In this explicitly borderzone corrido, Mario Quintero Lara bemoans the “frontera roja,” or the red frontier, so-called due to the endless bloodshed ensuing from the traffic of narcotics from Colombia to the United States. Confronted with the immediate menace of death and devastation, the singer of the narcocorrido can never turn back; his passage has already been purchased. His voice is consigned to a red frontier, a straying and a spar in which he is surely to die.
Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou and the Migration from Mu
