Narcocultura temprana: El consumo de drogas en la corridística de la primera mitad del siglo XX

Abstract:This essay seeks to revise the periodization of corridos dealing with the consumption of drugs. While it is commonly assumed that corridos depicting the use of drugs first appeared in the last decades of the twentieth century, in this essay I present several samples of corridos and popular songs depicting use of drugs (sometimes in a very explicit and crude manner) that seriously problematizes the notion of narcocultura (narcoculture) as a product of late twentieth-century Mexico. One of these early lyrics, "¿A poco picas?" ("Do you shoot up?"), which narrates in a very crude way the process of preparing heroin, boiling it in a spoon and then injecting it, precedes in some cases over half a century some graphic corridos of the 1990s such as "Líneas de a metro" (Meter-long cocaine lines), "Me gusta ponerle al polvo" ("I like snorting dust"), and "El nariz de a gramo" ("One gram nostril").