COMMENTARY: Mariachi experience a deep and enviable one

Roskruge School 8th-graders, Christina Bermudez, 13 (left) Maritza Rojas, 14, and Anna Maldonado, 14, play the violin at the Mariachi Music Workshop.
NORMA JEAN GARGASZ/Tucson Citizen

DANIEL BUCKLEY
Tucson Citizen
May 1, 2003
It takes a lot of courage to stand in front of 2,000 people and sing as though your life depends on it, to express mature emotions when your bodies and minds are far from mature, to put your stamp on songs that have been sung by generations before you, and to find new meaning in them.
Young mariachis are a courageous bunch. They're hard-working and thirsty for knowledge. They sacrifice their free time routinely in pursuit of something bigger than themselves - something that connects them to their families - to their ancestors, their history - to their heritage.
For the 16th time for this paper, and the 18th or 19th total, I've come away from the Tucson International Mariachi Conference envious of and inspired by the young students who attended the workshops and performed in the concerts. I felt envious because in my childhood, growing up in a small town in New York state, there was just a band program, and wind bands in the 1960s didn't have a lot of currency with young people.
Actually it was a strange interlude. I started trombone lessons in the fourth grade with a former Marine Corps band director from Spain. He was big on discipline, which he demonstrated by shoving the mouthpiece of my trombone into my teeth when I blew a wrong note. Hey, it was the pre-Kennedy assassination '60s. Live up!
It was with a mixture of relief and anticipation that we received news after fifth-grade Christmas break that he'd had a heart attack and died. His successor was a very tall, prim, soulless woman with the inspirational power of the gelatinous ooze in Spam.
In junior high, I had a pipe-smoking band director with curly hair who spoke in a deep baritone voice and actually was an interesting person. He may even have possessed some musical ideas, albeit sparingly administered. But high school put me back in my traditional slacker stride, with a teacher who had a disproportionately enormous head for so tiny a guy. My friends called him Mr. Planter. It stuck.
In fairness, I was more than a little goofy-looking myself. I was 6 foot 2 and 119 pounds. A strong wind would turn my trombone case into a sail, whisking me across the icy bridge in dangerous fashion. Middle age has settled that weighty issue.
I dropped band in ninth grade. But I did pick up the trombone briefly in college. When I would open the case to practice, my roommate's German shepherd would run into the bedroom, whack the door shut with his tail and howl till I quit. He was the best music critic I ever met.
With that sizable preface aside, I still can't say that my band experience was a bad one. It taught me teamwork, discipline, people skills, as well as an instrument. It helped me meet people from outside my little burg along the Hudson River. And it gave me the tools to write music of my own. But I can't say it made me feel hip, and even less that it made me feel part of the band world, let alone my family or my ancestry.
Something very special goes on at the mariachi conference. Year by year, one sees a progression - an evolution. The performers get better and better at younger and younger ages. And you can see how it makes them feel about themselves. They're not uncomfortable teens meekly toting instrument cases. They're mariachis. They're folklórico dancers. They're proud and confident.
Now I see parents who went to the conference when they were kids dropping their own kids at the workshops, and teachers who had gone through the Tucson program. One of the workshop teachers was Monica Trevino - a Tucson girl who would be among the first to break the all-male lineup of the professional virtuoso mariachis.
The audiences are different at the conference events, too. Most parents are proud of the things their kids do, and all parents sacrifice left and right to help their kids get ahead in life. But the kind of interaction I see at the mariachi conference among parents, grandparents, siblings and these young performers is a different kind of bond. It's not something they pipe up about and pat themselves on the back about. It's a deep, quietly understood kind of love.
This a tradition that reconnects youths in America with the language and values of their Mexican heritage. And it is a tradition that is very much alive - in fact, thriving, perhaps as never before with a new generation of crack groups and hit record-producing ranchera singers propelling it forward. For all its ups and downs, the Mervyn's Tucson International Mariachi Conference has remained an integral part of that cultural revolution.
That's a lot of responsibility to be shouldered by an event that is, at heart, a fund-raiser for a social services organization. But in a way, it's fitting, too. La Frontera - the organization it helps fund children's services for - has been putting Humpty back together now for decades. It's trying to mend damaged lives and give hope to people who are at points in their lives when they may not be feeling all that optimistic.
It's a privilege to write about it, even if I wish I could have experienced some of that when I was a young sprout.