Contrabando y Traicion. Los Tigres del Norte. 1974. Discos Fama.

 A small and tan box radio sat atop my mother’s refrigerator in the small kitchen that sat on the western side of the house she shared with my father. It was the one object in that kitchen from which all domestic energy on that houseside discreetly emanated, a sort of low frequency buzz field that held either our direct or ambient attention. Anyone living inside that house was affected by this strange totem in intensely different ways, but I can only speak for myself when I share the memory of how it acted as a kind of lymph for my rapidly emerging pre-teen sexuality, becoming a more integral part of my childhood than the crucifix, its counter totem in that grossly supernatural household. I was radicalized by American radio in the nineteen seventies—a late century, late millennial epoch in which American cultural history summoned from its own unsettling past a Dionysian energy that culminated in a unifying national renaissance we’re likely never to experience again. Our house was visited by the local spirit of Texas/Mexico border music, courtesy of the Spanish language AM radio stations my mother frequented, her radio on play from the pre-dawn hours when she prepared the home breakfasts, and on through to lunchtime, when she dissolved onto the living room sofa, sometimes dozing through As The World Turns and Guiding Light, before returning to the kitchen for dinner preparation. This was how Contrabando y Traicion came into our home, first as a song on the radio, then in record form when my mother bought the LP on the Discos Fama label. She sang along with it so often that I began to absorb it, first without notice, and secondly with genuine curiosity that led to me interrogating her about its meaning, which she was only too happy to share with me. What caught my ear, of course, was the song’s drug trafficking detail, making the ballad a forerunner in the narcocorrido tradition. The turgid and violent melodrama that climaxes the song wasn’t lost on me either; it opened my imagination to the power of unpredictability, chance, in destabilizing order. By an accident at birth, I had infiltrated the home of Christian assimilationists, first generation Mexican-Americans who had wandered onto a bourgeois capitalist playground encircled by invisible fencing they were not allowed to surmount without suffering the cuts and bruises of good behavior. Obsessed with modern manners, my mother sought and, at times, found within her husband a soft, bourgeois heroism that called to mind the calm efficiency of Emilio Barela, Contrabando y Traicion’s criminal drug smuggler whose good intentions win him seven fatal bullets by the song’s end. I absconded with the terrestrial radio energy my mother had unwittingly unlocked for me, transferring it to the small analogue radio I began keeping in my childhood bedroom, on the small built-in shelf directly above my mattress. Commercial radio spoke directly to a hole in the center of my brain put there by Camelia la Tejana’s flying bullets, and the consumer detritus began to accumulate in neck high piles within the waste receptacle that capitalism makes of the individual’s imagination, the data overflow of a culture out of bounds. Trawling obsessively through this garbage barrage, I’d found my dissociative bliss.

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