La Bamba redux (Friday night video)

If I’d only spelled Adolfo Ruíz Cortines wrong one time, I’d have been able to claim it was a typo.  Nooooo… I managed to make the same bone-headed mistake four times.  I’ll have to plead “no contest” on this one — when working on my Mexican history, I’d become rather fond of the old goat… and try to spell people’s names at least relatively correctly.   Thanks, Eric (comment 2) for catching — after the fact — what I otherwise just didn’t see the first time through.  

La Bamba has always been political. John Todd, Jr. claims that the song was originally an anti-draft ditty from the 1680s:

… probably the words of a coastal youth when questioned by the local draft board.

In those days, nobody in his right mind wanted to be a sailor to go to sea in search for pirates.

Yo no soy marinero // I am not a Sailor
Yo no soy marinero // I am not a Sailor
Soy Capitán // I am a Captain (in the Army)
Soy Capitán // I am a Captain (in the Army)

Perhaps after a show of force by the recruitment officer, the boy relents in his efforts to resist the draft:

Pero por tí seré, // But for you I will be (one)
Por tí seré,// But for you I will be (one)
Por tí seré.// But for you I will be (one)

A few hundred years later, and a few thousand different verses (some more polite than others, but usually with an undercurrent of tweaking the establishment) the establishment itself glommed on to La Bamba.

From the late 1940s until 2000, the PRI candidate was chosen by the outgoing president, and was slated to win, no matter what. Still, a candidate had to carve out his own image and had to at least make an appearance of running for the job. In 1958, the incumbent, Adolfo Ruíz Cortines, selected his Secretary of Labor, Adolfo Lopez Mateos as his successor.

Ruíz Cortines was a Jarocha, but you’d never know it. Other than having a potty mouth, which you’d expect from a guy born in Alvardo (supposedly the foulest mouthed city in Christendom) he just didn’t project the good times attitude of Mexico’s New Orleans. He was old for a Mexican president (in his 60s), dour and wonky. An agricultural economist by training, when he wasn’t reading statistical data on Mexican protein consumption, he relaxed by playing dominos with his cronies.

Lopez Mateos — from a Mexico City intellectual family (his sister was B. Traven’s editor and translator; his mother ran a literary salon) — had to overcome not just his upper-crust background, but his early flirtation with reaction… in his early 20s, he’d been involved with Jose Vasconcellos’ abortive 1929 campaign, and for a time, had to lay low in Guatemala.

As a party official, he’d worked his way up the bureacracy, eventually serving as Secretary of Labor. Reinventing himself as a leftist was easy. Overcoming the stigma of a too staid, too middle-class upbringing might take some doing. But, Lopez Mateos had his assets. Unlike Ruíz Cortines (said to be so boring he had respectable mistresses), Lopez Mateos was youthful and handsome. Where it might have been a career killer in a puritanical place like the United States, rumors that a candidate was getting some … especially if the some was said to include Maria Felix … suggested to voters a change was in the offing.

And, where Ruíz Cortines — who hated politics — might bore you to death with his statistical analysis, Lopez Mateos had to reign in the intellectualism and go for the heart. Selling things like nationalization of the electrical grid, or rural development projects aren’t catchy, but you save them for policy speeches. What he needed was a campaign song… you got it: La Bamba was all over Mexican radio in 1958.

And was heard as far away as Pacomia, California where high school boy Ricardo Steven Valenzuela had gotten a local reputation as a pretty good guitar player and singer. That campaign song did change Ricardo’s life… we can’t think of La Bamba (the only song in Spanish on the Rolling Stone List of the 500 greatest songs of all times) without thinking of Ritchie Valens.

We don’t think of Adolfo Lopez Mateos, though a young candidate trying to set himself selling himself as an agent of change … but it doesn’t make Mo Rocha’s parody isn’t that far off.

Courtesia de Burrohall

This is not an endorsement, but an observation. It’s easier to rhyme Obama in Spanish. Clinton … and McCain… just don’t work in most songs. Nor, for that matter, is Barack Obama suitable for all Mexican music: