e’re all familiar with the long, storied, and infinitely bizarre history of propaganda, but this may come as a surprise to even the most jaded: over the past year, the U.S. Border Patrol has commissioned and distributed music as part of a campaign to prevent illegal immigration. Come again?
The resulting songs, known as “migra corridos” in Spanish (literally “migration songs,” although the phrase is more a play on a derogatory term, “la migra,” used by immigrants to describe the border patrol), come at a time when illegal immigration is an obviously hot issue. Though its rate has slowed from a high of 800,000 a year in 2000-2004 to approximately 500,000 in 2005-2008, according to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center, the Border Patrol still records large numbers of disruptions on the U.S.-Mexico border. Between 2005 and 2008, for instance, the Agency reported 723,825 arrests, 390 deaths, and 1,264 rescues.
Evidently, the Border Patrol felt this was cause enough to take up song-writing, and in 2008 outsourced the production of a CD, the eponymous Migra Corridos, to Washington-based Hispanic ad agency Elevacion. In turn, Elevacion distributed tracks from the album to popular commercial radio stations in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Though the songs were originally supposed to be played only as short clips, in conjunction with commercials from the Mexican government discouraging illegal immigration, they generated so much interest among listeners that stations began giving them regular play (you can listen to some of the tracks, courtesy of the BBC, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7879206.stm).
A key part of Border Patrol’s strategy, logic would have it, was keeping its affiliation with these “migra corridos” concealed; the more listeners identified its music as propaganda, the agency felt, the less responsive they would be to its message. Accordingly, “migra corridos” were aimed at the public from two directions. First, they followed in the broader tradition of the “corrido” song form, a longstanding kind of narrative Mexican ballad set to simple melodies. Second, they crafted gruesome, intensely personal narratives of death, disappointment, and despair. To a strangely upbeat series of accordion-driven background tracks, men and women croon, alternately, about such uplifting things as: being left for dead, thirsty, in the desert, and ultimately dying; being raped, bearing witness to the murder of one’s child at the hands of a human smuggler, then dying; being trapped in the back of an airtight tractor trailer, after having been abandoned by a smuggler, and dying. To borrow from an Associated Press translation of several verses in the latter song:
“To cross the border/He put me in a trailer box/There I shared my suffering/With another 40 immigrants/I was never told/This was a trip to hell.”
And another, courtesy of the Latin American Harold Tribune:
“Night fell, silence came and 1,000 stars suffered with me/ when suddenly, far away, life put me before a friend/ He was sick, he was shivering and his eyes were full of fear/ He begged me, ‘Take me…don’t leave me to die like a dog.”
It would be cruelly disingenuous to mock the heavy-handedness of these songs, which seems to border on self-parody, were they the product of real (read: actually happened) human suffering—that is, if they were borne of a genuine want to deal with real tragedy through real music. But they’re not. Cooked up by an ad agency in Washington, the migra corridos are a mish-mash of low-quality instrumentals and corny vocals. While it is hard to believe that the songs are not based on true accounts of border crossings gone sadly awry, their existence as propaganda rather than as art is a strange one. Can we therefore deem their appeal as exploitative? Or does their hazily defined service of the public good place these songs in a moral gray zone?
This is the finer side of the issue. After all, since 2005, deaths on the border have fallen from a high of 492 to 390 in 2008, a trend likely explained not only by demographic shifts but also by a flood of new strategies employed by the Border Patrol. In light of all the other miserably misguided, ham-fisted policies we can now trace to the Bush Administration—rampant abuse of the public trust, torture, misgovernment, fence-building, domestic propaganda (!)—Christ, who’s to complain about a bit of spirited dis-information abroad, especially if it’s saving lives? If nothing else, after all, the past eight years have trained us to speak the language of moral compromise with striking articulateness.
Thankfully, these aren’t questions we should have to ask anymore in a post-Bush era. Ethical ambiguity will always stand front and center in the making of policy, sure, but propaganda is not ambiguous. Public service announcements, press releases, advertising campaigns: these forms, among others, of transparent self-advocacy will always be available to government. But Migra Corridos, a greatest hits album of faux-social awareness courtesy of Uncle Sam? Please. We should expect a bit more dignity from those in power, especially if our country hopes to receive it in return.
