Name: Distinguished Lecture Series with Teresita Lozano
Start: 2024-04-29T17:15:00
Location: University of California, Los Angeles

UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Many ghost stories utilize themes of apparitions and haunting to elicit terror, warning listeners to abide by moral codes. However, since 2007, a phenomenon of Mexican corrido (ballad) composition, which I define as ghost smuggling ballads, shares a collective ghost story meant to elicit hope, narrating transborder encounters with the ghost of Saint Toribio Romo, an apparition who smuggles undocumented migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. Saint Toribio, also called the Holy Coyote (Smuggler), was a priest killed in Jalisco during the 1926-1929 Cristero Rebellion, an armed revolt against the Mexican government in response to anticlerical laws. The Catholic Church canonized Saint Toribio in 2000 but has never recognized him as the patron saint of immigrants, a title bestowed on him by migrants. 