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MARIACHI CONFERENCES AND FESTIVALS IN THE UNITED STATES

Mark Fogelquist

Mark Fogelquist is an internationally recognized expert on mariachi history and performance and frequently serves as an instructor at various mariachi festivals in the south-western United States. Before pursuing his current career as a junior high and high school teacher in Washington State, he was the director of Mariachi Uclatlán in Los Angeles. The following essay originally appeared in a 1996 National Endowment for the Arts publication entitled The Changing Faces of Tradition: A Report on the Folk and Traditional Arts in the United States, by Elizabeth Peterson.

In 1991, a dedicated junior high school music teacher named John Vela organized a mariachi festival in the South Texas town of Driscoll, population 600. Vela had been teaching mariachi music in the public schools since 1980 and wanted to provide an intensive learning experience for his students. Working with a budget of only $4,000, raised by the school's band boosters at car washes, rummage sales and from local merchants, Vela was able to bring four maestros of mariachi music from California to conduct workshops in guitarrón, vihuela, guitar, violin and trumpet. During this two-day event, 150 students were immersed in intensive instrumental workshops and experienced presentations in mariachi history by the late Nicolás Torres, an early member of the legendary Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. The event culminated in a concert which featured professional groups from Corpus Christi as well as student musicians.

The next year, the Festival was moved to Alice, a neighboring town, and the budget grew to $10,000. With this relatively small increase, Vela attracted 250 students to the workshops and was able to bring eminent instructors from Mexico, including Jesús Rodríguez de Híjar, considered one of the most important arrangers in the history of the tradition, and Miguel Martínez, the greatest mariachi trumpeter of all time. The main concert featured the Mariachi Sol de México from Los Angeles, one of the most popular ensembles on the festival circuit since the 1980s.

The success of the South Texas Mariachi Festival was made of several ingredients: unequivocal community support generated through a preexisting school program, nofrills budgeting and the total commitment of the organizer. These same components are typically found in many of the mariachi festivals and conferences that have been held throughout the Southwest since the 1970s. The efforts of organizers like Vela have, in fact, given rise to a veritable movement that not only reaches large audiences at festival

concerts but also involves thousands of students in primary, secondary, and university mariachi programs throughout the region. This movement can be credited with the renewal of interest in mariachi music in Mexican and Mexican American communities on both sides of the border.

THE RISE OF A MOVEMENT

Since the 1940s, Mexican enclaves in the United States have witnessed a steady rise in mariachi activity. While major groups in urban Mexico have generated their income from tours, recordings and the accompaniment of "star" singers (artistes) for some time, ensembles in the United States were initially employed almost entirely in the cantina. Two key developments, however, took the mariachi beyond the barroom and enabled the festival movement to be born. In the mid-1960s, Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, an influential Los Angeles-based mariachi group, established the first night-club where mariachi music was presented on a stage as a dinner show, reaching a new audience of highly assimilated, middle-class, urban immigrants and their offspring. Simultaneously, mariachi instruction and performance began in some California, Arizona and Texas schools at the primary, secondary and university levels, a regional phenomenon akin to the inclusion of jazz in the school music curriculum.

These developments set the stage for the first mariachi conference, held in San Antonio, Texas in 1979. The event was organized by veteran San Antonio music educator Belle Ortiz. Inspired by visits to her grandparents' Mexican hometown of La Barca, Jalisco, Ms. Ortiz began an elementary school mariachi program in 1966. By the time of the first conference, this program had expanded to the secondary and community college level and had an enrollment of nearly 500 students. Like the South Texas Mariachi Festival, the First International Mariachi Conference was born from the desire to give students a superior educational and culturally resonant experience.

Having proved the viability of mariachi music in the classroom, Ms. Ortiz, then music supervisor for the San Antonio Public Schools, solicited and received support from the City of San Antonio, the San Antonio Convention Bureau, the National Endowment for the Arts, and corporate sponsors. Ms. Ortiz not only had enough credibility to harness local support for her conference, she also had enough vision to invite the finest group in the world, the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. According to Belle Ortiz, "it is difficult to imagine that the festival-conference movement would have gotten off the ground without the presence of the Mariachi Vargas at the first conference. Students and audiences were overwhelmed by the virtuosity of the Mariachi Vargas."

Indeed, this ensemble became a committed force in the movement. In its distinguished eighty-year career, "El Mejor Mariachi del Mundo" ("The Best Mariachi in the World") had never been called upon to teach students in an organized conference setting. The musicians relished the new experience and have continued to give of their talents at numerous conferences ever since.

The first mariachi conference in San Antonio not only broke ground by its very existence but also established the model for subsequent conferences. Typically, the mariachi conference is centered around workshops in which students study their individual instruments with professionals, then come together at the end of the day to play the chosen pieces as a large ensemble, side-by-side, with the instructors. Many conferences offer additional presentations on mariachi vocal technique, the history of mariachi music, showmanship, and dance. The typical conference also includes performances by student ensembles and invariably culminates in a concert featuring several professional groups with a grand finale in which the student musicians join professionals to form an enormous orchestra for the rendering en masse of one or two numbers.

Since the main concert is a huge event in itself, with ticket prices beyond the reach of many aficionados, most of the larger conferences also offer a "Plaza Garibaldi experience," named after the plaza in Mexico City where mariachi groups have gatherered to entertain customers ever since they first appeared in the capital in the 1920s. This event is usually held in a park, where a number of small stages are interspersed with food and beverage booths. Admission is moderately priced or free and attendance often surpasses that of the main concert. Many festivals also include the performance of a "Mariachi Mass" on Sunday morning.

SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS

Scores of mariachi festivals too numerous to mention have been held since 1979 in places such as San Diego, Fresno, San Jose, El Paso, and Las Vegas. While several last a year or two only to cease because of lack of funds, community support, or organizational know-how, many have grown and produced interesting variations of the San Antonio model.

The Tucson International Mariachi Conference, for instance, began in 1983, four years after the San Antonio Conference, and is, by all measures, the largest mariachi conference in the United States. Originally organized by members of the Mariachi Cobre, a young professional group that emerged from the Changuitos Feos ("Ugly Monkeys"—the first youth mariachi in the United States), the Tucson Festival was turned over to La Frontera Center, a mental health organization that works primarily within the Tucson Hispanic community, in its second year. By the mid-1990s, the festival was functioning as a fundraiser for the Center, had a total budget of $300,000, a year-round staff, and 450 community volunteers to help out and included such adjunct activities as a parade and a golf tournament. The main concert draws 6,000 spectators, the Fiesta de Garibaldi up to 55,000 and the workshops attract more than 900 participants from twenty-six states. The Tucson conference was the launching point for Linda Ronstadt's landmark career as a ranchera, which brought mariachi music to a vast, new audience, including many non-Mexicans.

As a profit-making commercial enterprise, Mariachi USA holds a unique position in the mariachi festival and conference movement. It began in 1990 as an extended concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and by the middle of the decade it had expanded to two days, drawing 30,000 spectators and operating with a budget of $500,000. There are no workshops tied to Mariachi USA, but the Rodri Foundation, established with proceeds from the event, has given grants to schools and community organizations involved in mariachi education. The grand scale of Mariachi USA is, in part, a reflection of the massive Mexican American population base in southern California. Southern California has been the home of outstanding mariachi groups since the late 1950s as well as a center for school and community mariachi programs.

On a smaller scale, the Festival del Mariachi de Alta California, (Salinas, California) took place annually from 1991 to 1994, was suspended in 1995, but was projected to reemerge in 1996. The principal organizer, William Faulkner, is an educator and leader of a local mariachi group, and he has made the Alta California festival the gathering spot for some of the most important figures of the mariachi world. At the 1993 festival, the Alta California Festival brought together all of the living musicians who participated in Mariachi Vargas' landmark 1956 recording "El Mejor Mariachi del Mundo," considered by many to be the finest recording of mariachi music ever made.

Similarly, the Mariachi Espectacular in Albuquerque is the only festival associated with a university. It combines aspects of large-scale festivals like Tucson with the dominant educational values of Alta California. Classes extend over three full days, followed by two days of concerts, a Garibaldi event, and a performance of the Mariachi Mass. Workshop instructors are handpicked from throughout the United States and Mexico and are chosen for their skill as performers and teachers. Mariachi history is given extra emphasis, and a mariachi Hall of Fame has been established to honor great figures of the tradition.

CONCLUSION

Mariachi conferences and festivals have provided unprecedented opportunities for young performers to study with outstanding mariachi musicians, establishing continuity with the roots of the tradition and a forum for the exploration and expression of cultural identity. They have also created new venues for the music, reaching tens of thousands of new listeners from a variety of backgrounds. They have brought groups established and operating in the United States back into contact with the finest ensembles from Mexico, the most salient example being the Primer Encuentro del Mariachi, Mexico's first mariachi conference held in Guadalajara in 1994. The mariachi conference movement has also helped generate a healthy discussion about the musical direction of the tradition. The rivalry between ensembles on the festival circuit has been a major stimulus for musical achievement and higher standards, both at the professional and student level.

Regardless of what direction the mariachi movement takes in the future, it is now firmly rooted in the southwestern United States. With modest financial support from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts and state arts councils, the movement has grown with amazing speed. Public support has, its fact, been more important as a source of legitimacy for grassroots activities than as a source of dollars. Official recognition in the form of small grants has given festival organizers the credibility needed to leverage existing resources in a new and productive way. In the mariachi festival, educators work with professional musicians; church, school and community leaders with business people; and students with artists. The result is that Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Anglos on both sides of the border share and enjoy a rich musical tradition—a tradition that, despite its symbolic importance, had begun to lose its luster in Mexico. Indeed, the mariachi festival movement is a true success story in which the whole is vastly greater than the sum of its parts.