On September 19, 1967, Hurricane Beulah devastated the borderlands of South Texas and Northern Mexico. Tearing across the flat terrain, flooding the Rio Grande/Bravo delta, causing nearly $240 million in property damage, and affecting thousands of residents on both sides of the border, the hurricane was nothing short of a minor apocalypse. In the half-century since it hammered the Gulf coastline, the storm has become a recurring motif in the border region’s long cultural memory, returning to conversation often by way of old photographs, grainy video footage, archived news articles, and unsettling historical analogies. Here, though, I emphasize figurations besides the visual and traditionally textual: the local soundtracks that the storm produced, the narrative folk ballads, or corridos, that it inspired. What might such post-apocalyptic ballads teach us today, amid the immense and interconnected social and ecological difficulties of the present? Uniting literary study with ethnomusicological inquiry, in this chapter I reflect on examples of such corridos to argue for the border ballad’s capacities to unsettle the colonialities of genre, media, and discipline; to bear witness to local catastrophe; and, ultimately, to guide collective memory in the long shadow of colonial encounter.

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.