‘A corrido in real time,’ How Gabriela MC was inspired to sing about Luigi Mangione

Gabriela Mejia-Cervantes, known on TikTok as Gabriela MC, is a singer, songwriter, social worker and business owner. 

CALÓ News spoke to the creator of “El corrido de Luigi” about her storytelling, her medical social work and creating spaces for youth.

She’s written a book about her experience as a 16-year-old with a full-ride scholarship to UCLA. That led her to become a public speaker at schools, talking about growing up in California as a child of immigrant Mexican parents. Her book’s title, “16 and a College Student,” was a riff on the MTV series “16 and Pregnant.” 

“I’m a college student but my back hurts, too,” Mejia-Cervantes said about her time in college, where she studied social work. She is now a hospice social worker and has been for eight years. 

Latina creates corrido about Luigi Mangione

She said working in marginalized communities, she sees “the struggle with the medical system.”

“I do my best to be a bridge for them,” Mejia-Cervantes said. 

Although social work is her main occupation, music was her first love. She played guitar as a child, but her parents wanted her to go to school. “Para que no trabajes tanto,” her parents told her. “So you don’t have to work too much.”

Two years ago, she started focusing on her music, writing songs and preparing her upcoming album in the summer. The traditional Mexican music album will have five covers and five original songs. Her first single was released in September called “La empresaria.”

But it seems Mejia-Cervantes doesn’t mind more work because she also added to her portfolio a coffee shop called Postres Cafe in Bellflower. 

“We opened in 2020, before the vaccines, but thanks to TikTok they found out about our coffee shop,” Mejia-Cervantes said, so the establishment continues to thrive. 

She said she loves coffee shops because “I think they’re great community places.”

Whether she is public speaking or talking about her experience as a first-generation Latina, “at the core it is all about storytelling,” she said. Gabriela MC as a storyteller has added to the conversation in the form of a corrido about the healthcare CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione. 

“This is the first time we live a corrido in real-time,” she said as she was waiting for more details to finish the song. She now has an English version of the corrido, too. 

“There was another content creator who made a video asking ‘Where are the musicians at? Why aren’t they making music about this’ and one of my followers tagged me and I thought you know what she’s right. And I wrote it while I was in the shower right after watching the video. I came back and posted it and went to sleep. The next day I saw that it had started to go viral and people liked it,” she said of the first video she posted about the corrido.  

Corridos became popular during the Mexican Revolution and usually “relates a story or event of local or national interest—a hero's deeds, a bandit's exploits, a barroom shootout, or a natural disaster,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. 

In her first video, a user by the name of Chayo Arroyo posted “Thank you for this experience, I feel that we all grew up with corridos in homes not witnessing what inspired those musical stories, but this here chica! Next level! We are experiencing it from its beginnings!” 

Unfortunately, Mejia-Cervantes said someone used part of her lyrics and put in AI so there’s another version circulating online with some of her lyrics. But she’s planning to record it with a group soon.