Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Before Christian Nodal, the tattooed prince of ranchera music, could take his place at the center of the palenque at the Feria de San Marcos earlier this year, the dirt arena had to be cleaned. A day’s worth of cockfights had left the site of the stage bloodied and strewn with feathers.
A warm-up act came next. Thousands of fans had descended upon the capital of the tiny Mexican state of Aguascalientes to see Nodal open the annual fair with the accordion-laced ballads that have propelled his genre to the top of the charts, and organizers wanted to keep pre-show energy high.
Speaking into a stick mic, an emcee solicited bids for a series of raffles that topped out at over $500 per entry. Gamblers placed their bets into cut-open tennis balls and tossed them back to a bookie.