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| photo courtesy of Mariachi Herencia |
“Sin mariachi no hay fiesta,” they say in
Mexico – without mariachis, it’s not a party. Happily, the big fiesta that caps
Overture Center’s Latinx Art Fair on Saturday, Oct. 12 is a performance by
Mariachi Herencia, in Capitol Theater at 7:30 PM. Herencia means heritage, and
the name is perfect, since the members of this large (16-18 piece) group –
amazingly – are high school kids from Chicago’s barrios who represent the
future of their rich musical heritage. Mariachi Herencia got a Grammy
nomination for its debut album, Nuestra
Herencia, recorded in 2017.
Right now, the group is touring its
third recording, Esencia, released
this past June. The album pays homage to Mexico’s golden age of cinema. These flicks
– black-and-white masterpieces from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s (some would say into
the Technicolor ‘70s) – have mariachi music woven into their plots, testimony
to how integral this sound is to Mexican culture. As the icing on the cake,
the tunes on Esencia were arranged for Mariachi Herencia by maestro Rigoberto Alfáro,
one of mariachi music’s grandest figures; his arrangements of the classics are
the ones everyone knows from recordings by great mariachi deities like José
Alfredo Jiménez, Vicente Fernández, and Juan Gabriel.
César Maldonado, president and
founder of the Mariachi Heritage Foundation, was born and raised in the Windy
City to Mexican immigrant parents. Mariachi Herencia is his brainchild, and in
anticipation of the group’s Madison appearance I interviewed him on the phone a
few weeks ago.
CulturalOyster: You’ve
done this amazing thing, taken high schoolers and gotten them involved to the
point of grammy-nominated albums and performances with artists like Lila Downs
and Los Lobos – with mariachi music! – while most of their peers on both sides
of the border don’t even listen to norteño or banda any more; they’re into
hip-hop, or Thalía-style pop. What motivated you to do this, and how did you
manage to pull it off?
Maldonado: Actually,
my background is in finance; I had a career in investment banking. But I see
myself in these kids. Growing up on Chicago’s Southwest side with blue-collar
parents who worked 12-hour days in factories and only had a few hours to have
dinner and sleep and get up and do it all over again, I was lucky to have the
opportunity to seek higher education and a career. It was always important to
me to come home and help the kids who were growing up the way I did. I wanted
to get a little creative, to marry my passion for mariachi music with my
passion for service. I came up with the idea of using mariachi not only to
teach music to the highest standards but also to use it as a bridge – to engage the kids in school, and to introduce their families to school life (most of the parents lack communications skills
in English).
Nati Cano from Los Camperos [the
Los Angeles mariachi band that played Overture’s Capitol Theater in the fall of
2010] gave me the idea. We started promoting it in Chicago, producing mariachi
shows – we’d bring Los Camperos and other groups in to play downtown, where
they’d never really had Mexican artists before, and we noticed that the
audiences were our parents’ generation – what was missing was the presence of
youth. So Nati Cano tells me the only way to change it is to teach the kids,
and that’s exactly what we did.
CulturalOyster:
Tell me about these kids. How close are
they to their Mexican roots?
Maldonado: Almost
all of them are first generation – their parents were born in Mexico. Some are
still undocumented. They just have this natural, authentic passion for the
music – they’re like sponges. They absorb everything and do it with such
passion at their age, it’s unbelievable. On the last album in particular you
hear that oomph that you can’t teach – it has to come from inside and these
kids have it. That’s what distinguishes them – this passion and pride for what
they do.
CulturalOyster: How
do they learn to play mariachi instruments like guitarrón y vihuela? Do they
teach that in Chicago public schools?
Maldonado: Our
approach was this: four and a half years ago I went to the Chicago Board of
Education and said we need an alternative to traditional band programs – we
need to try out mariachi. We picked five schools on the Latinx side of the city
that didn’t have music programs and I drafted a curriculum to fit the new art
standards that were being adopted across the US. We set up a full-time program
of teaching mariach as part of the school day – not as after-school, which
isn’t taken as seriously. After a year we could see that these kids, who’d
never been exposed to music education before, had an amazing amount of talent.
We had 1,100 students or so – and so much talent that we started an all-city
program. We opened up 90 seats to meet for class on weekends, and we took the
cream of the crop – out of the 90 the 20 most advanced students became the
elite group.
The way we teach them is in line
with classical; we focus on theory and technique. Mariachi is just about how you apply that
technique. At first the kids weren’t singing – they didn’t understand the style
– so we started training the elite group and at the end of the year we went
into the studio as a lesson plan and recorded eleven songs that sounded
great. We released the recording
independently on iTunes and it got nominated for a Grammy and Mariachi Herencia’s
been a life-changing experience since then.
CulturalOyster: Tell
me more!
Maldonado: The
Grammy nomination was the key that propelled everything that’s happened since. It
was totally unexpected. That first album was arranged by José Hernández [of
Mariachi Sol de México] – he came and worked with the students. We looked at it from the first session to
mastering the album as a class project, and then three months after we released
it, it got the nomination. It was just out of this world for me when it hit the
students what was happening. We actually walked the red carpet in las Vegas. The
events around the awards were designed for adults – it’s rare to see kids at
these things, and Las Vegas is an adult location, lots of bars and things. The
kids would walk in wearing their blue trajes de charro, looking like a group,
and people would come up and say who are you? And we’d tell the story over and
over. We didn’t mind ‘cause peoples’ jaws would drop and they’d ask the kids to
sing on the spot.
That experience changed their
mentality. I use the bubble metaphor for what happened. When you grow up in the
barrio, because of the family routine, you graduate from high school and you’re
still living in the five or six block radius that’s your world. It’s rare for
Mexican families to go downtown and explore the city. We need to use the
experience of music to explore the world – to do anything you want, I tell the
kids.
Their passion just grew and grew
after Las Vegas. They put in more and more time and they became much more
dedicated to the group. There aren’t a lot of mariachi groups out there these
days releasing albums consistently. When you search “mariachi” on Google,
Herencia comes right up. I’m really proud of them. But it’s only possible
because they just love it so much.
CulturalOyster: I’m
from Chicago, and I’ve lived in Mexico – mariachi is Mexico to me. But the youth culture there is so estranged from
that music, I’ve wondered if it can survive. Watching the release video for Esencia had me in tears – I had the
sense that the home of mariachi is now my home town. Does that sound right?
Maldonado: I think
it looks that way. The group was on tour in Mexico and you’d look into the
crowd and see the older generation, and families with young kids, but not a lot
of teens. Hopefully Mariachi Herencia appeals to a wider demographic than in
Mexico – to youths their own age as well as to older folks and families.
CulturalOyster: Getting
Rigoberto Alfáro to do the arranging for Esencia
was quite a coup – how did you do that?
Maldonado: He’s
been a personal hero of mine – he’s the Michael Jordan of mariachi music. In
the ‘50s he joined the most famous mariachi band of all, Mariachi Vargas de
Tecalitlán, and he did a lot of arranging for them and for others – his resumé
is just enormous. I’ve known him for many years and he was always in the back
of my mind for Herencia but I waited till I knew the kids were ready for his
level. He did completely new arrangements of the songs the kids picked – they
spent a couple of months watching mariachi movies with the great singers like
Lucha Villa or José Alfredo Jiménez. They came up with a list of 50 or 60 sings
and then worked it down to the ones they wanted most.
CulturalOyster:
Vicente Fernández’s title tune from Los
Mandados, with its defiant lyrics about crossing the border “let’s say 300
times,” is perfect for what’s going on today, even though the movie dates to the
‘70s. But how do you get a song like that – the lyrics are so important –
across to an English-speaking audience?
Maldonado: Ever
since Herencia started touring they’ve been able to communicate with their
audiences. It comes from them – they have a maturity well beyond their age
level. I have cousins their age and I realize how mature my mariachi kids are –
they’re very cognizant of what’s going on in their community and their society.
Even before we came up with the movie concept this song was on their radar and
it was the first one we asked Rigoberto to arrange. A lot of times we do
perform in areas that don’t have a huge Mexican population. Isaías López, who
sings it, is 14, but he looks like he’s 20. He goes up there to present that
song and tells the story of his family to introduce it so even if you don’t
speak Spanish or you’re not tuned in to what’s going on it still brings you to
tears and then you see the video backdrop and the performance and you will get
the message.
CulturalOyster:
Your last thoughts for my readers?
Maldonado: A lot
of times you hear a kids’ group is going to perform and your natural reaction
is ok, it’s just kids – just students – but with Herencia people should prepare
for a high-level, professional musical experience. What these kids do is truly
amazing, from the way they command the stage to how they take the audience
through the experience of Mexican music. This is beautiful music. Tell people
in Madison to get ready for one of the best mariachi shows they’ve ever seen.
______________________________________________ interview by SK
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