[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On one obviously important layer to the album’s most historical song, and a more subtle one.
As I hope this week’s series will clearly illustrate, all of Inyo is about the past in the thematic and thoughtful ways that the best historical fiction (per my definition of the genre, at least) always is. But only one of the songs is explicitly and entirely set during a real historical period and event, and that’s the album’s third track, “Adelita,” the speaker of which, Johnny, is a young man from Texas who finds himself riding with Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolutionaries due to his (the speaker’s) love for the titular revolutionary woman. As he puts it in the opening verse, “I’m far from my home now a Texacan soldier/It’s not for fortune or risk to the battlefield I fight/I fell in love with Adelita with my very soul/We’ll stand in arms this night.” From there, he moves us through a number of historically accurate details about these characters and the setting alike, before concluding with a beautiful series of lines after Adelita’s death: “Tonight, I lay in the mountains with the campesinos/My mind at peace from the vows I’ve made/I know I’ll never see Texas again/Your portrait I carry deep in my breast pocket/My rifle firing into the campana, I ride with you ‘round my heart/Protected from this death by beauty.”
Even amidst this album full of songs about the American Southwest and Hispanic American identities and communities—topics that have deeply interested Bruce since at least 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad album, with which the first Inyo recordings were contemporary—“Adelita” represents a striking new layer. It’s true that the speaker is (we assume) a white man from Texas, but almost every line and detail in the song focuses on its Mexican Revolutionary title character and setting. I’m willing to wager that to almost all white Americans—and probably all Americans who aren’t Mexican American, for that matter—the Mexican Revolution has no specific place in their collective memories, other than (mostly unknowingly) in the form of the folk tune “La Cucaracha” (which predates the Revolution but became popular in Mexico during that time, and these days is sung by American schoolchildren in Spanish classes). Of course this one Springsteen song can’t and shouldn’t take the place of an in-depth history lesson, but it’s nonetheless a creative work from one of the most prominent American artists of the last half-century that brings its audience, like its speaker, into the world of Mexican Revolutionary soldiers and events.
There’s another, even more strikingly revisionist layer to this song’s histories, though. The U.S. had a conflicted relationship to Pancho Villa, but for much of his time leading the Revolution it saw him as an enemy, to the point that President Woodrow Wilson organized a 1916-17 “punitive expedition” that sought to capture Villa. And that wasn’t without cause, as Villa had not only attacked U.S. corporate interests in Mexico, but in March 1916 he and his troops crossed the border and attacked the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17 Americans. (That too wasn’t without cause, however, as Villa was seeking revenge for U.S. backing of his revolutionary opponents.) Those overarching contexts are beyond the focus of Springsteen’s youthful speaker, but they make it even more striking that this young man from Texas is now fighting “side-by-side with Francisco Villa,” and thus quite possibly taking part in the raid on a U.S. community. It might seem that he is thus joining with “the enemy,” but I would argue that his status as a “Texacan soldier” makes him the heir of a long line of Tejanos whose identity bridges these two nations and reminds us of the border’s thorough porousness.
Next InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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