A border corrido

There are two references to border corridos in Stones from the Creek.  In the story "Passion Flower," the Engineer hears some shepherds singing a song about him begging la santa de Cabora for aid with the striking miners:

Pedía entonces el Moreno con su sombrero en la mano

Favor de cesa la huelga y regresa a trabajo.

Habla la Santa de Cabora en voz fuerte y clara

La Virgen demanda justicia y defiende la montaña!

Earlier, in the story "The Sun Shone So Brightly" those strikers dance while the band plays the ballad of Juan Cortina:

How much blood must be shed

To defend the land?

If they do not know how to respect us

Let us give them war.

In his book about the ballad of Gregorio Cortez, With His Pistol in His Hand, the folklorist Américo Paredes describes the second as much more in the line of the actual border ballads of the century 1830-1930, i.e. a male hero fighting to preserve his honor.  And I do not disagree with that.  But Enrique Lamadrid's article "'El Corrido de Tomóchic:' Honor, Grace, Gender, and Power in the First Ballad of the Mexican Revolution" (Journal of the Southwest (41:4, Winter, 1999) finds at least two songs that more resemble my imagined one, with a female hero.

First the ballad of Tomóchic honors Teresa Urrea, putting her name on the lips of the Tomochitecos' leader, Cruz Chávez:

Teresita de Cabora de mi amor

en la voz de Cruz resonaba

In a later verse the singer explicitly compares God's power in the Tomochitecos with God's grace inTeresa Urrea:

En Cabora está la gracia

y en Tomochi está el poder

But the ballad does not make that a gender distinction.  It also honors the prowess with rifles of the Tomochiteco women, whose blood is the blood of liberty:

Las mujeres en la torre

qué buenas para tirar

la sangre que de ellas corre

es sangre de libertad.

Lamadrid also finds a variation on the hymn Las Mañanitas which is dedicated to la santa de Cabora.  The first verse goes:

Buenos días Teresita

yo te vengo a saludar

saludando tu hermosura

y en tu casa celestial

And then, in a later verse, we find a reference to her help in fighting evil, in the form of Satan:

En ti espero niña hermosa

y el Arcángel San Miguel

que en la vida y en la muerte

triunfaremos contra Luzbel. 

Which will remind a careful reader of Magdalena in the story "Warrior Princess" who led the procession of San Miguel and sang the hymn Las Mañanitas to stop the arrest or murder of her husband.

So I maintain that my imagined corrido to la santa niña is not an impossibility.  That it was heard by the Engineer, describing his mission and its failure before he even undertook it?  Perhaps magical.  But recognizing the distinctly feminine forms of resistance to power was not my invention.