"Y No Poder Volver” (“And Not Able to Return”) by Salvador Urista Alvarado in honor of his father, a migrant farmworker who spent decades laboring in California’s Central Valley. Told from the imagined perspective of the father, the song traces his journey from Jalisco to San Francisco to Fresno—washing dishes, picking cotton, and living away from family. Though he longed to return to Mexico, he never did. Now voiced by his son, the corrido speaks to the heartbreak of separation from loved ones, the brutal necessity of work and migration, and the grief of not being able to return.

The corrido captures the emotional and spiritual dimensions of migration: not only the economic struggles or family separation that often define migrant narratives, but the deeper longing for closure and homecoming. It speaks to a reality known to many migrant workers—that the dream of returning home is often deferred until it is no longer possible.  

“Y No Poder Volver” underscores the role that song plays in expressing unspeakable experiences—those of absence and emotional endurance. His corrido speaks to the many men and women in the Central Valley who have spent decades away from their place of origin, shaped by labor and longing, without a clear path to return.

“Y No Poder Volver” is a final elegy—not only for one man, but for a larger migrant story marked by distance, duty, and the ache of unfinished returns. It invites reflection, remembrance, and reverence for those who gave their lives to labor, but never made it home.