The Changing Sounds of Mariachi Music

Fermin Herrera recently returned to Mexico City’s Plaza de Garibaldi to recapture the mariachi sounds he had heard as a boy in Oxnard cantinas. The Chicano Studies professor from Cal State Northridge didn’t like what he heard, though.

“Very few of them could play the sones abajenos “ (the traditional dance accompaniments developed in the rural towns of Jalisco and stairway plateaus of western Mexico). The current mariachis, he said, lacked their souls--the intricately syncopated and spirited sones.

He said their repertoires were mostly rancheras, heartfelt, often self-pitying ballads equivalent to country music in the United States. After several tries, Fermin, who leads his own Veracruz-styled string group, gave up on Garibaldi’s mariachis.

“I think we are better off here,” Herrera concluded. Throughout the Southwest United States, he said, mariachis are making greater efforts to preserve the music, including the son ‘s spirit evolved from 19th-Century hybrids of Spanish, Indian and African music.

Linda Ronstadt’s new gold album of Mexican songs, “Canciones de mi Padre” (Songs of My Father) may have helped bolster the trend by recording Los Angeles mariachis--Los Camperos and Los Galleros de Pedro Rey--on her album, Herrera said. Other aficionados go further, stressing that the excitement kindled by Ronstadt’s album, and the musical review upon which it is based, underscores the declining fortunes of mariachis south of the border.

Mexican historian Ricardo Perez Monfort concurs. Mexico’s mariachi tradition, dominated by the ranchera, has stagnated into a form that bears little resemblance to the festive, essentially instrumental music of rustic violins, harp and guitars from which it sprang.

This process began, explained the former folk music programmer for government-funded Radio Universidad in Mexico City, when radio adopted its earthy sound as a symbol of national identity. The 1930s screen classic “Alla en el Rancho Grande,” which featured singer Tito Guizar, set the stage for the tradition’s next makeover. Dressed up with studio musicians and polished arrangements, the mariachi became the vehicle for the ranchera , an abajeno song style also reshaped by radio, but now sung by the charro or man on horseback.

“Singers like Jorge Negrete and Guizar came to represent a cultural stereotype identified with nostalgia, machismo, alcohol and Mexican nationalism,” Monfort said. Movies exported the mariachi music internationally, he said, while at home the ranchera chronicled the peasant’s migration to the cities of Mexico and the United States.

Composers Jose Alfredo Jimenez and Felipe Valdez Leal wrote rancheras of lost loves and heart-splitting homesickness. Llanto or a weeping vocal style that trailed off at the end of each phrase became its trademark.

“Today,” Monfort said referring to Mexico, “(the mariachi) has passed its heyday. The ranchera had its best times during the ‘30s, ‘40s, all the way to the ‘60s, but after that, it frankly entered its decadence.” The mariachi tradition’s former working-class audience, he added, turned to the twangy border nortenos, rock, salsa and versions of American and European-flavored pop.

Carlos Monsevais, a Mexican cultural critic, asserts that the music’s detractors demand too much purity from a tradition that today encompasses a nation’s traditional and popular music.

“It no longer has much to do with its origins, but the country is no longer what it once was,” he said. “Today mariachis can play Beatles or Stevie Wonder tunes,” while the rural society that created the music no longer exists.

Still, Monsevais said, the son lives in Mexico’s family fiestas, tourism and show business spectacles, while rancheras continue to appeal to the underclasses by favoring the defiant outcast in Jimenez classics like “El Rey” (The King).

But Steve Loza, an assistant UCLA music professor, believes that Mexican immigrants and their descendants view mariachi music with different eyes. For these Latinos, he said, nostalgia for the old forms have been magnified by distance and time.

He believes this point is illustrated by Ronstadt’s recent concerts, which attracted both third-generation Chicanos and immigrants.

But the mariachi movement itself, Loza said, precedes Ronstadt, taking its impetus from the Chicano political and cultural awakening of the 1960s. As a result, the music is taught today in several Southwestern universities, including both Cal State Los Angeles and Northridge, and analyzed at annual conferences and festivals in Tucson, San Antonio and Los Angeles. That musical trail was blazed by Los Lobos, he said.

By returning to their roots, the Chicano rock group not only made a cultural statement, Loza said, but they began to reinterpret the traditional meaning of Mexican music.

“What has begun to happen is that the music itself, not the lyrics, becomes the (cultural) metaphor. This is what’s happening with the mariachi now--its form becomes the content. This music becomes very powerful when it’s experienced this way.”