Celestino Fernandez is a sociology professor at the University of Arizona and an expert in the Mexican musical tradition of corridos. Corridos have been a part of Mexican tradition for years and depict life experiences and situations through music. Fernandez recently composed a corrido about the dangers of U.S.-Mexican border issues called “Peligro En El Desierto (Danger in the Desert).”

Kelli Hart: So, when did you first come to the UA, and what brought you here?
Celestino Fernandez: I came here 31 years ago, and I came as an assistant professor in sociology. And really what brought me here is the quality of the faculty and sociology department, it’s a good department. I had an offer at the University of Minnesota, but I didn’t want to live where it snowed, I had an offer at UCLA, but I didn’t want to raise my family in Los Angeles. So I came to the UA with a plan actually to stay only two years, and I had opportunities, many opportunities, actually, to leave, but I just enjoy the university, the department at the university, and certainly the region, the community. I’ve become very, very involved in the community, so that’s what’s kept me here.

KH: What was it like growing up in Mexico?
CF: I grew up in a very small community in central Mexico. The name of the town is Santa Ines, in the state of Michoacan. It’s a very small town, less than one thousand people. I was between eight and nine years old when my family immigrated to California, to Santa Rosa (an hour north of San Francisco). At that time it was a community of about 40,000. Language, culture, everything that you could imagine was radically different. It was a huge culture shock for me and my mother and my two sisters.

My father had been in the states for a number of years and started out as a Bracero. That program was a collaborative program, a bilateral program that started during World War II, where the U.S. basically went to Mexico and said 'We have a shortage of laborers, we need laborers,' particularly in agriculture. Because American men were off to war in the Pacific and Europe and women were working in factories, but there still was a shortage. So they recruited in central Mexico, including my home state, because that’s where the majority of the population was located. Northern Mexico, in those days, was sparsely populated.

KH: You’re an expert on corridos. Tell me about them.
CF: The corrido tradition is a Mexican musical tradition, it’s a very poetic form that is based in fact, so they’re like ballads. They take an event or a personality or a location and something that has impressed, or made an impression on public sentiment, public feeling. To give you an example, obviously, 9/11. There’s a ballad, corridos about that, wars, earthquakes, folk heroes.

In the '80s there was a baseball pitcher named Fernando Valenzuela and he was hired out of the state of Sonora by the L.A. Dodgers, and he was a fabulous pitcher. The first year, he won the Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year. But he didn’t speak any English, but there were about six corridos about him.

Now when John F. Kennedy was president of the United States, he was very popular with Mexican people and Mexican-Americans. When he was assassinated, a number of corridos were composed about his life and experience and many of these corridos are very factual. They have dates and locations and names. They’re really like a narrative, a story.
And then a major issue that has had tremendous impact on both sides of the border is immigration. So there are a lot of corridos about immigration. In fact, I just composed one.

KH: You did?
CF: Yes, and there is a professor in the School of Medicine here at the university named Samuel Keim. He developed a model that predicts, based on the weather and temperature, the number of border deaths or migrant deaths in the Arizona desert. So he is creating a Web site and part of that Web site will include this corrido that I composed about the dangers of crossing the desert during the summer. He is working on it now, there is a prototype of it, and the corrido has been recorded by a a graduate of the UA, he lives in Phoenix - Giermo Saenz.

People write about their experiences and they want to communicate with others. Clearly music is a way to educate others. In the old days, these ballads, these corridos were anonymous, but now, of course, everybody copyrights them and puts their name on it.

And they used to be much longer. When they first started to produce records, a corrido would literally run up both sides. They needed both sides of a 45 record to record the entire corrido because they were so long. This last one that I wrote is longer, certainly than average, it’s about five minutes.
KH: How did you get involved with composing corridos? Was it something that was a tradition within your family?
CF: Well it’s a Mexican tradition, everybody knows corridos just like you know mariachi music, because these are generally Mexican musical forms. But the reason how I got started collecting and then writing about it, and analyzing and then later composing was that my father was an immigrant. There was one corrido that he used to listen to called 'Vendiste Los Bueyes' ('You Sold the Oxen'). Having oxen was a means of livelihood. And people plowed their fields and the plows were pulled by oxen and wagons were pulled by oxen. So the story is that you sold the oxen to get a passport to go to the U.S. To make a trip to the U.S. you sold a means of livelihood for the family.

In the corrido, this woman tells the story. It only makes sense if the woman tells it, but she stays behind with the kids. And you see if you go to central Mexico today its very, very green this time of year because this is when it rains and people plant their corn and there’s no irrigation other than the natural rain. That year there was a drought and she was having to borrow money for tortillas. And in the end of the story, these Americans came and brought bags of money and they were giving her this money because her husband had died in the United States working.

So it’s very tragic, but I can assure you that every immigrant, in any part of the world has experienced having some family member die. And in our own case, for example, my grandfather, my father’s father, died while he was in the U.S. And in those days there were no phones, certainly no phones in our small town, and they sent telegrams. So literally by the time my father got there, my grandfather had already been buried. So it was that song that I heard so many times as a kid, and I knew it meant a lot to my father, and clearly as an immigrant myself, it started to mean a great deal to me.

KH: People really seem to enjoy your classes. What made you interested in teaching sociology of popular culture and ethnic relations?
CF: Well, I worked in the fields as a kid. In the summers I used to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday, picking apples off the ground, apples that fell off the trees. That was my family’s job. My father picked them off the tree because those got packed and they were for eating, they were sold to the grocery stores. But the ones that we got off the ground went to the cannery for apple sauce and apple juice and things like that.

If we had remained in Mexico, I’d probably have a sixth grade education because my folks had a fourth grade education and my grandfather on my mother’s side died illiterate at the age of 104. So my parents, when we were up here, always used to stress the value of education and they would say to my sisters and myself, 'Look, you know what physical labor is like and you know the kind of work that we do and you do, and you have opportunities that we didn’t.' And in school, I had a lot of encouragement from teachers as an undergraduate. They would say, 'You know what, you have got to go to graduate school.' And I really had some very incredible teachers and I think that’s why, at some point, I decided I wanted to teach college.

You know, I mentioned that I’ve been here 31 years and 15 of those years I was in administration. I was a vice president. But I resigned that position and took a 40-plus thousand dollar pay cut to teach. Because this is my passion, I want to be in direct contact with students. That’s the heart and mission of the university. It’s not about administrating. When I had initially gone into administration, I had agreed to do it for two and half years and it turned into 15. Three different presidents. I was getting all these nominations to be president of the university and that was a different route but that’s not what brought me to the profession.

I guess what students like is my energy, I don’t know. It’s authenticity. I’m in the classroom because I have decided, it’s not a second choice for me, it’s not a third choice, it’s my top choice. In fact, I feel very privileged to be able to be a professor at the university. The students keep one very young. I have been here long enough that I’ve had children of students I had in my classes and its very interesting.

KH: What do you personally think would be a good solution to all of these border issues?
CF: There is a solution but it has to be a comprehensive solution. I think the best solution would be bilateral. It’s not a problem of one . Icountry. It’s not a U.S. problem. It’s a problem of Mexico as well.
We can put up as many fences as we want, but as long as there are jobs here, and there aren’t enough jobs in Mexico, people will find a way here. So I think the solution has to be comprehensive, meaning that it has to be a path to legal residency for people, particularly for people who are here. Estimates are about 12 million. Of those 12 million, at least half have children who are U.S. citizens by birth. Are we going to break up families? Is that the kind of society and people that we want to be? We have all these family values, let’s think through that.

So it involves some path to legalization, and it also involves some work permits. A lot of people don’t want to come to live here. They really don’t. They want to work here, then go home. Sure enforcement is always part of the formula, but enforcement alone won’t do it. That’s not a solution. Let’s work together. What will it take? It doesn’t mean opening the gates.