Cowboy hats, warm clothes and the desire to dance tightly. The drop in temperatures in Mexico City last September did not stop the 54,000 people who came to enjoy ARRE, self-proclaimed ‘the largest Mexican music festival in the world’. As headliners, Los Tigres del Norte, Xabi, Codiciado, Gerardo Ortiz, Panter Bélico and Junior H. This second edition of the festival had a point in common with the first, held in 2023: very few female voices in the lineupnone as headlining.
Among them, Delilah Rose Cabrera, a promise of the corrido tumbado at only 16 years old: born in the US but with Mexican roots, she grew up in a small town in Washington and began her career on TikTok. At the ARRE, hundreds of people knew the lyrics of the ballad Lost Lovewhich the artist released this year after being the first woman to sign with CT, Natanael Cano’s record label. “It’s going to change everything,” he assures elDiario.es Elizabeth Medina, 20, after traveling for more than two hours by public transport from the outskirts of Mexico City to attend the festival. “I love lying down, but it’s true that Delilah is almost the only morra (girl) I follow, I don’t know about other women,” she adds.
The corridos tumbados, a fusion between tradition and urban music, have placed Mexico in the international spotlight with stars such as Peso Pluma, Natanael Cano, Xabi and Junior H. In 2023, Peso Pluma will have 15,000 people dancing at the Wizink Center in Madrid , months after his song She dances alone broke records on the charts. The ‘tumbados’ are part of the Mexican regional, a broad umbrella that encompasses different subgenres and artists who live between Mexico and the US; the same as its listeners, distributed mainly between Mexico and the diaspora north of the border, but increasingly present in Spain and other Latin American countries.
With exceptions such as the legendary Jenni Rivera, who died in a plane crash in 2012, the references of the Mexican regional are generally male. But something is changing in the scene: it is evident by artists such as Delilah, Yvonne Galaz, Conexión Divina, Michelle Bi, Camila Fernández or Vivir Quintana, but also by producers, composers and managers that behind the spotlight they pave the way for women to be part of something that is much more than music, perhaps the social thermometer of an entire country.
Work twice as hard between male camaraderie
“Despite the significant and recent progress, we still have many challenges,” says Erika Vidrio, currently the most recorded regional Mexican composer and nominated for several Latin Grammys, from a US airport. “Women have a hard time, we work twice as hard and yet we are questioned.” Glass founded in 2021 The composers, a community to strengthen networks and introduce more popular music creators. “A few years ago they still called me a composer, in men, the percentage of female composers in the Mexican region is less than 10%, that’s what we represent and I’m getting very positive.”
There is a camaraderie that surrounds the Mexican regional, and especially the corrido tumbado: its artists collaborate constantly, meet with each other, open their own record labels together, compose the songs that others sing – a great example is the Sinaloan Tito Laija, known as Tito Double P and creator of some of Peso Pluma’s great songs such as “PRC”, “AMG” or “Siempre Pendientes”—. That camaraderie is, in its essence, masculine. Meanwhile bro, carnal, compa, it is legitimate to wonder where they are. “Compadrismo has made the genre grow a lot and made it independent of the big labels, but it has also closed it in on itself and has marginalized women,” Andrea Fernández, who during her years working at Warner, told elDiario.es Music México promoted Gorgona Records, a label to give more visibility to women in the industry.
Lore Cabral, the first Mexican woman to achieve three nominations as a sound engineer and producer at the Latin Grammys, says that “we are still not close to having an equitable gender, it is a very closed genre and for music producers much more so.” Explain on the phone elDiario.es who still does not know other women who produce regional Mexican, a problem that is often related to “credibility.” “Many times, they are not going to let me and my team make a production because I do not have the same credibility as a woman, but I do have a man who is just starting out,” she laments. She has chosen to open her own record label and admits that “many times you have to be colder, harder, to have the respect that any man would have.”
A future that involves the fusion of genres
The most widespread accusations against corridos tumbados and, in general, against Mexican popular music, have to do with machismo and the exaltation of violence and narcoculture in the lyrics. Recently, the release of the song your wedding by Óscar Maydon and Fuerza Regida was surrounded by controversy on social networks for advocating gender violence with verses like “I’m going to hell, but I have to take revenge (…) I want to stain the white dress red. I know that the altar of God is holy, but, my love, a hundred guests and everyone will have to see that our love goes to the afterlife.”
Even President Claudia Sheinbaun has taken sides on this musical genre, after announcing that in 2025 she will launch a contest where corridos with “other types of values” are promoted, since “it is not only an apology for violence against women, but in general for violence and exalt ways of life linked to crime and cartels as if it were a life option, when in reality it is a death option,” the president said in a press conference at the end of November.
For Erika Vidrio, “popular music is the reflection of social realities, this does not mean that all artists share the same vision, that all composers have the same way of writing, and even more so within all the subgenres of regional Mexico. Although the images of violence and machismo in the corridos tumbados “are evident,” Vidrio believes in the need “not to cancel them.” ”I would not write a corrido that talks about drugs, weapons or violating a woman, I am very clear about my values in that sense but I do not cancel anyone, I try to understand that behind that expression there is a social reality, a history of life,” he points out. ”If women are more participatory in this genre, perhaps we can provide another type of angle regarding the lyrics.”
The corrido is sexist, you just have to look at the line up of festivals like ARRE, get on the Spotify chart…they are not opinions, they are facts
Andrea Fernandez
— Creator of the music label Gorgona Records
Andrea Fernández maintains that “the corrido is sexist, you just have to look at the lineup of festivals like ARRE, entering the chart from Spotify…they are not opinions, they are facts.” That does not imply that it should be automatically reviled, when machismo is present in a multitude of musical styles, not only in Mexican popular music. “For me, what excites me about tumbado is that it is a mix of genres and cultures, it comes from the north of the country where there are many people who are neither gringa (American) nor mexa, and who are influenced by listening to regional and hip music. -hop”, he says. “I think it’s very beautiful that people who have traditionally felt marginalized feel heard and say: this speaks to me.”
“For me, the future is in the fusion of genres, emerging artists like Delilah are doing a fusion with pop because it is friendlier for them,” continues Fernández, who has just opened her own agency. management and emphasizes the importance of always having female names involved in the different parts of the musical process: “If in the corrido tumbado environment there are almost no female artists, there are also no sound engineers, producers or managers.”
From Los Angeles, producer María Vertiz agrees in calling the Mexican region “a masculine universe.” An ecosystem that, like hip-hop or reggaeton, is shedding its sociopolitical burden—in this case associated with violence and drug trafficking—while “popifying itself to reach the masses.” For purists of the genre it may not be a positive thing, but for Vertiz, who has recently recorded with a regional promise like Delilah, “it implies that it be democratized and that we find more diversity.” Some of the new references of the Mexican regional already show the possibility of a more diverse scene; for example, the singer-songwriter Vivir Quintana, with her lyrics against sexist violence and a team made up only of women, or the trans singer Michelle Maciel, who fuses corridos with electronica and reggaeton.
The day before being interviewed, Erika Vidrio went to an Iván Cornejo concert with her daughter. The main artist was preceded by Delilah, and Vidrio says she felt hopeful. A feeling shared with many of her colleagues in the industry because, as Vertiz says, “the Mexican regional is putting us on the map in a very nice way.” “This new generation of women on stage is going to raise the flag high; I think it is a matter of time but there is a greater opportunity coming in genres such as corridos tumbados as long as record labels look for female voices and young artists open spaces for their female colleagues,” concludes Vidrio.
#women #revolutionize #Mexican #popular #music #badass #work #hard #questioned
