Los Tucanes de Tijuana
photo: lostucanesdetijuana (own work) · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗In November 2009, Tijuana’s police chief banned Los Tucanes de Tijuana from performing in their namesake city, citing a 2008 concert where singer Mario Quintero had sent an on-stage greeting to two of the city’s most-wanted drug figures. Quintero pushed back rather than apologize: he told the Los Angeles Times he wasn’t “justifying them, or approving of what they do,” and that the police chief “shouldn’t fault us for the corridos as if we’re responsible for the killing of his police.” That fight had been building since Quintero, Mario Moreno, Joel Higuera and David Servín Raya — all transplants from Sinaloa — formalized the group in Tijuana in 1987, setting narco ballads to a rowdier, brass-thickened norteño built around Quintero’s bajo sexto. Six of their albums landed on Billboard’s Latin chart at once in 1996-97; they have since sold more than 25 million records.
Mario Quintero’s uncle Mariano Quintero played bajo sexto in Los Incomparables de Tijuana, led by another uncle, Guadalupe Quintero — and it was Mariano, not the group collectively, who put the instrument in teenage Mario’s hands. “Mi tío Mariano Quintero de Los Incomparables de Tijuana me regalo mi primer bajo sexto y ellos me enseñaron a tocar,” Quintero told BMI — my uncle Mariano gave me my first bajo sexto and they taught me to play — and it was Mariano, he added, who then walked him through song structure and rhyme. Before his own band, Quintero played warm-up sets whenever Los Incomparables rested.
listen forNeither song shares a subject — Los Incomparables’ 1996 corrido “El Número Uno” narrates a trafficker’s boast, the Tucanes’ 2002 “Mi Ex” is a breakup ballad — but the toolkit underneath is the one Mariano is credited with teaching: bajo sexto and accordion trading the melody while the vocal stays close to plain speech, each verse a tight rhymed couplet with no chorus hook to lean on. Listen for how both tracks let the story carry the song forward rather than a refrain, the structural lesson Quintero says he learned before he had a band of his own.