While the corridos roots are in the "Spanish romance ballads brought over by soldiers during and after the conquest" (Edberg 2004:29), throughout Mexico it has become a distinctly norteno, or northern, form of folklore.  The northern borderlands of Mexico have always been a place of conflict, from the Mexican Revolution to the Mexican-American War to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  In this tension the corrido has evolved, from the heroic exploits of Gregorio Cortez standing up to rinches to tequileros smuggling tequila into the United States during prohibition. 

Two noted folklorists, Americo Paredes and Vicente Teodulo Mendoza, believe that the heyday of the corrido has come and gone.  "Mendoza argues that the corrido degenerates, at the close of the revolutionary period, into something 'culterano, artificioso, frequentamente falso, sin caracter autenticamente popular' (cultured, artificial, often false, and without traditional flavor" (McDowell 2012:250) while Paredes laments of the "corrido's 'decay' under the influence of a Tin Pan Alley effect and deplored what he saw as the epitome of demise when, 'Pedro Infante....groaned a pseudo-corrido into a microphone while a bevy of Mexican bobby-soxxers squealed in ecstasy" (McDowell 2012:250).  

While Paredes and Mendoza have declared the death of the corrido, researchers like John McDowell believe that the corrido is alive and well and has simply gone through an evolutionary phase like it has in the past, from romance to revolution to banditry to its current incantation, the narcocorrido.  In his article The Ballad of Narcomexico (2012), McDowell recognizes that the modern narcocorrido is not one-hundred percent faithful to the style of the original corrido, including the switch to a first person narrative instead of third person and the use of banda music instead of the more traditional accordion and waltz (2012:253), but still serves the purpose of "doing the job that corridos have always done for the Mexican people, that is, offering them a zone of commemorative practice where disruptive historical events can be processed through the artistic conventions of words set to music" (2012:268).

The Mexican corrido demonstrates a simple folksong style who's tempo varies from lento (slow) to allegro (brisk) and consists of thirty-two syllables in an octo-syllabic quatrain.  Each quatrain is meant to be sung uninterrupted with the performer adding a vocal glissando (slide between notes) or melisma (multiple notes for one syllable) technique to emphasize certain portions of the corrido, often occuring at the end of the second or fourth line of the quatrain (Pedrick 1998).  One of the most well known corridos that follows this traditional pattern is La Cucracha, the Cockroach, a popular revolutionary corrido.