Towards the end of his trip to Mexico City in the summer of 1930, Carl Zigrosser, director of Weyhe Gallery, visited the studio of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, where he bought four paintings, including El corrido (Street Singers), noting in his diary that they were “among the most interesting in Mexico."...

In the 1920s, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano created fewer than forty paintings, of which the majority remain lost. Apart from an occasional landscape, most are figure studies, either portraits or genre scenes, rendered in bright colors on cardboard, an inexpensive support that testifies to his precarious economic status. In El corrido, he reveals stylistic devices common to his works of this decade: his soft bodies seem formed from clay, their awkward poses barely evident beneath thick layers of cloth; facial features are childlike more than pre-Hispanic, with ears, noses, and lips exaggerated for effect. These devices, drawn largely from children’s art, were shared by several of Rodríguez Lozano’s contemporaries, including Jean Charlot and Rufino Tamayo…

Rodríguez Lozano’s El corrido is one of the artist’s most complex pictures of the decade, a picture that deeply resonates with several key post-Revolutionary themes. The Spanish title refers to the popular ballad sung by the group, perhaps written on the small sheets of colored paper held by the singing woman in the center. Although likely derived from the Spanish romancero, these narrative songs—about everything from heroes to murderers, freak accidents to sacrilegious demons—assumed nationalist and political meanings in the 1920s…corridos were embraced as a cultural form because they too were made by and for the people, their content baldly honest, their cadences free from formal training.

Rodríguez Lozano attended Bohemian gatherings in the 1920s where Rufino Tamayo—an accomplished guitarist—and singer Concha Michel sang corridos, but this scene shows an assembly of working-class types on a nondescript city street, set against a brick wall. It is the most densely populated of Rodríguez Lozano’s genre paintings of the 1920s, which generally feature individual workers or family groups: only The Wake (El velorio) (1927; Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City) uses the same massing of figures and forms to emphasize communal celebration…

Although references to corridos are frequent in Mexican art of this period, the focus here on an urban scene has few parallels in Mexican visual culture…Rodríguez Lozano shows urban types of different social classes, evident in their varied clothing, as well as a range of skin tones. From left to right, the men who flank the guitarist in the painting represent a soldier, a policeman, a worker, and a farmer or campesino (though almost hidden he can be identified by his palm sombrero); the women, all of whom wear rebozos, are a bit harder to categorize. A further clue as to social status…is whether they wear shoes—a sign of modern, urban living—or not: barefoot residents were far more common in a capital that, in the 1920s, remained largely rural…

El corrido is at once replete with specific references to history, anthropology, and popular culture, and an elegant and modernist abstraction of those same references.