Chalino Sanchez                     

          Chalino Sanchez grew up in Sinaloa, in the town in Sanaloa, near the capital of Culiacan. A small time local gangster raped his sister when Chalino was a boy, and at fifteen, when he ran into the man at a party, he shot and killed him. He then fled to live with a relative in Los Angeles. This sounds like the basis for a corrido. After spending some time in jail for an unrelated event, where he apprently wrote some corridos, he became popular with some small-time criminals who themselves wished to be immortalized. So his career began. Some of these songs which he recorded for these tough guys became commercially popular. This was in the late 1980's. He quickly gained in popularity, as he was not dissimilar from the characters in his corridos. Chalino's rough, somewhat unprofessional voice didn't deter his audience-quite the opposite. He was authentic, and ushered in a new age of drug/gangster style corridos. One couldn't find a better figurehead for the movement. Just as his career began to take off, he was shot while singing in a California club on January 20th, 1992. In a life-imitates-art occurrence Chalino returned fire and survived. His shootout grabbed international attention and Chalino's fame grew. The gangster narcocorrido movement was born. On May 16th of the same year, his body was found in a ditch, having been shot execution-style in the back of the head. The reasons are still unknown, and the progenitor of a movement sang no more.