Music of Mexico : Mariachis in Search of U.S. Respect

Alfredo Aguilar sat at the bar of Los Vacitos Cafe in Orange, reveling in the comfort of yet another beer and a mariachi’s rendition of “The Avocados,” a boisterous song from the homeland.

“For whenever I die, may they gather 100 mariachis, and sing me my rancheras ,” sang the five-man mariachi in Spanish. Aguilar and a few others at the long, curved bar sang along.

“This is a Mexican’s pleasure,” said Aguilar, a sewing machine mechanic who came to California from the southern Mexico state of Puebla seven years ago. He handed the band leader $30 for the five songs the group played at his request. “The music is a part of our lives.”

Even though its elusive Spanish lyrics mystify non-Latino audiences, the music has entrenched itself in the cultural life of Southern California. Understood or not, mariachis play at company parties, political fund-raisers, baptisms, weddings and even funerals. They play at Catholic Masses, and they play on cruise ships, at race tracks and at Little League picnics.

Well-Known Standards

Still, most Angelenos’ familiarity with the engaging, alegre mariachi sound begins and ends with a couple of shopworn standards--”La Bamba,” or “Cielito Lindo” ( “Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores” ) heard over Sunday margarita brunches dozens of times a week in dozens of Mexican restaurants.

But if the huevos rancheros crowd doesn’t know what it is listening to, it doesn’t really matter, said Nati Cano, director of Los Camperos, the most successful mariachi in Southern California.

“This is the kind of music that you don’t have to understand--you just have to like it,” Cano said during a recent show at La Fonda, the band-owned restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard.

Cano’s philosophy is understandable; buses full of Japanese tourists pull up at the landmark club for the early shows, and it is not until late at night, when aficionados replace the camera-clickers, that Los Camperos dares venture much beyond the crowd-pleasers.

Wants More Respect

But Cano would like to see mariachi music get a little more respect in this country.

Cano, a Mexican-born, third-generation mariachi who gave up playing nightly shows “40 pounds ago,” was one of the first band leaders to take mariachi music out of smoky bar rooms and introduce it to middle-class audiences in Los Angeles.

“It’s about time that somebody . . . paid attention to the kind of music that’s been around for, I don’t know, a couple hundred years,” he said.

A recent album by pop singer Linda Ronstadt could help the music gain wider understanding, said Cano, whose Camperos were one of three locally based groups that played on the recording. Her album includes both mariachi standards and some lesser known traditional pieces.

Ronstadt is currently touring with the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan--a Mexico City group that Cano says is the best in the world. Four recent dates at Universal Amphitheater quickly sold out and a fifth concert was added. Her album--”Canciones de mi Padre,” or “Songs of My Father”--has sold more than 500,000 copies in just three months.

Whether Ronstadt is able to bring mariachi music further into the mainstream or not, its most natural environment in Southern California will remain the cantinas and restaurants frequented mostly by Latinos.

Steven Pearlman, a doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA who is studying mariachis, wrote in a 1983 article that mariachi culture in Los Angeles is “largely of and for immigrants and their descendants; a transplanted people’s music.”

Microcosm of the Community

The immigration patterns of mariachis are a microcosm of the Mexican immigrant community as a whole, he said.

“Many of them are seasonal laborers . . . who come for economic reasons,” said Pearlman, who also plays violin in a professional mariachi, Nuevo Uclatlan. There is more work during the summer, Pearlman explained, and some mariachis, like other laborers from Mexico, simply go home around Christmas to spend time with their families.

There are even a few spots in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles--the parking lot of a doughnut shop at the corner of Boyle and 1st streets is one--where mariachis gather in the late afternoon hoping to get picked up by a group in need of violin or trumpet player, much like the laborers who gather on street corners throughout Southern California.

Others, however, come to California because the artistic opportunities for mariachis are better here than in Mexico.

“In Mexico, their role is perceived in a particular way--like a gardener,” Pearlman said. “In the United States, the attitude toward musicians is subtly to greatly different. They may be considered offbeat, but with an artistic quality, and worthy of respect.”

Musicians who cross the border for artistic reasons typically try to form groups that develop polished, but limited, repertoires and play in just one or two restaurants for a nightly or weekly fee, Pearlman said.

But the majority of mariachis in Southern California replicate their environment in Mexico, working al talon --literally, on one’s heels--in places like Los Vacitos Cafe, La Parrilla restaurant in Boyle Heights or El Mercado on 1st Street in East Los Angeles. They may work five or six establishments in one night and earn nothing from the house--instead charging a fixed fee, usually between $5 and $8 a song. The groups keep a keen eye out for big spenders who are willing to pay $100 or more to hear their requests.

They have also been known to speed up tempos and drop verses to squeeze more songs into the few busy hours each night.

Some nights the groups make nothing. Other nights, they might end up splitting as much as $500.

Ramon Antonio Platero, leader of the Mariachi Los Angeles, said the band once played at a customer’s table in San Pedro for eight hours straight. The bill came to $1,200. “I don’t know where he got the money,” said Platero, a 34-year-old from El Salvador who plays the vihuela , a small, five-stringed guitar-like instrument. “It didn’t matter to me.”

Because mariachis working al talon sometimes must play for hours without a break, an extensive repertoire--or at least the ability to fake it well if only one or two members know a song--is crucial to their success.

“A mariachi that plays in a cantina has to know all of the popular songs from 1890 to 1988,” he said. “People ask for these songs because they grew up listening to them, or they heard them in their grandparents’ house.”

Learning such a vast repertoire is no easy task.

“I play strictly by ear--I can’t read music,” said Jesus Jose Chavez, leader of the Mariachi Cajeme, during a lull one afternoon at the La Costa restaurant in Garden Grove. “When a customer asks for a song I don’t know, I go back and learn it from a recording or from another musician who does know it.”

Chavez’s experience is fairly typical of the mariachis at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

He grew up in a poor family near Ciudad Obregon, in the state of Sonora. His father, an agricultural worker, is illiterate. When he was 17, Chavez decided that he did not want to grow old in the dusty fields of northern Mexico, so he asked a neighbor to teach him to play the guitar. A year later, he was playing in mariachis, and in 1979 he came to Los Angeles to form his own band. He sends money home to his wife and two children each month, he said.

Scholars agree that modern mariachis grew out of small string ensembles that accompanied theatrical performances in the state of Jalisco in the mid-19th Century. But they are not sure where the word mariachi itself--which can mean either a musician or the entire group--comes from.

The most common theory is that the ensembles played at aristocratic weddings during the French occupation (1861-1867) and took on the French word for marriage-- mariage . Most scholars dismiss this theory as myth, citing the lack of French settlements in the rural regions where mariachi music developed, and offer instead a variety of indigenous etymologies--none of which has been accepted as fact.

“It (the mariage theory) may be just a bunch of hogwash, but then again, how do these tales get started?” said Stephen Loza, assistant professor of music at UCLA.

Influenced by Revolution

There is more agreement on a few key events that shaped the development of the modern mariachi. One was the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), which brought with it admiration and respect for Mexican, rather than imported, culture; the mariachi soon became the symbol of this nationalistic pride, said Pearlman, who is one of the few scholars in either Mexico or the United States who has studied and written about mariachi music.

As groups moved from rural Jalisco to Mexico City, they donned trajes de charro --the elaborate rancher’s outfits and large sombreros that some groups still wear--to shed their image as peasant musicians, and the dress became a part of the cultural symbol, Pearlman said.

It was the radio, though, that brought about the big change in mariachi instrumentation that would vastly increase their versatility and popularity.

The earliest mariachis had consisted of two violins, a harp and a vihuela . Some groups, particularly those from around the town of Cocula, about 30 miles from Guadalajara, substituted the guitarron , an oversized bass guitar, for the harp in the late 19th Century.

These early groups played almost exclusively sones jaliscienses --highly syncopated, African-influenced folk songs from the state of Jalisco that originally were accompanied by dancers. The songs have bucolic, sometimes ribald, lyrics: “There is no morsel more delicious, than that in another man’s house,” goes a line in the “The Traveler.”

In the 1930s, though, on the heels of a sensational performance at the inauguration of leftist President Lazaro Cardenas, the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan began playing regularly on popular radio station XEW. The station’s director found the traditional string sound somewhat weak for the airwaves, and suggested adding a trumpet as other Mexico City groups were doing, according to scholars.

Broader Repertoire

The new sound was a hit, and mariachis, bolstered by a new instrument that could lay out a powerful, clear melody, and their growing popularity in all parts of Mexico, began diversifying their repertoire.

They played rollicking sones (such as “La Bamba”) from the Caribbean seacoast state of Veracruz and haunting huapangos from the northeast Huasteca region; they played marches, waltzes and slow, romantic boleros popular with urban audiences.

Mariachis today even play versions of popular American songs, such as “A Mi Manera”--”My Way.”

Since the 1930s, mariachi instrumentation has changed very little. The one trumpet has become two or three, and few groups besides the Mariachi Vargas still employ harpists, mainly because harpists are so hard to find and the instruments difficult to maneuver. (Los Camperos is one group that does employ a harpist--Arturo Gerst, an American of Russian-Jewish descent whom Cano found playing in a Veracruz-style ensemble 12 years ago).

Loza of UCLA attributes mariachi music’s enduring appeal to its elemental themes.

“Thirty or forty years from now, people aren’t going to be sitting around singing ‘Material Girl’ (Madonna’s 1985 hit),” Loza said. “These (mariachi) songs have an organic quality, they are so intense and relate so closely to working-class people. They are songs about life and losing love, the things that hit you hardest.”

The mariachi tradition in Mexico. Calendar.