
something so mind-numbingly academic. But, amazed at the Smithsonian's
whitewashing (which was bolstered last week by a politically correct Kansas
City Star piece that dismissed the narco style as an unfortunate sideshow),
the Strip contacted Elijah Wald, who's listed as a consultant on the
Smithsonian exhibit, and who wrote Narcocorrido, the best book on the subject.

Why, this sirloin asked Wald, wasn't the traveling exhibit a livelier look
at what's really driving the hardcore corrido scene today? Where was
Lupillo Rivera, the current king of the Chalinitos (the singers vying to
inherit Chalino's throne)? And what about the other great narco stars,
crooners such as El As de la Sierra, Adan Sanchez and Jessie Morales?

"As I understand it, they were terrified that some conservative congressman
would charge that they were doing an exhibit promoting drug trafficking,"
Wald told the Strip. "Getting Chalino in at all was a fight."

But the PC nature of the exhibit, Wald says, shouldn't fool anyone -- the
narco theme is what's really behind the corrido's popularity today.

"The narco phenomenon has certainly fueled the current corrido boom, and
even many of the modern political corridistas would not be using the form
as much if it weren't for the shot in the arm the genre got from the Tigres
and Chalino," Wald says. "There might well be a traveling exhibit in any
case, because corrido studies in academia have tried like crazy to ignore
the narco stuff and stick to the archaic Texas and Arizona folkloric songs
until the last couple of years. But obviously the narcocorridos are far and
away the most popular, and Chalino the most influential corridista of the
last decade."

But you'd never know it from the show at Union Station.