Week 5 Blog: Happy Cinco de Mayo!!! :)

Week 5: 05-03-2007
1. Can you think of any examples in our day and age in which real life influences theater (or film or music or music video) and in turn these representations influence society?
First I want to apologize for turning in the blog late. I didn’t realize I had work today and it took away my entire evening. Anyway, I wanted to respond to both of the questions since they’re both interesting and I have a story for both. When it comes to the relationship between society and theatre or music or videos, Mexican “corridos” immediately come to mind. Corridos are narratives in song or poem form that originate mostly from the Southwestern regions of Mexico like Sinaloa and Michoacan. Corridos are basically stories about romance or about someone’s death, about crossing the border, or even about drug trafficking and getting caught and the gunshots that come with it, but this is the more current stuff! They can also be stories of old legendary heroes like Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and how he was a friend of the common people—maybe to influence the politics of today. They came to influence society during the Mexican Revolution because a lot of people were illiterate and the corrido was used to sing the message to people whether it was something that had to do with religious movements of the time or about the corrupt Porfirio Diaz government. Everyone knows the “La Cucaracha” corrido, Im sure. The meaning of this song was rephrased to talk about Pancho Villa’s abusive army against Venustiano Carranza during the Mexican Revolution. It isn’t actually about a roach that cant walk! The old corrido style was more educational, imformative, romantic, and religious but a lot of today’s corridos are automatically associated with drug dealing and shootings and violence, which sure it does reflect some of the unfortunate realities of Mexico today but it is unfortunate that its losing its primacy as a means of mass communication. This has a tremendous influence on society because what you hear on the media or in music for one, is what people are going to go out and do and in this case, some of the effects may be unfavorable.

2. Can you think of an encounter with some type of representation in the mass media (give a musical example if possible) that you felt strongly about? It doesn't have to be about ethnicity--you could choose to write about gender identity, religious identity, or something else. I will write very briefly on this one. I liked the presentation with the episode of The Simpsons that showed to us how the mass media tries to represent the cultures, ethnicity, identities, etc of a certain population. The infamous George Lopez does this with the Mexican/Latino culture. He is a stand-up comedian meant to be for the Latino audience who understands exactly what he is talking about when he brings out these “inside jokes” of Hispanic people. He talks about how we are “afraid of the cucuy (monster)” and that we run as little kids when we get something from the closet; we never want to admit that were getting old, we don’t go to the doctor because we think were fine and are afraid of finding something wrong; how parents always have “no” as an answer and how we get “spanked” or “hit” for whatever reason; how we take our own food and lunch to Dodgers games for example because food there is too expensive; this and other things (including religion, foods, values, dress, jobs, etc) that you can hear about by typing George Lopez onto the search engine on Youtube.com. I didn’t want to put it up because it might offend some people. This is just one example. I personally don’t have a liking for this comedian even though a lot of the things he says are true and they give us a good laugh if we are able to understand the inside joke.