Inspired by the past. Looking to the future

Mexican music encompasses a colorful spectrum of subgenres, but at the core of all of them are the art of storytelling and an innate sense of pride. It's all about the corridos: songs that tell heroic, subversive, and poetic tales of love, war, and outlaw glory. Corridos first flourished in the fiery atmosphere of the Mexican Revolution and remain central to the genre today. No act represents the enduring power of this tradition better than Los Tigres Del Norte, brothers from San Jose, Calif., who voice the struggles of immigrant life while uplifting Mexicans on both sides of the border—and do so with unrivaled authenticity. While norteño is typically defined by its instrumentation and themes, ranchera puts the singer front and center in a challenging bout of vocal showmanship against the brassy bombast of a mariachi ensemble. It follows that ranchera icons are often larger-than-life themselves—like the opera-trained Tito Guízar, who first introduced the world to the singing charro (a gallant cowboy of sorts) in the iconic 1936 film Allá en el Rancho Grande. Thanks to José Alfredo Jimenez, who penned some emblematic mariachi classics, vocal virtuosos like Vicente Fernandez, his son Alejandro, and Luis Miguel have found an audience well beyond Mexico's borders. Miguel learned a thing or two from Mexico's greatest contemporary showman, Juan Gabriel, whose 40-year career touches on everything from ranchera to pop.

Across the border, in Texas, Little Joe took what early tejano pioneer Beto Villa created and integrated rock, blues, and country—all while capturing the unique bicultural experience of the upwardly mobile Texan with a sentimental attachment to the motherland. What started after World War II as a novel mix of norteño-style accordion, Mexican ranchera, and European waltzes and polkas became a full-fledged soundtrack to the brown pride movement. But it was a young singer, Selena Quintanilla, who catapulted tejano music into the mainstream in the ‘90s; her combination of her R&B-style vocals and pop beats were the perfect launching pad for superstardom. Selena broke the glass ceiling in tejano, just as Amalia Mendoza, Lucha Villa, Lola Beltrán, and Rocio Durcal had done in ranchera, daring to steal the spotlight from their chest-puffing male counterparts. La Banda El Recodo, a legendary family ensemble that was formed in the late ‘30s, has long defined the brassy banda sound, broke ground for relative newcomers like La Arrolladora Banda el Limón de René Camacho (who have only been around for a half-century) and Banda Sinaloense MS de Sergio Lizarraga, a bestselling group that emerged in the ‘00s. But another phenomenal woman, the late Jenni Rivera (who once boasted in a song about her “steel ovaries”), was also a driving force in a male-dominated genre. And just as women continue to leave their mark in Mexican music, a new generation of songwriters and performers such as Luis Coronel have become inspiring sources of innovation, great stories, and Mexican pride.