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    The World Loves Corridos Tumbados. In Mexico, It’s Complicated.

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    Inspired by a century-old genre from the Mexican countryside, the latest pop music phenomenon is drawing thousands of young fans — and criticism for its violent references.In many Mexican towns where wars between drug cartels continue to wreak havoc, the sight of a young man at night dressed in black and donning a balaclava would be terrifying. On a recent Saturday in Mexico City, Peso Pluma strutted across the stage in the same outfit, to excited cheers: It was time for the corrido tumbado concert.The 24-year-old breakout star, who makes a modern take on traditional Mexican music, wore a glamorous Fendi version of a sicario (or hit man) uniform. He faced a stadium full of fans and shouted, “Are you ready to witness the most warlike concert of your life?”The crowd roared back: It was ready. Later, during “El Gavilán,” the audience sang in unison, “I’m of the people of Chapo Guzmán,” a reference to one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords.Peso Pluma, along with acts like Natanael Cano, Grupo Firme, Eslabon Armado and Banda MS, is at the forefront of a musical movement that has found growing audiences this year in the United States and beyond. The artists perform corridos tumbados (or trap corridos), which combine singing and rapping familiar to fans of hip-hop and reggaeton with instrumentation and melodies common to traditional Mexican music, along with lyrics inspired by narcocorridos — songs that tell stories of the drug trade.But even as Peso Pluma racks up millions of streams and Grupo Firme tours arenas in the United States, these artists often find themselves in contested territory at home, where the drug war isn’t a dramatic fantasy but a bloody daily reality.“They are striking a nerve of Mexican culture,” said Camilo Lara, 48, a music producer, composer and former label executive with extensive film credits. He cited how the artists have tapped into “the relationship with violence, the relationship with the street, with politics, with what’s happening with fashion,” and added, “It’s the most exciting moment in Mexican music in 20 or 30 years.”Peso Pluma’s stadium show at Foro Sol, a venue that holds more than 60,000 people, was the last of his concerts in his home country after several cancellations over security threats. Days earlier, authorities in Tijuana had banned corridos tumbados in all public spaces with fines of up to $70,000.While the sounds and the faces may be fresh, these artists are heirs of a musical tradition that has long attracted controversy. In 1987, the governor of Sinaloa asked local news media to stop the broadcast of music that made reference to drug trafficking. In 2002, radio stations in the border state of Baja California agreed not to play songs that exalted narcos and asked their U.S. counterparts to do the same. In 2010, conservative Mexican lawmakers presented a bill that would have sent artists who glorified criminals to prison.Natanael Cano onstage at Coachella in April 2022. Cano is known as a pioneer of corridos tumbados, which contain many elements of old-fashioned corridos.Scott Dudelson/Getty Images“The decision to ban these corridos tumbados is to protect the mental health of Tijuana’s children,” the city’s mayor, Montserrat Caballero Ramírez, said last month through a spokesman. In May, Cancun banned public shows “that foster violence,” saying such events contradicted the pursuit of peace and security; Grupo Firme canceled a concert there shortly after. Two months later, Chihuahua’s City Council voted unanimously to fine public shows promoting violence.Officials contend it is not censorship. “They can sing whatever they want,” Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said this summer, “but we are not going to keep quiet when they say that Ecstasy is good, that they have a .50 caliber gun and the most famous narcos are their idols.” A month later, perhaps in tacit recognition of the influence of corridos tumbados, the government released its own kind of tumbado: a song warning of the dangers of fentanyl.The artists have pointed out that their lyrics aren’t aimed at children. “I know sometimes it’s not OK for kids to see or hear this,” Peso Pluma said in an interview, “but it’s a reality.”The reality is also that this type of music, once very locally rooted and associated with an older generation, is attracting global attention for its catchiness and cachet. The songs are not only fixtures of radio stations in Los Angeles, but are draws for concertgoers in Lima and Madrid and have made fans of celebrities like Mike Tyson and the band Maneskin.“I heard it at a wedding,” said Javier Nuño, a partner at Indice, a company that has licensed Peso Pluma’s and Cano’s songs for HBO. Once you cross over into wedding D.J. playlists, “you are at another level,” he added.At Peso Pluma’s Mexico City show, kids arrived in droves — mostly teenage boys dressed in Air Jordans, oversize hoodies and outfits featuring Nike, Gucci, Fendi and Burberry logos in models, colors and materials Nike, Gucci, Fendi and Burberry have probably never manufactured. Some dared to sport Peso Pluma’s signature mullet.Oliver Medrano, 35, said his 9-year-old, Sofía, had asked for tickets. The two gave up their seats close to the stage and watched instead from the bleachers after the girl’s mother protested. “They say the songs are too war-driven,” Medrano said. Sofía said she had become hooked on “El Belicón” (“The Belligerent”), Peso Pluma’s song about a man who boasts of owning sports cars, bazookas and Kalashnikovs.“I was a bit worried about security,” Medrano said. But mid-concert he felt confident enough to ask the couple next to him to watch his daughter while he made a quick bathroom run.Leonardo Manuel, 12, attended the show in a blue velour tracksuit with rhinestones arranged in the Fendi logo with his aunt, Elizabeth Rubí Cruz, who works at a jewelry store; she said there was a high demand for Cuban-style chains, thanks to the influence of Peso Pluma. Clients “like how he dresses,” she said. The pair’s favorite song? “Lady Gaga,” about a dealer hanging out with influencers (“none of them post to Instagram”), with mentions of Cartier, pink cocaine and Louis Vuitton.The excitement, and controversy, surrounding the lyrical content of corridos tumbados in Mexico in many ways mirrors decades of debate in the United States over the real-life implications of rap lyrics. From N.W.A to Jay-Z and Rick Ross, many of the most popular hip-hop artists have relied on the imagery of drug kingpins for both glitz and grit. Beginning with the gangster rap of the 1980s and ’90s and continuing through the 21st-century hip-hop subgenres of trap and drill, lyrics that document — and some say glorify — the drug trade, its attendant violence and its spoils have remained a cultural and political battleground. Currently in Atlanta, music by the rapper Young Thug is being used in court as evidence of his membership in a criminal street gang.“You see these guys partying with these luxuries and suddenly it’s, ‘How can I get this?’ especially in this country, our country, which has some very strong social limitations,” said Graciela Flores, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila.Dr. Flores, who specializes in 19th-century crime and justice in the Mexican borderlands, organized a series of events this past fall at the university focused on corridos tumbados at the behest of one of her students. She was overwhelmed by the attendance. “People were eager to talk about what they had seen” in terms of daily violence in their communities, she explained. The songs had moved people to share their experiences, something that Dr. Flores found “valuable, but at the same time very disturbing.”This past spring, the steps of the National Auditorium in Mexico City were filled with mothers waiting while their children attended a Natanael Cano concert. Cano, 22, is recognized as a pioneer of corridos tumbados, which absorb many elements of old-fashioned corridos: nasal voices, tololoche, accordion or brass instruments, strummed guitars.“At the beginning I was freaked out a bit” by the lyrics, said Dolores Saldívar, 47, who sells balloons. “But now I like them.” She had paid about $120 each for her two teenage children to attend.Juan Bosco de la Cruz Rangel, 23, the student who had urged Dr. Flores to put on the conference, said that when he and his friends started listening to tumbados, he looked up the artists online and found them relatable — skinny guys who liked to party and saw the police as hostile — to a point: “We’re literally them,” he said. “We’re their age, but without money, bands and that life.” Though he faces daily dangers, he finds songs about gangs and guns provocative and unsettling. Still, he added, he understands where the lyrics are coming from. Critics of the genre “that have never been hungry, it’s easy for them to say ‘there’s a different way’” to make a livelihood, he said.Bringing Cano to the stage in Mexico City, Peso Pluma proclaimed that his fellow artist had “paved a road so all of us could be here” to wild cheers. Just a few days earlier, Peso Pluma had notched another milestone: his first ever Grammy nomination. More

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      Pop Music Hits Finding New Listeners as Mexican Norteñas

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      The EZ Band’s blend of norteña music and Top 40 hits offers some Americans a way to connect with their parents’ culture and exposes others to a new sound.At first, Jaime Guevara’s version of “Hey There Delilah” sounds like just another cover of the Plain White T’s original. But some seconds in, an accordion enters the mix. Then, Guevara shifts his crooning from English to Spanish.“¿Qué tal, Delilah?” he sings, interpreting the lyrics and feeling of the song for a new audience. “Aquí estoy si te sientes sola.”Suddenly, the song that was a hit in the mid- to late aughts has become a norteña, a ballad from a regional Mexican genre that relies heavily on accordions and other acoustic instruments.Guevara, a Houston musician, and his EZ Band have created more than a dozen covers in norteña form, such as “Creep” by Radiohead and “Easy on Me” by Adele — and they’ve taken off.The EZ Band’s rendition of “Hey There Delilah” has been played more than 1.5 million times on Spotify, and at least two million times on TikTok. The band’s version of “Santeria,” originally by Sublime, even drew notice from a fan account. And most recently, the band ventured into Swiftie land with a remake of Blank Space, from the “1989” album by Taylor Swift.“It has kind of changed a lot of my life,” Guevara, 33, said in an interview, referring to the recent rising interest in the EZ Band and its album “Make it Norteño Vol. 1.” (Either norteña or norteño are used to describe artists, songs, music and awards in the genre, because nouns and adjectives have a gender in Spanish; the Grammy Awards, for instance, name a category for Best Norteño Album.)Covers of different genres are not a new concept, of course. There have been Beatles songs made into polka music, and “Hotel California” has gotten the ukulele treatment. But the EZ Band’s songs are growing in popularity at a time when norteña music, and other regional Mexican genres like tumbados, are becoming more popular.These blends of once-Top 40 and norteña music offer first- and second-generation Americans a way to connect with a musical heritage that they don’t always know or may have left behind. It also exposes new audiences in the United States to the unique norteño sound.The sound of norteña music has influences that date back to the 1840s, when Germans began settling in what is now southern Texas, according to Celestino Fernández, a retired sociology professor and consultant for the University of Arizona.“They brought with them their music, and the accordion was a foundational instrument for the waltz and polka,” Dr. Fernández said. “Then the mexicanos, with the 12-string guitar, basically created música norteña.”Mr. Guevara, who is based in Houston, said he grew up listening to both music in English and norteñas played by his family from Mexico. He has mixed the two in his work.Arturo Olmos for The New York TimesThe norteño genre, popular in parts of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, features accordions and other acoustic instruments.Arturo Olmos for The New York TimesGuevara, who was born in Monterrey, Mexico, said his covers were the product of his background: He grew up listening to norteñas thanks to his father, who Guevara said played music on buses for tips in Mexico. When he moved to Houston with his family, at age 9, he was exposed to new genres of music in a new language. Later, Guevara’s wife, who is from Minnesota, introduced him to more new music from the wide range of American pop.“Me, growing up, it’s the generation that grew up here listening to all the music in English, but also have family that listen to norteño,” Guevara said. “I get a lot of comments where people say, ‘You’re putting my two worlds together.’”For decades, norteña music has mostly been popular in the regions where it originated: northern Mexico, the U.S. Southwest and California. But in recent years, the genre has gained a newfound recognition thanks, in part, to the prominence of other Latino acts like Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma. Both have collaborated with norteña bands.Since Peso Pluma collaborated earlier this year with the regional Mexican band Eslabon Armado on “Ella Baila Sola” (“She Dances Alone”), the song has reached No. 4 on the Hot 100, Billboard’s mainstream pop chart, and it has been played more than 380 million times on YouTube.“I didn’t think it would ever reach the level it has gotten to,” Guevara said of the current interest in norteña music. “It is a little surprising to see it blow up as much as it has.”Dr. Fernández said some of norteña’s rise could be attributed to the growth of the Latino population in the United States.“I think what we’re seeing is there are more and more Mexican immigrants in the United States, particularly the Southwest, and people bring their culture with them,” he said. “Some of them have heard that music when they were kids in their homes, and maybe now they’re reconnecting to it.”Catherine Ragland, a professor of ethnomusicology at University of North Texas, said she had noticed the interest in her own neighborhood. Teens who were once playing rap and reggaeton from their cars, she said, are now blasting regional Mexican music.For immigrants who moved to the United States recently or at a young age, listening to more traditional music can be a way to connect to their culture, Dr. Ragland said.“This is a way to feel more authentically Mexican and really connect with that,” Dr. Ragland said. “The more they go back to these older styles, the more you feel like you’re truly connected to something.”The blend of American music and norteña in the EZ Band’s songs has given first- and second-generation Americans a way to reconnect with their Mexican roots.Arturo Olmos for The New York TimesBut perhaps a more simple explanation for norteña music’s new popularity is that it’s catchy and easy to move to.“Norteña music is dance music,” Dr. Fernández said. “When you have events, people like to dance — and Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a lot of events around.”Across Mexico and parts of the United States, norteña bands are often hired to play at celebrations for baptisms, first communions, weddings and even funerals, Dr. Fernández said. In Houston, the EZ Band has played at bars, parties and, recently, a halftime show at a Major League Soccer match.After discovering the EZ Band on social media, Juan Loya, director of multicultural marketing for the Houston Dynamo, reached out to the band and invited it to perform.Mr. Loya, 45, grew up in Houston and said that the band’s music resonated with him because his parents came from Mexico, and he used to listen to norteña music at parties and other events. Mr. Loya said that he thought the largely Hispanic Dynamo fan base would enjoy it, too.“Hearing it in a different lens or in a different flavor,” Mr. Loya said of the EZ Band’s norteña sound, “it’s definitely really impactful to me, and I think I’m not alone in that.”Adriana Torres, 38, of Maryland, said that she learned about the EZ Band while scrolling through social media, and she was hooked to the sound.“It immediately took me back years,” Ms. Torres said, adding that she grew up listening to norteñas and other Mexican genres.“It really touches people like me who are Mexican Americans, but also everyone,” she said. “It exposes our music in that style.” More

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      How the Agushto Papa Podcast Chronicles Musica Mexicana

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      The Agushto Papa podcast has become the go-to media outlet for the rising stars of música mexicana.When the four hosts of the Agushto Papa podcast — all Mexican Americans in their early to mid 20s — were teenagers, they wrestled with, as all young people do, the music of their parents’ generation. The varying styles that are termed, broadly, regional Mexican music, have remained emphatically traditional in presentation and sound for decades. For young men growing up very differently from their parents, listening to it was a complicated proposition.“In middle school, I was kind of scared to tell people that I would listen to it, because back then, it wasn’t cool,” said Diego Mondragon, one of the show’s founders. Angel Lopez, one of his co-hosts, echoed the sentiment: “I feel like there was a negative stigma toward it.”Much has changed in the last five years, however, thanks to an influx of new talent with wide-ranging musical references, gestures borrowed from hip-hop, and increased global attention on Spanish-language music thanks to the rise of streaming. As a result, Mexican music is evolving quickly and being heard more broadly than ever. This movement, broadly referred to as música mexicana, has minted a whole new generation of stars in short order: Peso Pluma, Natanael Cano, Grupo Frontera, Ivan Cornejo, Fuerza Regida, DannyLux, Yahritza y Su Esencia, Eslabon Armado, Junior H and more.Agushto Papa, which released its first episode on YouTube in March 2021, and has since amassed over 270,000 subscribers on the platform, has become the most reliable and visible chronicler of this wave — showcasing new releases, hosting intimate performances, reporting news about established stars and rookies alike, chit-chatting about gossip and keeping an eye on tensions that have been developing between some of the movement’s biggest names.“As first-generation immigrants, we always felt, like it or not, a little bit out of place or a little bit like we’re intruding into something,” Lopez, left, said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesFour months ago, the hosts — Lopez, 23; Mondragon, 23; Diego (Keko) Erazo, 24; and Jason Nuñez, 23 — each moved out of their respective families’ homes into a shared house in Stanton, Calif., after a long stretch filming the show largely in Nuñez’s family garage, in order to create a more focused environment for making their content. (Erazo, Mondragon and Nuñez grew up nearby, in Westminster, Calif., and played soccer together as children. They met Lopez in high school.)“As first-generation immigrants, we always felt, like it or not, a little bit out of place or a little bit like we’re intruding into something,” Lopez said. “And now, with the music, we heard people our age talking about issues that we have living here in the United States as Mexicans. So we really fell in love with that.” (For a time, Mondragon and Nuñez were in a band, Grupo Activo, managed by Erazo — the podcast’s title is from an inside joke from that era, riffing on the term “a gusto,” or relaxed.)Most of the show’s interview subjects are of a similar age and cultural background as the hosts, creating a built-in ease. “A lot of the new artists that are coming out, they’re Mexican American. They speak both Spanish and English,” Erazo said. Mondragon estimated that about 75 percent of the podcast’s interviews are conducted in English.Erazo added that the casualness of the setting contributes to the hosts’ ability to get unvarnished conversation from their subjects: “They needed somewhere where they could be themselves, be who they are, express their feelings, let it all out instead of going in and being like, ‘Yes sir, no sir.’” Many interviews are booked directly, over text or direct message, bypassing traditional intermediaries.Mondragon also emphasized that it’s not just the musicmakers who are changing, but the music as well, a far cry from what was on offer in his parents’ era. “Back then music was very strict with their rules. Like, ‘you need to dress like this, You need to sing like Vicente Fernández. You need to have this beautiful voice,’” he said. But the introduction of technology and techniques from other genres meant more stylistic entry points for artists.“I think a big reason why the younger generation fell in love with this music is you didn’t really have to have a singer’s voice to participate,” Nuñez said. “If you had like a regular monotone voice, you could still cultivate and create the new style of music.”As the scene has become more popular, there have been more internecine squabbles between artists — a primary one is between Peso Pluma and Jesus Ortiz Paz, the singer of Fuerza Regida — tensions that persist despite the fact that the genre’s rising tide is likely to lift all boats.The podcast’s casual setting is key to the hosts’ ability to get unvarnished conversation from their subjects.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“I think we just try to stay neutral and let the people decide,” Nuñez said. “Just give them the facts.” On the show, discussions about the artists’ barbs at each other are dissected with childlike awe and a layer of concern. (Occasionally the podcasters have tried to capitalize on the spats: They briefly sold “Make JOP and Peso Friends Again” shirts and hats.)Very quickly, the hosts themselves have become figures in the world they document. Occasionally, they’ll share videos which show them getting acknowledged at concerts by the artists they cover and admire. They have started a record label, which they hope to use to elevate new talent, and view the long-running radio and television personality Pepe Garza, and his interview and performance show “Pepe’s Office,” as a model for what Agushto Papa might develop into.There have been some hiccups in the crew’s quick ascent. Recently the show was demonetized by YouTube over a technical issue. And in a recent video, Lopez frankly discussed how the sudden success of the show had led to some disruptive life decisions, which prompted a group decision to stop drinking. “The whole honeymoon phase is over,” he said. When they began the podcast, Lopez said he had been happy just to receive invitations to artists’ parties. “But you’ve got to learn to say no and just to get to work.”Perhaps most crucially, though, not only have they fully reconciled their relationship with the music of their parents’ generation, but they’ve been able to convince their parents that the music of the current generation is valid, too.“A lot of older people were saying, ‘Oh, what is this? Turn it off. That’s not real Mexican music,’” Erazo said.Mondragon recalled his mother’s initial resistance to Cano, one of his favorite artists and a central figure in the movement’s increased visibility. “She would be like, ‘Why does he dress like that? Why does he talk like that? The tattoos are ugly,’” he recalled.She’s opened her mind, and her ears, though. “Now she understands that we need a Nata, we need a Peso — to put Mexico out there to the world, for us.” More

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      Peso Pluma, Mexico’s Breakout Music Star, Finds New Spotlights

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      Backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards last month, at the Prudential Center in Newark, the out-of-nowhere Mexican superstar Peso Pluma gathered his band for an inspirational talk. That night, he was to become the first Mexican artist to ever perform on the show, but before the dress rehearsal of his song “Lady Gaga,” he set aside around 10 minutes to reminisce with the musicians who have been with him for years, telling them how none of his success would have been possible without them. At the end, almost the whole band walked out of the room in tears.Peso was in a reflective mood because of the milestone he was about to achieve. But some somberness was in the air, too. That morning, there were news reports from Mexico about banners posted in Tijuana, signed with the initials of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a powerful rival to the Sinaloa Cartel. They demanded Peso cancel an upcoming concert in the city, threatening his safety if he were to perform.A handful of personal security guards were milling about, but at the moment, there wasn’t much to do besides press on. Before Peso hit the red carpet, he and his manager, George Prajin, huddled quickly, to talk about how to handle any questions about something other than music. Then, he stepped out in front of the paparazzi phalanx, playfully jabbing out his tongue, Jagger-style, and sidled into cheerful interviews with “Entertainment Tonight” and “El Gordo y La Flaca.”The following day, at the Hard Rock Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Peso woke up late after a long night at his V.M.A.s after-party. But he was alert, and pointed in underscoring the importance of the prior night’s performance.“I took it as an opportunity to show the world what I had,” he said. “I just wanted all these artists to get to know me. To get to know what I do, and to get to know better the genre that I do.”More than a dozen weeks after the release of Peso’s third album, “Génesis,” it remains in the top 10 of Billboard’s all-genre album chart.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesPeso, 24, is the reigning king of corridos tumbados, a modern version of traditional Mexican music, which has found great success over the last couple of years. Peso sings and raps in a fashion indebted to contemporary hip-hop and reggaeton over production that holds close to traditional forms. (Peso Pluma — which translates to featherweight — is both his stage name and how he refers to the musical project and band as a whole.)In July, “Génesis” — Peso’s third studio album, but his first since refining his sound and growing his ambitions — made its debut on the Billboard all-genre album chart at No. 3, the highest position ever for an album of regional Mexican music. And it’s had staying power — more than a dozen weeks later, it remains in the Top 10. On Spotify alone, his songs have been streamed several billion times.There have been occasional moments of Mexican American musical crossover in this country — the gangster rap of Kid Frost, the emotional ballads of Selena, the lite R&B and hip-hop of Frankie J and Baby Bash. But Mexican performers have largely been relegated to, and musically remained faithful to, the traditions of what is termed regional Mexican music, an umbrella term that encompasses varying styles from different parts of the country and the southwestern United States. Peso has reframed this music from regional to global. He has collaborated with artists from across the Spanish-speaking world — the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión, the Dominican dembow star El Alfa, the superstar Argentine producer Bizarrap. And his song “Ella Baila Sola” — a collaboration with Eslabon Armado — was the first Mexican song to hit the Top 5 on the Billboard all-genre Hot 100Peso — whose real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija — was born in Guadalajara, and sometimes spent time in Sinaloa with family as a child. He found inspiration in the work of Chalino Sánchez, a seminal singer of narcocorridos, which tell stories about the Mexican drug trade. Peso fell for “his raspy voice, his very unique way to sing corridos, his very unique way to sing romantic songs,” he said. “When this type of music was playing in the car, I literally took my earphones out to hear what he was saying.”Peso also gravitated to Ariel Camacho, a rising young star of the 2010s known for impressive guitar playing. (Sanchez was murdered in 1992; Camacho died in a car accident in 2015.)But even though Peso enjoyed that music, he didn’t feel particularly connected to its aesthetics, which tend toward crisp Western wear, embroidered suits and cowboy boots.“Since I was a kid, my favorite genres have always been reggaeton and hip-hop,” he said. (He spent some of his teenage years in San Antonio and New York, where he found himself gravitating to the likes of Kanye West and Drake.) “That’s why I don’t wear the sombreros. I don’t wear the boots. I’m not that.”Instead, he dresses like a rapper — loud designer clothes, expensive jewelry and watches that a member of his entourage is tasked with carrying around in soft blue cases from the Atlanta celebrity jeweler Icebox.On the V.M.A.s stage, he was dressed in all black, like a luxury spider — wide and angular puffy vest, shamelessly wide and crinkly pants, short leather gloves and boxy sunglasses. Backstage, he gamely stood for a signature antic TikTok interrogation about his outfit from the social media personality Christoosmoove, a clip that was viewed over 10 million times.Peso was also the first Mexican musician to film an episode of “Sneaker Shopping,” a YouTube series that’s a favorite of rappers and social media celebrities; he spent over $32,000, including sneakers for all his bandmates, putting him in the show’s top 10 all-time spenders. The day after the V.M.A.s, the show’s host, Joe La Puma, sent him a gift: a rare pair of 2005 Cinco de Mayo Nike SB Dunks in the colors of the Mexican flag.Peso’s path to the MTV stage was nonlinear, and also improbably fast. He released a pair of albums in the early 2020s, just as the corridos tumbados scene was being established. And he began working extensively with other artists — the majority of his earliest songs to chart were collaborations, including with Natanael Cano and Fuerza Regida, some of the young performers who established the movement just a few years ago. (Cano’s 2019 collaboration with Bad Bunny on the remix of “Soy El Diablo” was one of the first crossover moments for corridos tumbados.)Some of Peso’s songs tend to the romantic, some are boastful, and some are in the vein of narcocorridos. (These are the songs that have led to the reported threats against him.)The young stars of corridos tumbados initially received a cold welcome from the older, more established traditionalists of Mexican music. “I know it’s not envy, I know it’s not any of that,” Peso said graciously. “It’s just they weren’t sure about how to react.”But while he has been able to befriend and continue to collaborate with Cano, there has been rumored tension with Jesus Ortiz Paz of Fuerza Regida, one of the scene’s most prominent acts. (Peso largely declined to discuss any friction he’s faced: “I feel everything that people say, but I try to focus on the positive things, not the negative.”)Peso plans to release a reggaeton EP soon, and following that, strategic collaborations with American rappers.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesIt has provided a story line for the media outlets that document the scene, including the Agushto Papa podcast, which has been enthusiastically covering the rise of Mexican music for the past two years.“I think that he has pushed how these artists do concerts a lot,” said Angel Lopez, one of the show’s hosts. “I don’t think they’ll ever admit it. But after seeing how Peso Pluma performs, everybody had to step their game up. They can’t just stand there in front of a microphone, play their instrument, or sing. They need to add more.”Onstage, Peso is loose and a little eccentric, always shimmying; his band also moves with controlled jubilation. Jason Nunez, one of the other hosts, added, “Another thing too is the dances — no one danced like that. And even if people thought it was weird, they would hate on it and it would just make him bigger. And also, I feel like it’s like a small thing, but it still matters — the hair.” (The hair does matter. Peso has a rangy mullet that’s become a style marker, and is in perhaps unconscious dialogue with the mullets of Morgan Wallen and various K-pop stars.)The speed of Peso’s ascent has been dizzying and disorienting. “A lot of people don’t know that I have anxiety breakouts,” Peso said. “It is very important for people who have mental issues to be treated and to talk about it.”The Tijuana show was eventually canceled out of safety concerns, even though the police had yet to publicly confirm the authenticity of the handwritten banners. “There’s a lot of things that is fake and a lot of things that is not,” Peso said.Prajin, his manager, said the team had to take every threat seriously. “I want to make sure that not only is he secured financially, but that also we take care of his mental health and his physical health,” he said. “And of course, his security. He can’t go anywhere without having a bunch of security — I won’t let him.”A couple of weeks after the cancellation, Peso announced shows in three other Mexican cities. “I do feel safe,” he said. “Being close to God is the most important thing. And I think that’s why I feel safe. It’s more of a spiritual thing for me.”Prajin suggested that Peso’s subject matter might evolve as he became better known, and his musical footprint widened. “He’s never going to stop singing those songs because that’s what he grew up with, the culture that he grew up around,” he said. “But I do see that he’s definitely going in a different direction in terms of the music that he’s singing. There’s a lot of love songs, a lot of different fusions.”Given Peso’s popularity, the collaboration requests are coming in fast. “You have no idea of how many rappers, how many country singers, R&B singers are connecting with us,” Peso said.He plans to release a reggaeton EP soon, and following that, strategic collaborations with American rappers. Prajin said conversations had already begun with Cardi B, ASAP Rocky and Post Malone.These new pathways, he hopes, will be available not just to him, but to Mexican artists who might follow in his footsteps. And thanks to his success, more new doors are open to Mexican performers beyond just the V.M.A.s.“I saw Taylor Swift moving her head, dancing to my song yesterday.,” he said, marveling at the unlikeliness of it all. “That, we couldn’t even imagine.” More

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      City in Mexico Bans Performances of Songs With Misogynistic Lyrics

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      The city of Chihuahua said it would impose hefty fines on bands that perform songs with lyrics that “promote violence against women.”Fed up with persistent violence, officials in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico approved a ban last week forbidding musical acts from performing songs with lyrics that degrade women.Mayor Marco Bonilla of Chihuahua said in an video update last week that the law banned the performance of songs that “promote violence against women” or encourage their discrimination, marginalization or exclusion.Mr. Bonilla said that those who violate the ban could face fines ranging from 674,000 pesos to 1.2 million pesos, or between about $39,000 and $71,000.The City Council approved the ban unanimously on Wednesday amid a rise in killings of women across Mexico in recent years, and as Chihuahua, a city of about 940,000 residents, is struggling with its own cases of violence against women. Recently, Mr. Bonilla said, about seven out of 10 calls to 911 in Chihuahua have involved cases of domestic violence, particularly against women.“Violence against women has reached levels that we could consider like a pandemic,” he said. “We can’t allow this to happen, and we also can’t allow this to be normalized.”It was unclear from his message who would impose the fines or how the ban on misogynistic lyrics would be enforced. Money raised from the fines will be channeled to a women’s institute in Chihuahua and a confidential women’s shelter, said Blanca Patricia Ulate Bernal, a Chihuahua city councilwoman who proposed the ban.Ms. Ulate Bernal said in a post on Facebook last week that the law will apply to concerts and events in the city that require a municipal permit. She added that the ban would help ensure that women have the right “to enjoy a life free of violence.”Mr. Bonilla, Ms. Ulate Bernal and other council members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The lyrics ban was passed about a month after Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized songs known as corridos tumbados, or trap ballads, whose lyrics glorify drug smugglers and violence.“We’re never going to censor anyone,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference in June. “They can sing what they want, but we’re not going to stay quiet.”The approval of the ban is not the first time the city of Chihuahua has taken a strong stance against the performance of certain songs. Citing high levels of drug violence, Chihuahua banned the long-running band Los Tigres del Norte in 2012 after a concert during which the group performed three songs known as narcocorridos, which celebrate the exploits of drug traffickers. The city also fined the concert organizers 20,000 pesos, or about $1,600, at the time. More

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      Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

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      The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      ‘Gods of Mexico’ Review: A Portrait of Indigenous Residents

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      This abstract-leaning nonfiction film consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus of communities in Mexico.Onscreen, “Gods of Mexico” is subtitled “a portrait of a nation through its land and peoples,” although its human subjects rarely speak and aren’t identified by name until the end. The director, Helmut Dosantos, making his first feature, eschews context. This abstract-leaning nonfiction film, made from 2013 to 2022, consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus featuring Indigenous residents of Mexico. Chapters are labeled by geographic region and, more obliquely, with the names of Aztec gods.Some of the movie shows life in motion. The camera observes salt harvesters sloshing water in rhythmic synchronization. A shot descends into a crater until all that’s visible is the crater’s floor, which resembles a giant eye.Other stretches of “Gods of Mexico,” which shifts between black-and-white and color, are built from shots that contain barely any motion. A fisherman who has his catch strung from a bamboo trunk carries the beam behind his neck, as the wind ripples across his clothes. A cow-drawn cart and its driver remain surreally in place on a beach as waves lap the shore. Women balance baskets on their heads while standing frozen against a spare, desert-like backdrop.Viewed as still photographs, these images have a raw power, and sound contributes to that effect. But the temporal element of cinema makes the compositions feel mannered and overly posed. (“Just one more second,” you picture the camera operator signaling to the women with baskets.) When, late in the film, miners playing a dice game converse, it only calls attention to how artfully — and perhaps artificially — withholding the preceding scenes have been. This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.Gods of MexicoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘What We Leave Behind’ Review: A Father’s Final Project

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      At 89, Julián Moreno began building a home in Mexico for his children who had immigrated to the U.S. His granddaughter made the poignant documentary “What We Leave Behind.”When Iliana Sosa’s grandfather Julián Moreno turned 89, he stopped making trips from Mexico to El Paso, Texas, where Sosa’s mother lives. In her documentary “What We Leave Behind,” his granddaughter follows Moreno to his home in the Mexican state of Durango and watches as he undertakes one last project: building a house next to his own that his children who migrated to the U.S. might return to.With an approach that is more elegiac than sociological, the director signals the passage of nearly seven years with the progress of the new building and the evidence of Moreno’s decline. He shovels a bit. He fries an egg that begins sunny side up but ends scrambled. He carries a plank, annoyed that he can’t carry two. A quad cane appears.Eschewing the politics of policy, “What We Leave Behind” honors the poetics of a life: Moreno’s memories of his long-dead wife; his affection for the land; his fealty to his son Jorge, who is legally blind and lives with him; but also his belief in hard work. His face holds traces of the handsome young man pictured on the ID card he used as a bracero — an agricultural worker issued a temporary work permit to come to the United States after World War II.Compositionally calm but never static, the documentary trusts in motes of beauty: a dog lapping water out of a mop bucket; Jorge’s green bristled broom poised above a courtyard floor as he listens; a once-sturdy man lying in bed, his family surrounding him. “What We Leave Behind” insists upon power in stillness, and the poignancy in staying — and leaving.What We Leave BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 11 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More

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      Carla Morrison Wasn’t Afraid to Go Pop. It Helped Conquer Her Anxiety.

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      With her first album in five years, the Mexican songwriter embraces a new sound, and sings bluntly about her struggles.The Mexican songwriter Carla Morrison had a thriving career in 2017. With her pure soprano, her unabashedly vulnerable songs and constant touring, she had steadily built an audience among Spanish-speaking listeners across the Americas and Europe. Her songs had won Latin Grammy Awards and her first two full-length albums, “Déjenme Llorar” (2012) and “Amor Supremo” (2015), were nominated for Grammys. Morrison was on the road, performing at theaters and festivals following the release of “Amor Supremo Desnudo,” an album of radically altered acoustic remakes of the songs from “Amor Supremo.” Concertgoers were singing along with every word. And she was miserable.“I was on tour and I was hating it,” she said. “And I wanted to make music and I was hating it. And I just had no songs to offer.”That’s why it has taken five years for Morrison to release a new album out Friday, “El Renacimiento,” which can be translated as “The Renaissance” or “The Rebirth.” In her new songs, Morrison, 35, reveals both her paralyzing anxiety and her newfound strength. The album’s opening song, “Hacia Dentro” (“To See Within”), begins with Morrison singing “One day I woke up numb/Without the desire to keep going.” And it concludes with the hymnlike, uplifting “Encontrarme” (“Finding Myself”), which vows, “Even if it hurts when I touch/I will heal with time.”Morrison was relaxed and smiling in a video call from her home in a suburb of Los Angeles, where she settled in 2021 after marrying her longtime boyfriend and co-producer, Alejandro Jiménez. The piano she writes songs on was just over her shoulder. But in 2017, she recalled, “I just was kind of like, ‘What am I?’ All those questions that we as human beings ask ourselves: ‘What am I here for? What was I born for? What’s my purpose?’ I was just so uninterested, and at some point a little bit suicidal as well,” she said.“I remember thinking that I just didn’t know my value whatsoever,” she continued. “I just felt like everybody just wanted a piece of me, but nobody really wanted to know me.”Morrison’s songs have never held back on emotion. Her first EP — the skeletal, self-produced “Aprendiendo a Aprender” (“Learning to Learn”) in 2009 — opened with “Lagrimas” (“Tears”), presaging a catalog of songs filled with loneliness, yearning, devotion and heartache.“In every one of my albums, I’ve always tried to be very honest and to give a space to people that feel like nobody understands them,” she said. “I have a feeling that if I hadn’t been a singer-songwriter, I’d probably have been a psychologist or a therapist.”Morrison was born in Tecate, Mexico, a border town in Baja California, and she grew up hearing both traditional Mexican rancheras and American and British pop and rock. She lived in Phoenix for part of her teens. “I do feel very Mexican in my core, but at the same time, I feel very gringa,” she said. “But all of my songs, if you sing them like rancheras, they would totally make sense. Rancheras always tell you a story. The lyrics are very, very honest. There’s no shame if you feel something or expose it.”In 2017, “I just had no songs to offer,” Morrison said. But after taking a break and studying jazz singing, she found her voice again.Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesMorrison’s early recordings presented her as a pop-folk singer-songwriter, relying on guitar and keyboards. Her first full-length album, the largely acoustic “Déjenme Llorar” (“Let Me Cry”), in 2012, went platinum in Mexico and won a Latin Grammy as best alternative music album. Just three years later, Morrison transfigured her sound with “Amor Supremo,” deploying hefty rock beats and reverberant keyboards for songs about obsessive love. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Albums chart. As Morrison promoted it, she agreed to perform acoustic versions of the songs for radio stations and webcasts; eventually, she decided to rework all of the songs, adding two new ones, for “Amor Supremo Desnudo.”But when her 2017 tour was over, Morrison upended everything. She dropped her Mexican management company and stopped touring for the first time since her debut. With Jiménez, she moved from Mexico to Paris in 2019. They passed auditions to enroll at a music conservatory in a Paris suburb, where Morrison studied jazz singing; it was her first formal music education after a decade as an award-winning songwriter. She immersed herself in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and, surrounded by fellow musicians, she also eased back into writing songs.“Carla was starting to feel much better,” Jiménez said in a separate interview. “I remember the day she wrote something and she showed the song to me and I was like, Wow! It had been such a long time since she had not only written something but was excited about music again. She had the same old Carla energy.”As the pandemic began in 2020, Morrison got an unexpected message: Ricky Martin was looking for songs. Morrison and Jiménez sent some possibilities; from the demos, Martin chose to collaborate on one and invited Morrison to share lead vocals and Jiménez to produce. The result is “Recuerdo,” which appeared on Martin’s 2020 quarantine EP, “Pausa,” and has been streamed 16 million times on YouTube alone.In Paris, working on songs during quarantine isolation, Morrison was ready to change her sound again. “For the longest time, I felt very pressured to keep my guitar close,” she said. “I felt very pressured to be this singer-songwriter, because I know people love that side of me. But I also was like, ‘No! I listen to Adele, to Sam Smith, to Billie Eilish, to Ariana Grande, to Dua Lipa.’ And I was like, ‘I really want to channel that. I just want to go pop. And I don’t want to be afraid.’”Where “Amor Supremo” used the gravity and spaciousness of rock, “El Renacimiento” has the surreal depths and computer-aided transparency of 21st-century pop, with close-up vocals, programmed beats and enveloping ambiences: the kind of music that could be concocted while working in isolation in Paris. “We had a whole different perspective,” Jiménez said. “We were not competing with anyone else — we were just trying to do our thing.”In September 2020, Morrison released the first single from “El Renacimiento”: “Ansiedad” (“Anxiety”). Over pulsing, hide-and-seek chords, she sings about panic attacks: “I want to speak and I can’t/I want to breathe and I can’t.”But the chord progression ascends and the beat is crisp and confident “I thought if I were to listen to the song, I would like for the beat to make me forget I’m having an anxiety attack,” Morrison said. “I would like for the beat to make me think, ‘OK, I’m getting out of this.’”Morrison weathered another bout of depression in 2021 after losing her father to Covid-19. She got treatment with ketamine infusions at a clinic in Los Angeles. “I had a ton of epiphanies,” she said. “The next day I woke up and I thought, ‘What’s missing? Something’s missing.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not scared, I’m not sad.’ I just felt at peace.”Fans have told Morrison they are grateful to hear songs about her struggles. “There aren’t many songs about mental health in Spanish,” Morrison said. “In the Latin community, we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable, because then you’re weak. Or if you think about mental health, you’re crazy — just drink a beer, calm down, relax. We don’t face these problems because we weren’t taught.”Morrison has made her way back to performing. Last year, she played a full-length livestream concert. And as a lead-up to the album release this spring, she has been performing at arenas in Mexico, opening for what she names as her “favorite band”: Coldplay.Onstage, on tour, with fans shouting along, Morrison felt joy again. “In the industry, I get this space where I am so honest, and so vulnerable, and very intense at times,” she said. “I feel like people get that from my music. I do feel like I’ve really tried to be that space of freedom. And as long as I’m honest, I’ll be happy.” More