Every year in the weeks leading up to Carnival, local authorities in the small Panamanian town of Las Tablas review the lyrics of the songs of two rival bands with the aim of censoring personal insults they regard as simply beyond the pale. Yet each year, these bands explicitly ignore the edicts of the censors, to the scandal of some and delight of many. This defiance, as any interviewee would tell you, is in keeping with the spirit of Carnival: a raucous annual tradition where throngs of locals, bolstered by a vastly larger contingent of visitors, gather in the town square to denigrate their rivals through lyrics that are, by most standards, extremely pungent.

Las Tablas’s Carnival differs from other, more well-known (and well-studied), carnival traditions in that the focus of ridicule is not the rich, famous, or political elite, but rather regular townsfolk on opposing sides of a longstanding rivalry. In this paper, I examine the varied incentives that simultaneously draw (A) outsiders to engage in the pillorying of people they scarcely know and (B) locals who risk offending intimate acquaintances in pursuit of risqué Carnival fun. I argue that for many participants, Las Tablas’s deeply (inter)personal lyrical mudslinging spans a continuum between obscenity for obscenity’s sake—an accusation often lobbed at outsiders who cannot know the esoteric real-life stories behind the insults—and something approaching Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of grotesque realism, in which public displays of obscenity temporarily dissolve social boundaries and offer the possibility of communal renewal.

On March 29, 2025, a packed auditorium in Zapopan, Jalisco hosted “Los Señores del Corrido,” a concert by Los Alegres del Barranco. Among their performances was “El dueño del palenque,” a narcocorrido that explicitly names Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, while projecting his image on large screens. The spectacle—lyrics and visuals combined—sparked national outrage and accusations of apología del delito (the defense or glorification of crime). Within days, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration announced México Canta, a state-sponsored music competition promoting songs centered on social responsibility, explicitly rejecting lyrics that reference violence or drug trafficking.

This paper examines México Canta as a cultural policy response to narcocorrido performance and as a site where music becomes central to debates over authority, legality, and justice in contemporary Mexico. I argue that the state’s swift condemnation of musical “apology” contrasts sharply with its slower, unresolved responses to structural violence, most notably the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. By juxtaposing these cases, I explore how musical expression becomes a terrain for negotiating moral authority and public legitimacy.

Drawing on analysis of lyrics, media discourse, and theories of performativity, I ask: What forms of justice are imagined, enacted, or deferred through song? How do audiences interpret and inhabit these narratives? Ultimately, the paper positions narcocorridos and state cultural initiatives not simply as opposing forces, but as intertwined actors in the ongoing reconfiguration of justice, memory, and power in Mexico’s soundscape.

There are numerous musical traditions and lyrical practices in the Dominican Republic in which artists regularly employ song texts to offer perspective on everything from the hyper-local to the global. This commentary can take the form of name-checking an artistic rival, teasing or berating the opposite sex for a particular behavior, expressing pride in one’s town or region of origin, or speaking across borders to—or as—members of the diasporic community. Scholars such as Dr. Paul Austerlitz (Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity) and Dr. Deborah Pacini-Hernandez (Bachata) have established the centrality of popular music in the formation and evolution of Dominican identity. As a contributor to this panel on song lyrics as the subject of discourse, argument, and debate on communal and national identity, the presenter will offer an overview of selected examples from Dominican merengue, bachata, and the lesser-known extemporized a cappella group song tradition known as chuines. The aim of the presentation is to explore numerous strategies Dominican musicians and lyricists use to make meaning and to challenge or support identity claims at both the individual and group level. In conjunction with the other topics included in the panel, this presentation provides information on popular music and identity within the circum-Caribbean that may be more broadly useful within the field.