“Los Oprimidos” (1978) – José-Luis Orozco * Trad. * LP: Canta 160 Años Del Corrido Mexicano y Chicano * Label: Bilingual Media Productions
Before he recorded this 1978 album, and especially after, Mexico City’s José-Luis Orozco established himself as a gathering force of Mexican folk song. A one-time member of his home city’s boys choir, the musically-inclined Orozco emigrated in the late 1960s to California, where he evidently realized he couldn’t separate his tendencies toward musical and social consciousness. He began teaching, collecting songs, and recording while working on degrees at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Multicultural Education. We know him now as the simpatico, kid-friendly Smithsonian Folkways resource for Mexican-American folk song, so the shadowed and serious young man on the cover of his first record, José-Luis Orozco Sings 160 Years of Mexican and Chicano Corridos, is an eye-catching contrast. The back cover introduces him aptly as being attentive to how “social contrasts and social struggles are universal realities which transcend borders and nationalities.” The album’s opening corrido, “Los Oprimidos (The Oppressed),” dates back to 1821, immediately after the Mexican War of Independence. It’s a song that acknowledges that conflict’s overall collective effort, and also the galvanizing spirit of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the “priest of Guanajuato” and spiritual father of Mexico, but concludes that the suffering of the “sad Indians,” the Native Americans and Mestizos who had already lost so much, is not likely to ebb.