Los Tigres del Norte

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Image:LosTigresDelNorte246-1000.jpg Grammy winners Los Tigres del Norte (1987; Best Mexican-American Performance; Gracias! America Sin Fronteras) is one of the most popular Mexican norteño bands from Rosa Morada, Sinaloa, Mexico. They even have a street with their name and they appear in a mural^{[citation needed]}. The group was started by Jorge Hernández, two of his brothers (Raul and Hernan), and a cousin (Oscar Lara). They started playing with the instruments of one of their grandparents, and started playing in cantinas.

In September 1968, Los Tigres del Norte immigrated to San Jose, California where they played for the Mexican Independence Day celebration. The primary motivation in travelling to the United States was to provide money for their family after their father was injured. The oldest member of the group was 14 at the time, so they needed to recruit an older couple to pose as their parents. In crossing the border, a customs official kept calling them "little tigers," providing the inspiration for their name.

A producer from Fama records heard their Independence Day performance on the radio and signed them onto his record label, also encouraging them to begin playing with amplified instruments, a key inovation in a previously acoustic musical genre. Later, they switched to the Fonovisa record label, under whom they presently continue to produce albums.

In the United States they recorded their first albums, but their real hit was a song in the early 1970s about a couple of drug runners. After getting permission to record this song, Los Tigres del Norte released "Contrabando y Traición" (Contraband and Betrayal) in 1972. While songs like this had previously existed, the popularity of this recording served to initiate the narcocorrido (drug ballad) subgenre. As many groups imitated this type of music, taking it to more extreme levels in some cases, Los Tigres del Norte were careful to distance themselves from the darker elements of the narcocorrido culture.

In the later seventies and eighties, Los Tigres del Norte began focusing more on immigration, particularly surrounding the immigration legislation reform in 1986. In so doing, their songs have become a sort of voice for Mexican immigrant identity.

Presently, after a musical career spanning almost forty years, Los Tigres del Norte continue to tour Mexico and the United States, but have also expanded into Spain (where a novel about Carmelia la Tejana, the heroine of "Contrabando y Traición" has found huge success) and also South America.

1 Music
2 Members
3 External links
- 3.1 Music clips

[edit] Music

In Norteño/conjunto form, Los Tigres del Norte have been able to portray "real life" in a manner that most of the Americas can relate to, but also in a way most Americans are afraid to interpret through music. Most of their songs consist of tales or corridos about life, love, and the struggle to survive in an imperfect world. They regularly touch on the subject of illegal narcotics and immigration, but they've also shared stories of love and betrayal between a man and a woman. Together, the band and its public has turned norteño music into an international genre. The band has modernized the music, infusing it with boleros, cumbias, rock rhythms, waltzes, as well as sound effects of machine guns and sirens integrated with the music. In the process, they made a pop style out of an accordion-based polka music to Northern Mexico cantinas.