MEXICO: Mobile Music

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Valentino, Valentino, I throw myself at your feet. If I am to die tomorrow, Let them kill me right away.

The revolutionary armies of Zapata marched into Mexico City singing such songs as Valentina. Today's Mexicans still hear Valentina, as well as more modern ballads, as they bounce to work in battered buses over the capital's paved and cobbled streets. Sometimes the music is from the driver's radio. More often it is strummed by a wandering guitar player who has hopped aboard to travel free. As he plays, he croons; passengers sing with him. When he has finished, he passes the hat.

Last week, without any explanation, the Federal District government forbade minstrels to play on buses, on pain of jail or fine. But the order had a hole in it. Hereafter, it read, drivers must stop their buses and call a cop whenever the music starts.

"Who am I," asked a tough Jalisco-born busman, "to throw off a guitarrista who sings so sweetly of my birthplace? Do you hear what he is playing?" At the back of the bus, grinning broadly, the troubador sang a song from Jalisco—Cuando Mueren los Valientes (When Brave Men Die).

By week's end, nobody had been locked up, nobody fined. As their buses banged along toward the Jail of the Lost Child, Tacuba Cemetery or Mercy Slaughterhouse, Mexicans heard as usual the consoling plunk-plunk of the minstrels' guitars, and the familiar words borne long ago by the wind that swept Mexico: // 7 am to die tomorrow, Let them kill me right away.