The corrido is a folk ballad which serves as a chronicle of life in Mexico.
Recently, artists in Mexico and the U.S. have been composing corridos about the 43 students who went missing from the city of Iguala in September.
Julie Schwietert Collazo, a freelance writer specializing in Latin America, wrote about this new batch of folk ballads for the Latin music and culture site Remezcla.
The songs, according to Schweitert Collazo, traditionally recount true stories and serve an oral history function as well, passing a story along throughout the community.
In the case of the missing students, the songs work so well "because the situation is really confusing, there's so many chapters within the story, and so many different protagonists and antagonists," Schweitert Collazo says.
"The corrido is a form that is so compact and so direct that it helps inform people in a really succinct way about what happened."