A Mariachi Beat Resounds in Orange Restaurant : Mark Fogelquist Was Captured by the Rhythm as a Boy; Now His Uclatlan Band Is Acclaimed as County’s Best

Mark Fogelquist’s decisive moment came 27 years ago, the summer before he entered the ninth grade at Paul Revere Junior High School in Brentwood. His father, a professor of Spanish at UCLA, had taken the family from its home near the beach in Pacific Palisades to Guadalajara, where he taught during the summer. At a fiesta for the summer school students, Fogelquist heard a mariachi play for the first time.

“I just thought it was the most exciting stuff I’d ever heard,” Fogelquist said. “I didn’t even understand the words. But there was so much energy in that music, so much life.”

Fogelquist spent much of the rest of that summer seeking out mariachis in a city renowned for them--unaware, of course, that his new-found passion would one day keep him working 14-hour days, dressed in one of those tight-fitting, silver-studded suits himself.

Nor did the fair-haired descendant of Swedish immigrants imagine that years later he would enjoy the unlikely distinction of being the leader of the best mariachi in Orange County, one of the top four or five groups in Southern California.

Even his competition concedes that, from La Habra to San Clemente at least, El Mariachi Uclatlan is unmatched.

“They’re the best around, top of the line,” said Raul Davis, whose family owns the venerable Tlaquepaque restaurant in Placentia where Fogelquist’s and other mariachis first made their mark in the county.

Back in the 1970s, Davis’ father, also named Raul, hired El Mariachi Uclatlan to play every Friday for one hour at lunchtime. The group had already developed a following among Latinos in the northern part of the county, and the Friday mariachi lunch at Tlaquepaque quickly became an institution among employees from a nearby Rockwell Corp. plant and other companies.

“When Mark started here, we really used to jam them in,” Davis said one recent Friday afternoon as the lunchtime crowd began to thin out. The group became so popular that, in 1981, it left Tlaquepaque and opened the El Mariachi restaurant in Orange, where the nine-piece band now jams in its own customers, three nights a week.

Fogelquist, a violinist who lives in Whittier, said the decision to open the restaurant was made for reasons other than a simple desire to make more money. “We’ll make a living, but we’ll never get rich in this business,” he said, noting that the restaurant is just beginning to turn a profit after some shaky early years, and that the group supplements its income by playing about 200 private functions a year.

“But,” he added, “we now have control over the performance situation. We’re not slaves to the public’s requests.”

Last year’s film “La Bamba” and the recent release of an album of mariachi standards by pop singer Linda Ronstadt--who is performing tonight at Irvine Meadows with the Mexico City-based Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan--have given the club’s business a boost, Fogelquist said.

“It’s the middle-class Mexican-Americans who are most affected by that stuff,” Fogelquist said. “The ones who’ve maybe lost their heritage a little bit and want to get back to it.”

Fogelquist said the irony of his own situation--an Anglo helping Latinos preserve and regain their heritage--is not lost on him.

“I think about it all the time,” he said. “People wonder if I was raised in East L.A. Actually, there were only two or three Spanish-surnamed students at Palisades High School. But I had been exposed to Mexican culture, and absolutely loved it.”

El Mariachi Uclatlan’s name reveals its origins, which were in a performance class at UCLA in the 1960s. Fogelquist, then an undergraduate music student, joined the group in 1966 and began the enormous task of learning the mariachi repertoire, estimated to include as many as 4,000 songs.

Several trips to Mexico followed, as did hundreds of hours playing alongside other mariachis in cantinas in Tijuana and East Los Angeles. And so did a 300-page thesis analyzing the son jalisciense --the vibrant folk-song style from the state of Jalisco that is the bread and butter of mariachi--and a master’s degree in music. Today, Fogelquist is something of a rarity within the mariachi world: He is both an accomplished performer and an authority on mariachi music.

As the early Mariachi Uclatlan improved and picked up regular jobs, student players were replaced by seasoned professionals. Only Fogelquist and his brother, Jim--a violinist and former Spanish lecturer at Yale University and Mt. Holyoke College, who has taken a temporary leave from the band--remain from the student group.

The prospect of having to give up playing mariachi to write a doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology finally pushed Fogelquist away from academia and into the music for good.

“One of the things I realized by playing the music was how it was impossible to really do a significant study of a musical tradition without getting into it all the way,” Fogelquist said. “You have ethnomusicology treatises written by guys who have a very superficial knowledge of the language and culture they’re dealing with. How can they possibly get through that?”

Fogelquist said he has never regretted his choice, although his mother, who had hoped to have another professor in the family, sometimes does. “The excitement of playing the music, and the challenge of playing the music, are tremendous,” he said. “Every day, my perception of mariachi music changes. I see new things, discover new information.”

Part of that, he said, is because of the first-rate musicians who make up the group. Stephen Loza, a professor who specializes in Latin American music at UCLA, says Uclatlan’s first trumpet player, Samuel Nolasco, is “the best in the L.A. area.” The group’s musical director, Juan Manuel Cortes, studied for seven years at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, and he has played with and arranged compositions for the top groups in Mexico.

“Juan Manuel’s philosophy, and I agree with him completely, is that we should try to educate the public by giving them a varied repertoire, not just the same old stuff,” Fogelquist said. “We try to do their requests, but we also want to introduce them to new songs.”

While the group obviously enjoys playing in front of its lively crowds--which range from predominantly older Mexican-American audiences Friday nights and during Sunday brunches to mostly young, recent immigrants on Sunday nights--it disdains the gimmickry and ethnic clowning in which some mariachis in Southern California engage.

“That degrades the tradition,” Fogelquist said. “The music speaks for itself.”

The club, at 650 N. Tustin Ave., is open daily except Tuesday, with the Mariachi Uclatlan playing Friday through Sunday nights, Friday at lunchtime and for Sunday brunch. Other groups provide entertainment the rest of the week. Reservations are highly recommended, especially Sunday nights, when the group hosts a contest at 11 for amateur singers. Call (714) 532-4001.