New York Times
April 1, 2008
A Women’s Mariachi Band Sings Its Way Through Traditional Male Turf
By MIREYA NAVARRO
LOS ANGELES — In “Compañeras,” a documentary about the female mariachi band Reyna de Los Angeles, one of the members explains why she is loath to see mariachi music as work.
“Personally, I don’t want to say: ‘Ugh! I have to go play today,’ ” says Sylvia Hinojosa, a violinist. “I want to say: ‘Yes! I’m playing today! I want to have a break from my school. I am going to have a break from my husband. I’m going to have a break from my house chores. I’m going to get away and be with the girls and play.’ That’s where it is for us.”
That so many of Reyna’s members regard the band more as a passionate hobby than a job may help explain why professional female mariachi bands are not as numerous as their male counterparts. But as portrayed in “Compañeras” — which is to be shown as part of the PBS series “Independent Lens” on April 4 in New York (April 1 in the rest of the country; check local listings) — marriage, motherhood and meager pay also get in the way.
But the operative word here is passionate. The women bring such power and feeling to this 19th-century Mexican tradition that audiences can only assume they know what they’re singing about when they plead for the return of a lover or berate him for his drinking, betrayals and assorted misbehavior.
“I want a man, not a potbellied macho,” goes one song in Reyna’s repertory.
Mariachi bands have commonly featured women as singers, but all-female ensembles like Reyna, formed in 1994 in Los Angeles and believed to be one of the first such mariachi bands north of the border, have been rare. Some of the women in the documentary mention the excuses that have been used to keep women from tarnishing the music’s aura of machismo. A common one, says one member, is that the guitarrón, an acoustic bass, is too heavy for women.
But the music is thriving among both male and female students in high schools and colleges around the country, and “Compañeras” notes that more than 20 female professional groups have been formed in the United States since Reyna began.
The film’s producer-directors, Elizabeth Massie and Matthew Buzzell, said in an interview that they stumbled across the band in the early 2000s when they passed through Union Station, the landmark Los Angeles railway station, while the women were giving a Mother’s Day performance. The filmmakers then set out to explore the female interpretation of a male-dominated genre.
The creator of Reyna is José Hernández, founder and musical director of the Grammy-nominated all-male ensemble Mariachi Sol de México. Mr. Hernández, who composes for both his mariachi bands, also owns Cielito Lindo Restaurant in South El Monte, east of Los Angeles, where both Sol de México and Reyna de Los Angeles play regularly.
Mr. Hernandez assembled the female group after starting mariachi classes for children in Los Angeles public schools in the early 1990s. Half the students who showed up were girls.
“They didn’t really have any role models,” he says in the documentary.
Soon he was holding auditions for a women’s band, drawing mostly high school students and amateurs whose love for the music ran through generations of their families. As it turned out, the most experienced of the lot was not a Latina: she was Cindy Reifler, a classically trained violinist from Santa Cruz who had played with a male mariachi band for years and became Reyna’s first leader.
True to the music’s itinerant peasant roots, the 13 women donned cowboy “charro” skirt suits and swept up their hair in buns. Some married, some single, and ranging in age from 16 to 42, Reyna’s members bonded into a tight-knit group. As the documentary’s title suggests, they are compañeras.
“When you tell your friend secrets, and she tells you her secrets and her problems, that’s not a friend, that’s a compañera,” Laura Paloma Córdova, who plays the harp, explains in the film.
The women felt so strongly about protecting their vibe that when two candidates auditioned for an open slot, they rejected the obviously better musician in favor of a younger, less experienced one, 19-year-old Angélica Gómez, whose dream of joining a mariachi band is one of the main stories in the film.
“The girls said it was her attitude, but I think they were intimidated,” Karla Tovar, a band member who plays the guitarrón and who had favored hiring the experienced player, says in the film.
Other women counter that a group with no soloist — they take turns singing — has no room for a prima donna. And as Mariana Nañez, who plays the signature mariachi five-stringed vihuela, says on camera, “When you go out onstage and you all had a really good talk and you bonded, it comes out in the music.”
Camaraderie can get the female players only so far. While mariachi music generates more than $100 million in records sales each year, according to “Compañeras,” the genre relies heavily on live performances. Touring — in theaters and arenas, and at festivals and county fairs — along with nightly gigs at restaurants and private parties are hard to balance with child care needs and second jobs. And the low pay, about $75 a night when the film was made, seems hardly a reason to abandon school, day jobs or families for the music.
“We have a hard time selling the group,” Mr. Hernández says in the film. “We’re lucky if we get half the amount of the money we charge for Sol.”
Still, American audiences have been receptive not just to all-female mariachi bands but also to co-ed bands, multiethnic bands and those that tweak the form to sing English-language standards like “New York, New York.”
“When mariachi is offered as a class in American schools, there is no sex barrier whatsoever,” said Jeff Nevin, director of mariachi activities at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif. “Most school-based mariachis are approximately 50-50 guys-girls.”
One result, he continued, was that there are a lot of girls and boys graduating from high school with considerable mariachi experience. And many of these girls want to continue playing mariachi professionally, he added.
But among the high-profile “show” mariachis, Mr. Nevin said, the all-male groups still tend to resist admitting women instrumentalists, and the all-female bands are still catching up to the male bands in the market.
At Cielito Lindo, where Reyna performs every Tuesday night, the band draws a crowd that on a recent week consisted mostly of families with young children and birthday revelers who wanted their photographs taken with the women, who are mostly college graduates and whose day jobs include teaching and real estate. The Reynas may still be regarded more as a novelty than a bona fide group, but Ms. Massie said the compañeras have helped smash one stereotype: “They’ve proven that they are as capable of playing the music,” she said.
Showing posts with label mariachi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mariachi. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Sunday, October 22, 2006
School of Mariachi
from the October 23, 2006 edition - Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1023/p20s01-almp.html
Backstory: This is your father's mariachi
As the genre grows worldwide, a school in Mexico teaches it the 'old way' - and decries pop imitations.
By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
MEXICO CITY
Isaac Escobar Bravo, an auto-parts salesman, looks as if he were heading to a nightclub, donning a leather jacket and designer jeans, his hair slicked back. But he is actually attending a mariachi class, and if he could have his way, he'd be dressed in his charro suit: a waist-length jacket, vest, and black pants with silver adornments running down either side - the signature costume of a mariachi musician.
"To put on a charro suit, it just feels right," says Mr. Escobar Bravo. "It's your roots."
Escobar Bravo stands in the cement courtyard of the School of Mexican Music, the only conservatory in Mexico City that teaches traditional folk music - the Juilliard of mariachi. He's waiting to join a dozen other students ranging in age from teens to seniors for a two-hour workshop. The building, an old silk factory, stands in one of Mexico City's most crime-ridden neighborhoods. But from its pastel-blue walls emanate the sounds of salterios and marimbas - traditional folk music the school hopes to preserve and expand.
It might seem odd that an institution in Mexico - the birthplace of mariachi - needs to promote the genre. But, in fact, that's what it's doing - and, in the process, is somewhat at war with the country's own pop music culture. Mariachi music today is undergoing a worldwide renaissance. Once simple street musicians, mariachis have turned into mainstream pop stars celebrated from Tijuana to Tokyo. They play with world renowned symphonies. In the US, hundreds of public schools now offer mariachi classes.
But along with the music's popularity have come glitzy adaptations, commercialized products, and often embarrassing wannabes. Purists consider some of today's sounds no closer to traditional mariachi music than the rock opera "Tommy" is to "La Boehme." Thus the conservatory's quest to turn out a generation of artists schooled in the old ways.
"Mariachi is getting so modern," says Daniel Garcia Blanco, a sprightly septuagenarian who founded the school in 1990 as an alternative to the classic conservatories of Bach and Beethoven. "We teach it the way it was."
***
Students mill about the old warehouse roofed with corrugated metal, their guitars and bongos in hand. Some 200 are enrolled in programs that last from one to three years. Some want simply to be able to play music at home. Others, like Escobar Bravo, dream of becoming professional musicians. Many know they'll never be famous, but see their instruments as their closest companions.
"For we musicians, our instruments are like a girlfriend: They won't respond to nothing, you have to give them care," says Isidro Roman, a student who works part-time at a law firm as a messenger.
The school's mariachi class has all the elements to form an ensemble: violins, Spanish guitar, a small five-string guitar called a vihuela, a guitarrón or bass, and trumpets. The class plays traditional sones (music from the western state of Jalisco) and is at turns both lively and melancholic, depending on the theme: love and unrequited love, war heroes, tragedy, patriotism. Though the image of mariachi is middle-aged men strolling in plazas, many of these students are women. At least half are young.
On a recent evening, Escobar Bravo sits slouched against the wall, as if his parents made him join mariachi class against his will, but his posture belies a deep dedication. At age 14, the most un-Mexican band - the Beatles - made an impression on him, and he asked for a guitar. His mother is a singer, but at age 16 he went to work for his father in an auto-parts shop.
Now, as he tries to balance work and art, he labors in the store from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then heads to school. A third-year student, he takes 20 hours of classes a week, and practices his guitarrón at least two hours a night. He performs in a restaurant with a group on weekends - for free. "You have to sacrifice a lot: going out at night with friends or family events," says Escobar Bravo.
***
Once rejected by Mexico's uppercrust, mariachis became national icons in the 20th century - bolstered by their role in movies. In Mexico City, tourists flock to Garibaldi Plaza nightly, where mariachis have congregated for almost a century. Outside the country, mariachis play everywhere from orchestra halls to children's baptisms. They're contracted for weddings, funerals, and birthdays. Musicologists attribute the genre's global spread to its emotional range.
"It is one of the few music forms that marks the entire human life cycle, from birth to death, and everywhere in between," says Daniel Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington and an expert on mariachi.
As more people play, though, the sounds that come out of the vihuelas and violins don't always satisfy the purists. In Garibaldi Plaza, musicians say they're inundated with "imitators" who play poorly and sometimes turn out to be "thieves." "They might be taxi drivers during the week, and then on the weekend they come and put on a charro suit," huffs Juan Manuel Cruz. "I am a son of a mariachi. The pirates humiliate and denigrate us."
Efraín Reyes Perez, general secretary of Mexico City's mariachi union, says his group counts 1,050 members and more than 2,000 imitators. In November, the union will relaunch a program requiring mariachis to hold city-certified credentials, "so that wherever we go, we represent Mexican folklore," says Mr. Reyes Perez, a guitarrón player, "not robbery."
At the conservatory, musicologist José Luis Cerón Mireles complains that arrangers of mariachi today often add faddish twists to traditional compositions. He says mariachis have simply become "adornments" to sell music, which adversely affects young people learning the genre. "They just want to play the successes, the stylish music," he says, "whatever the stars are singing."
The conservatory's goal is to teach basic skills such as reading music, theory, and history and to provide a repertoire of classic music. But even the school doesn't dominate the moral high ground in the debate over what's authentic. Some musicians in Garibaldi Plaza doubt a school, even a well-intentioned one, can teach the art properly. They note it is something that has to be handed down through generations. "You have to feel mariachi to play it," says Mr. Cruz, a freelance musician.
The sound is just different, he insists. "Here, if I kiss a woman, I do it with passion," interjects his colleague, Erik Hernandez, pretending to dip a woman in the air. "In the US it's like this," he says mimicking a peck on the lips.
To watch Escobar Bravo play in a class, one might sense a certain stiffness. This is school, after all, full of seminars and tutorials. But hearing him talk of his dreams - to someday play with Mariachi Vargas, the country's most famous ensemble - reveals a passion and dedication that, surely, even the musicians in Garibaldi Plaza could appreciate. "I love Mexican music," he says. "And you play [the classic] 'El Son de la Negra,' and it's, you know, Mexico."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1023/p20s01-almp.html
Backstory: This is your father's mariachi
As the genre grows worldwide, a school in Mexico teaches it the 'old way' - and decries pop imitations.
By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
MEXICO CITY
Isaac Escobar Bravo, an auto-parts salesman, looks as if he were heading to a nightclub, donning a leather jacket and designer jeans, his hair slicked back. But he is actually attending a mariachi class, and if he could have his way, he'd be dressed in his charro suit: a waist-length jacket, vest, and black pants with silver adornments running down either side - the signature costume of a mariachi musician.
"To put on a charro suit, it just feels right," says Mr. Escobar Bravo. "It's your roots."
Escobar Bravo stands in the cement courtyard of the School of Mexican Music, the only conservatory in Mexico City that teaches traditional folk music - the Juilliard of mariachi. He's waiting to join a dozen other students ranging in age from teens to seniors for a two-hour workshop. The building, an old silk factory, stands in one of Mexico City's most crime-ridden neighborhoods. But from its pastel-blue walls emanate the sounds of salterios and marimbas - traditional folk music the school hopes to preserve and expand.
It might seem odd that an institution in Mexico - the birthplace of mariachi - needs to promote the genre. But, in fact, that's what it's doing - and, in the process, is somewhat at war with the country's own pop music culture. Mariachi music today is undergoing a worldwide renaissance. Once simple street musicians, mariachis have turned into mainstream pop stars celebrated from Tijuana to Tokyo. They play with world renowned symphonies. In the US, hundreds of public schools now offer mariachi classes.
But along with the music's popularity have come glitzy adaptations, commercialized products, and often embarrassing wannabes. Purists consider some of today's sounds no closer to traditional mariachi music than the rock opera "Tommy" is to "La Boehme." Thus the conservatory's quest to turn out a generation of artists schooled in the old ways.
"Mariachi is getting so modern," says Daniel Garcia Blanco, a sprightly septuagenarian who founded the school in 1990 as an alternative to the classic conservatories of Bach and Beethoven. "We teach it the way it was."
***
Students mill about the old warehouse roofed with corrugated metal, their guitars and bongos in hand. Some 200 are enrolled in programs that last from one to three years. Some want simply to be able to play music at home. Others, like Escobar Bravo, dream of becoming professional musicians. Many know they'll never be famous, but see their instruments as their closest companions.
"For we musicians, our instruments are like a girlfriend: They won't respond to nothing, you have to give them care," says Isidro Roman, a student who works part-time at a law firm as a messenger.
The school's mariachi class has all the elements to form an ensemble: violins, Spanish guitar, a small five-string guitar called a vihuela, a guitarrón or bass, and trumpets. The class plays traditional sones (music from the western state of Jalisco) and is at turns both lively and melancholic, depending on the theme: love and unrequited love, war heroes, tragedy, patriotism. Though the image of mariachi is middle-aged men strolling in plazas, many of these students are women. At least half are young.
On a recent evening, Escobar Bravo sits slouched against the wall, as if his parents made him join mariachi class against his will, but his posture belies a deep dedication. At age 14, the most un-Mexican band - the Beatles - made an impression on him, and he asked for a guitar. His mother is a singer, but at age 16 he went to work for his father in an auto-parts shop.
Now, as he tries to balance work and art, he labors in the store from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then heads to school. A third-year student, he takes 20 hours of classes a week, and practices his guitarrón at least two hours a night. He performs in a restaurant with a group on weekends - for free. "You have to sacrifice a lot: going out at night with friends or family events," says Escobar Bravo.
***
Once rejected by Mexico's uppercrust, mariachis became national icons in the 20th century - bolstered by their role in movies. In Mexico City, tourists flock to Garibaldi Plaza nightly, where mariachis have congregated for almost a century. Outside the country, mariachis play everywhere from orchestra halls to children's baptisms. They're contracted for weddings, funerals, and birthdays. Musicologists attribute the genre's global spread to its emotional range.
"It is one of the few music forms that marks the entire human life cycle, from birth to death, and everywhere in between," says Daniel Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington and an expert on mariachi.
As more people play, though, the sounds that come out of the vihuelas and violins don't always satisfy the purists. In Garibaldi Plaza, musicians say they're inundated with "imitators" who play poorly and sometimes turn out to be "thieves." "They might be taxi drivers during the week, and then on the weekend they come and put on a charro suit," huffs Juan Manuel Cruz. "I am a son of a mariachi. The pirates humiliate and denigrate us."
Efraín Reyes Perez, general secretary of Mexico City's mariachi union, says his group counts 1,050 members and more than 2,000 imitators. In November, the union will relaunch a program requiring mariachis to hold city-certified credentials, "so that wherever we go, we represent Mexican folklore," says Mr. Reyes Perez, a guitarrón player, "not robbery."
At the conservatory, musicologist José Luis Cerón Mireles complains that arrangers of mariachi today often add faddish twists to traditional compositions. He says mariachis have simply become "adornments" to sell music, which adversely affects young people learning the genre. "They just want to play the successes, the stylish music," he says, "whatever the stars are singing."
The conservatory's goal is to teach basic skills such as reading music, theory, and history and to provide a repertoire of classic music. But even the school doesn't dominate the moral high ground in the debate over what's authentic. Some musicians in Garibaldi Plaza doubt a school, even a well-intentioned one, can teach the art properly. They note it is something that has to be handed down through generations. "You have to feel mariachi to play it," says Mr. Cruz, a freelance musician.
The sound is just different, he insists. "Here, if I kiss a woman, I do it with passion," interjects his colleague, Erik Hernandez, pretending to dip a woman in the air. "In the US it's like this," he says mimicking a peck on the lips.
To watch Escobar Bravo play in a class, one might sense a certain stiffness. This is school, after all, full of seminars and tutorials. But hearing him talk of his dreams - to someday play with Mariachi Vargas, the country's most famous ensemble - reveals a passion and dedication that, surely, even the musicians in Garibaldi Plaza could appreciate. "I love Mexican music," he says. "And you play [the classic] 'El Son de la Negra,' and it's, you know, Mexico."
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Mariachi Music In Public Schools
April 24, 2005
Sousa? Many Students March Instead to Mariachi
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
CHULA VISTA, Calif., April 17 - At home with his family - four brothers and a foster mother - Jorge Geraldo struggles with pimples and shyness, a handsome 18-year-old with deep brown eyes who sleeps on Goofy and Donald Duck sheets that tend to lie in an unmade heap on his bunk bed.
But come the weekend, he dons his traje de charro - the suit of the horseman, a glimmering costume with gold buttons slithering up the sides and custom-fitted by a tailor in nearby Tijuana - to become the lead singer in Mariachi Chula Vista, a group of high school mariachi musicians who have forsaken John Philip Sousa marches at halftime of football games in favor of spending the weekends playing at parties, baptism receptions and the like.
The 15 young musicians - cellphones attached to elaborately stitched leather belts to communicate with carpooling mariachi moms and dads - are stars in a spirited and growing movement to bring the centuries-old Mexican musical tradition of mariachi to public schools.
Across the country, more than 500 public schools now offer mariachi as part of the curriculum, said Daniel Sheehy, a mariachi expert and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington.
Mariachi music is aggressive and festive, dominated by a celebratory explosion of trumpets - usually played in short, fast bursts - lilting native vihuela and guitarrón guitars, and occasionally punctuated by a grito, which is jubilant, soulful yell.
The music is flourishing in San Antonio, where a high school mariachi class has been offered since 1970, and at Chula Vista High School here, six miles north of the border with Mexico and where the student body is 78 percent Hispanic. But mariachi has also taken root in Milwaukee, Chicago, Tucson and Albuquerque, and in small towns with large migrant populations like Wenatchee, in eastern Washington.
Two years ago, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas recruited Javier Trujillo, a 28-year-old musician from Tucson, to develop a mariachi curriculum at 10 schools. He has hired eight teachers, with five more en route - so many that the teachers recently formed their own mariachi ensemble.
The mariachi movement has also crossed cultures. At the Oak Grove Middle School in Concord, a San Francisco suburb, the student population is 67 percent Hispanic, and mariachi is taught by Emile Patton, who is half African-American. One of her lead singers is Connie Kakhigna, a seventh grader whose parents are Laotian and Vietnamese.
"It's a different culture than mine, so to learn it is cool," she said. "Most of my friends are Hispanic. This makes me feel involved with them."
The number of students involved in mariachi is "growing substantially," said John Mahlman, the executive director of MENC, formerly the Music Educators National Conference, in Virginia. Mr. Mahlman said his organization was conducting a nationwide survey to see how far the trend had spread.
"It's a musical bridge between family, school, community and culture," he said.
As a middle school student, Mr. Geraldo, who is now a high school senior, spent a brief stint playing Sousa marches and Bruce Springsteen medleys on the trombone as a member of the marching band. "I tried to relate, but it was really weird," he said. "It's hard being Mexican in America, because society says you have to adjust to succeed."
Then he discovered mariachi, developing calluses to play the guitarrón, a six-string bass, his voice perfectly suited for Romeo-like songs of temptresses and betrayed love. "Something took over me," he recalled. "I felt alive, I guess. It was like, 'Wow.' I didn't know you could do that with music."
Texas and California, a state in which Hispanics are expected to be the majority by 2040, are in the forefront of the mariachi-in-the-schools movement. The music is joining band, orchestra and choir in the school music pantheon.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista - the sons of construction workers, nurses aides, and truck drivers, and the daughters of welders, mechanics and supermarket clerks - are the most accomplished group in the Sweetwater Union High School District, one of the nation's fastest-growing school districts and a highly evolved mariachi outpost: 12 of 20 junior high and high schools now offer classes.
The Mariachi Scholarship Foundation provides $750 college stipends for graduating seniors and varsity letters are awarded for mariachi performance. The first Chula Vista International Mariachi Conference is to take place this June.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista, accompanied by Mark Fogelquist, a 57-year-old teacher who plays the violin and has a master's degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, are in demand on weekends. They have played at birthday parties, weddings, housewarming parties, the opening of a department store, a post office retirement party and who knows how many baptisms.
One of the baptisms was for baby Antonio Serrano, held in a park with a view of Tijuana that was transformed by the sheer joy of the music into a mini-Plaza Garibaldi, the fabled mariachi gathering spot in Mexico City. Staccato trumpets and violins in lush three-part harmonies filled the air, mingling with the smell of gorditas on the grill.
The proceeds - as much as $1,800 on a busy weekend - help pay for a tailor, who crosses the border to measure for costumes, and trips to festivals like the Tucson International Mariachi Conference, where students study with maestros like Victor Cardenas of Mariachi Vargas, who autographed a vihuela guitar for 16-year-old Martha Ramirez. For many, "it is their first time staying in a hotel, or flying in an airplane, or meeting people from another social strata," Mr. Fogelquist said.
"You don't see the marching band and the choir playing four gigs a weekend," he added. "Mariachi is part of the musical life of the culture, a part of the daily life of Mexicans in a way that's hard for Americans to understand."
In Chula Vista, where Interstate 805 separates older neighborhoods mired in poverty from new subdivisions with walking trails and three-car garages, mariachi music is helping students to cross an even more profound divide.
Nationally, Hispanic students lag behind both white and African-American students, with 10 percent earning college degrees, compared with 34 percent for whites and 18 percent for blacks. Hispanics also drop out of high school at a higher rate - 25 percent, compared with 13 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites.
Edward M. Brand, the Sweetwater superintendent, said that the mariachi program, which started as an after-school class in 1996, and literacy and other arts programs have helped keep Hispanic students in school. Ten years ago, he said, the dropout rate among the district's Hispanic students was 20 percent; today, it is just under 6 percent.
Mr. Fogelquist watches over his students - from arranging rides for musicians whose parents do not have cars to making sure that one of his students who is struggling with math remembers to sit in the front row of the math class.
"He wants us to respect ourselves," said Mr. Geraldo, who plans to enter college next year. "That's the whole deal."
Mariachi was the music of itinerant rural musicians, an adaptation of Spanish theatrical music incorporating violins, harps and guitars. Its popularity has been somewhat eclipsed in Mexico, where it is considered "something of the past that you experience at weddings or baptisms or in bars when you're drunk," said Hugo Morales, a MacArthur fellow and the founder of Radio Bilingüe, the Latino public radio network, which sponsors a mariachi conference in Fresno.
Victor Quezada, 43, the father of Angel, a 16-year-old violinist, grew up in Tijuana listening to Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Lynrd Skynrd. "When my son first started I said, 'No mariachi! Why not a rock band?' " he recalled.
For recent immigrants and especially for young people, Mr. Morales said, mariachi helps foster cultural identity and self-esteem, helping the young "articulate their feelings through music."
After rehearsals, Jorge Geraldo takes care of his four brothers. At home, said Martha Jimenez, 40, his foster mother, he sings while washing dishes or taking out the garbage, inspiring cousins from near and far. "Kids around here can be influenced in so many directions," she said. "You see him on stage and you know how big a part of him mariachi is."
Sousa? Many Students March Instead to Mariachi
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
CHULA VISTA, Calif., April 17 - At home with his family - four brothers and a foster mother - Jorge Geraldo struggles with pimples and shyness, a handsome 18-year-old with deep brown eyes who sleeps on Goofy and Donald Duck sheets that tend to lie in an unmade heap on his bunk bed.
But come the weekend, he dons his traje de charro - the suit of the horseman, a glimmering costume with gold buttons slithering up the sides and custom-fitted by a tailor in nearby Tijuana - to become the lead singer in Mariachi Chula Vista, a group of high school mariachi musicians who have forsaken John Philip Sousa marches at halftime of football games in favor of spending the weekends playing at parties, baptism receptions and the like.
The 15 young musicians - cellphones attached to elaborately stitched leather belts to communicate with carpooling mariachi moms and dads - are stars in a spirited and growing movement to bring the centuries-old Mexican musical tradition of mariachi to public schools.
Across the country, more than 500 public schools now offer mariachi as part of the curriculum, said Daniel Sheehy, a mariachi expert and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington.
Mariachi music is aggressive and festive, dominated by a celebratory explosion of trumpets - usually played in short, fast bursts - lilting native vihuela and guitarrón guitars, and occasionally punctuated by a grito, which is jubilant, soulful yell.
The music is flourishing in San Antonio, where a high school mariachi class has been offered since 1970, and at Chula Vista High School here, six miles north of the border with Mexico and where the student body is 78 percent Hispanic. But mariachi has also taken root in Milwaukee, Chicago, Tucson and Albuquerque, and in small towns with large migrant populations like Wenatchee, in eastern Washington.
Two years ago, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas recruited Javier Trujillo, a 28-year-old musician from Tucson, to develop a mariachi curriculum at 10 schools. He has hired eight teachers, with five more en route - so many that the teachers recently formed their own mariachi ensemble.
The mariachi movement has also crossed cultures. At the Oak Grove Middle School in Concord, a San Francisco suburb, the student population is 67 percent Hispanic, and mariachi is taught by Emile Patton, who is half African-American. One of her lead singers is Connie Kakhigna, a seventh grader whose parents are Laotian and Vietnamese.
"It's a different culture than mine, so to learn it is cool," she said. "Most of my friends are Hispanic. This makes me feel involved with them."
The number of students involved in mariachi is "growing substantially," said John Mahlman, the executive director of MENC, formerly the Music Educators National Conference, in Virginia. Mr. Mahlman said his organization was conducting a nationwide survey to see how far the trend had spread.
"It's a musical bridge between family, school, community and culture," he said.
As a middle school student, Mr. Geraldo, who is now a high school senior, spent a brief stint playing Sousa marches and Bruce Springsteen medleys on the trombone as a member of the marching band. "I tried to relate, but it was really weird," he said. "It's hard being Mexican in America, because society says you have to adjust to succeed."
Then he discovered mariachi, developing calluses to play the guitarrón, a six-string bass, his voice perfectly suited for Romeo-like songs of temptresses and betrayed love. "Something took over me," he recalled. "I felt alive, I guess. It was like, 'Wow.' I didn't know you could do that with music."
Texas and California, a state in which Hispanics are expected to be the majority by 2040, are in the forefront of the mariachi-in-the-schools movement. The music is joining band, orchestra and choir in the school music pantheon.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista - the sons of construction workers, nurses aides, and truck drivers, and the daughters of welders, mechanics and supermarket clerks - are the most accomplished group in the Sweetwater Union High School District, one of the nation's fastest-growing school districts and a highly evolved mariachi outpost: 12 of 20 junior high and high schools now offer classes.
The Mariachi Scholarship Foundation provides $750 college stipends for graduating seniors and varsity letters are awarded for mariachi performance. The first Chula Vista International Mariachi Conference is to take place this June.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista, accompanied by Mark Fogelquist, a 57-year-old teacher who plays the violin and has a master's degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, are in demand on weekends. They have played at birthday parties, weddings, housewarming parties, the opening of a department store, a post office retirement party and who knows how many baptisms.
One of the baptisms was for baby Antonio Serrano, held in a park with a view of Tijuana that was transformed by the sheer joy of the music into a mini-Plaza Garibaldi, the fabled mariachi gathering spot in Mexico City. Staccato trumpets and violins in lush three-part harmonies filled the air, mingling with the smell of gorditas on the grill.
The proceeds - as much as $1,800 on a busy weekend - help pay for a tailor, who crosses the border to measure for costumes, and trips to festivals like the Tucson International Mariachi Conference, where students study with maestros like Victor Cardenas of Mariachi Vargas, who autographed a vihuela guitar for 16-year-old Martha Ramirez. For many, "it is their first time staying in a hotel, or flying in an airplane, or meeting people from another social strata," Mr. Fogelquist said.
"You don't see the marching band and the choir playing four gigs a weekend," he added. "Mariachi is part of the musical life of the culture, a part of the daily life of Mexicans in a way that's hard for Americans to understand."
In Chula Vista, where Interstate 805 separates older neighborhoods mired in poverty from new subdivisions with walking trails and three-car garages, mariachi music is helping students to cross an even more profound divide.
Nationally, Hispanic students lag behind both white and African-American students, with 10 percent earning college degrees, compared with 34 percent for whites and 18 percent for blacks. Hispanics also drop out of high school at a higher rate - 25 percent, compared with 13 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites.
Edward M. Brand, the Sweetwater superintendent, said that the mariachi program, which started as an after-school class in 1996, and literacy and other arts programs have helped keep Hispanic students in school. Ten years ago, he said, the dropout rate among the district's Hispanic students was 20 percent; today, it is just under 6 percent.
Mr. Fogelquist watches over his students - from arranging rides for musicians whose parents do not have cars to making sure that one of his students who is struggling with math remembers to sit in the front row of the math class.
"He wants us to respect ourselves," said Mr. Geraldo, who plans to enter college next year. "That's the whole deal."
Mariachi was the music of itinerant rural musicians, an adaptation of Spanish theatrical music incorporating violins, harps and guitars. Its popularity has been somewhat eclipsed in Mexico, where it is considered "something of the past that you experience at weddings or baptisms or in bars when you're drunk," said Hugo Morales, a MacArthur fellow and the founder of Radio Bilingüe, the Latino public radio network, which sponsors a mariachi conference in Fresno.
Victor Quezada, 43, the father of Angel, a 16-year-old violinist, grew up in Tijuana listening to Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Lynrd Skynrd. "When my son first started I said, 'No mariachi! Why not a rock band?' " he recalled.
For recent immigrants and especially for young people, Mr. Morales said, mariachi helps foster cultural identity and self-esteem, helping the young "articulate their feelings through music."
After rehearsals, Jorge Geraldo takes care of his four brothers. At home, said Martha Jimenez, 40, his foster mother, he sings while washing dishes or taking out the garbage, inspiring cousins from near and far. "Kids around here can be influenced in so many directions," she said. "You see him on stage and you know how big a part of him mariachi is."
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