The corrido, a type of narrative folk song, comes from a region half in Mexico and half in the United States known as the Lower Rio Grande Border. Corridos, which flourished from about 1836 to the late 1930s, are part of a long-standing ballad tradition that has roots in eighteenth-century Spain. Sung in Spanish, corridos combine formal features of several different types of folk songs, but their narratives consistently deal with subject matter specific to the Border region. For example, "El Corrido de Kiansis" (c. 1870), the oldest corrido surviving in complete form, records the first cattle drives to Kansas in the late 1860s. A single important event is likely to have inspired several corrido variants, yet the different versions of any given story all partake of standard generic elements. When sung at social gatherings, corridos served to commemorate significant local happenings, but more importantly, their heavy reliance on familiar linguistic and thematic conventions served to affirm the cohesiveness of Border communities.

Corridos take their name from the Spanish verb correr, meaning to run or to flow, for corridos tell their stories simply and swiftly, without embellishments. Figures of speech such as metaphors are generally rare in corridos, and when metaphors are used, they usually incorporate everyday images that are familiar to the songs' listeners. In the popular "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez," for example, the hero Cortez, fighting off pursuers, uses the metaphor of a thunderstorm to boast that he has had harder fights than the one they gave him: "I have weathered thunderstorms; / This little mist doesn't bother me." Similar storm imagery is found in other corridos including "Kiansis," which tells of stampedes caused by thunderstorms during the Kansas cattle drives. Such imagery, highly conventional and readily recognizable to corrido listeners, reflects and strengthens the continuity of the corrido tradition.

The corrido is composed not only of familiar images but also of certain ready-made lines that travel easily from one ballad to another. This is most evident in the corrido's formal closing verse, or despedida. The despedida of one variant of "Gregorio Cortez" is translated as follows: "Now with this I say farewell / In the shade of a cypress tree; / This is the end of the ballad / Of Don Gregorio Cortez." The first and third lines are a set convention. The second and fourth lines are variable, the fourth carrying the name of the corrido or expressing its subject, and the second varying according to exigencies of rhyme. In the despedida, perhaps the clearest marker of both the corrido's uniqueness and its generic continuity, the corrido's maker asserts that the task of relating an authentic Border tale has been accomplished.