This article examines two musical chronicles of the 1984 fire and explosion at the San Juanico Pemex facility outside of Mexico City. The explosion killed between 500 and 700 people, but has been largely overshadowed, in both popular memory and scholarly works, by the Mexico City earthquake of 1985. Folk singer, Oscar Chavez, and rock band, El Tri, used corrido-style songs to revive the memory of the fire and make it part of the collective memory of the city. Despite government officials actively trying to repress the memory of the fire, Chavez and El Tri forced Mexican civil society to reckon with the tragedy by making the experiences of marginalized groups highly relatable to a population still in shock from the earthquake. Keywords: Alex Lora, Corrido; El Tri; Explosion; Fire; Mexico City; Nueva Cancion; Oscar Chavez; Pemex; San Juanico.
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