LA BOYLE : For L.A.’s Mariachis, the Road to Success Begins Outside a Doughnut Shop at First and Boyle

A SHORT STROLL FROM downtown Los Angeles, across the First Street Bridge, the junction of Boyle Avenue and First Street forms a little plaza framed by a doughnut shop and a Marlboro man riding atop his billboard horse. On any given night, as day fades behind L.A.’s mirrored skyline, scores of mariachis gather here, carrying guitars, accordions, violins, trumpets, big bass guitarrons. They come to join their bands, look for jobs, exchange gossip and perhaps find a way out of obscurity.

For more than 30 years, the plaza, known among the musicians as La Boyle (la boy-lay), has been a gathering place for mariachi bands--from strolling street bands that sing to survive to musicians who no longer need to hustle for work but want to stay in touch with the community. They all know the plaza, and whenever a good player shows up there, the word gets around. In the past decade, Los Angeles has become the new mariachi mecca, and La Boyle is its center. It is unique north of the Mexican border, because each nearby house, apartment and hotel--in fact, the whole neighborhood--is inhabited mainly by mariachis.

A new Cadillac pulls up to the curb, and the driver rolls down the window to talk to a handful of musicians. He is a Latino businessman looking to hire a mariachi band for his wife’s birthday party tonight at their Beverly Hills home. The jefe (leader) of a group is right there to grab the job. The price is set--for a good four-piece band, the rate is $175 an hour, with a two-hour minimum. A down-payment made, the deal is sealed on a handshake. The musicians pile into a beat-up van owned by one of them and rumble off.

The less-established musicians, unattached to any particular group, wait as station wagons and bright step-vans come and go--the bands loading up their instruments, squeezing in for trips to Pacoima, Azusa or Long Beach.

The older mariachis sit on a row of boxes against the side of the doughnut shop, holding banged-up guitars and dented trumpets. Occasionally, someone will strum a tune--or go inside for coffee and doughnuts or a game of cards.

It’s a cohesive community. Most of the La Boyle musicians have been in the United States--not all legally--between 10 and 15 years. The band members are often interchangeable, and they try to help one another out, even taking up collections for musicians who are ill or in trouble.

Some of the players now hold steady jobs with groups that perform regularly; others supplement low-wage day jobs by playing at night. And among them are a few dedicated young musicians, recently arrived with dreams of success.

“There are only two places for a mariachi to become famous,” says a 19-year-old guitarist named Leandro, “Mexico City and L.A. I hope to make it here.”

Leandro has just arrived from Guadalajara, where he comes from a long line of musicians (the mariachi tradition tends to run in families). Leandro had played with a group in Mexico for four years, and when he heard about La Boyle, he came to try his luck. He sleeps days on his cousin’s couch in a nearby apartment, and at night he goes to the plaza. He dresses in his traje de charro (suit of the horseman) , the traditional black mariachi costume with silver trim, standing straight and tall to catch the eye of any jefe who might need a guitar player for his group. Last night, he teamed up with two other musicians, walking from bar to bar, playing for about $5 a song. His share at dawn was $35.

Leandro hopes to form his own group here and make a name for himself. But first, he must pay off the coyote who got him across the border and buy himself some ID.

“I REMEMBER,”says one tall, lean mariachi who everyone calls El Cochero (the Coachman) after a legendary movie character. “I remember when this doughnut shop used to be a gas station. And the trolley cars stopped at this spot when I first came 31 years ago.”

Everyone nods. El Cochero is a fundador , a founder of La Boyle, and the others regard him with awe. Leaning against the doughnut shop wall, he tells the story of his father from Sinaloa who married a beautiful Puerto Rican woman, of how he himself was born in Mexicali and moved to the United States as a teen-ager. He joined the Navy during the Korean War and became a citizen in 1956. But always he played the music his father had taught him.

When he quit the sea and came to settle in Los Angeles, he found a $7-a-week room in a Boyle Heights house. (El Palacio del Cochero, they still call it.) He began playing the music he loves, going from bar to restaurant, assembling groups, quitting, forming new ones, always writing new songs, becoming legendary among the La Boyle musicians. Now in his 60s, El Cochero still plays at restaurants such as El Palenque in Azusa, approaching tables to ask diners whether there is something they’d like to hear, collecting $6 a song.

ACROSS THE STREET from the doughnut shop, music blares from the Casa del Mariachi. The front and sides of this bar are painted with murals by local artists, scenes of mariachis, the Virgin of Guadalupe and East L.A. barrio life. Indoors, the jukebox pours out a poignant song by the late mariachi hero Jose Alfredo Jimenez.

Jimenez stretched mariachi music beyond its traditional boundaries in the 1950s by writing songs in the ranchera (country) style and performing them with mariachi instruments. This popular singer-songwriter popularized mariachi music with hit songs such as “A Punto de Llorar” (“On the Verge of Tears”) and “Amor del Alma” (“Love of My Soul”). These compositions, about love, life and broken hearts have become mariachi standards.

Traditional mariachi music originated in Cocula, in the region southwest of Guadalajara, when the French took over Mexico from Spain in the 1860s. During the brief reign of Maximilian, European instrumentation was adapted to existing folk melodies and Indian rhythms to create music that was performed at wedding celebrations. Mariage in French became mariachi in Spanish. Or at least that’s one story.

Traditional mariachi groups have eight to 12 pieces, and at the heart of the music they play is a collection of songs called sones, about 50 compositions with brassy, rhythmic instrumental arrangements and simple, sentimental lyrics that often contain bawdy or political double meanings.

In Los Angeles, the mariachi repertoire has widened to accommodate not only the country-and-Western style of Jose Alfredo Jimenez but also Latin styles from all over. A good mariachi must know a minimum of 200 songs; the best boast of being able to play 500.

But making it in L.A. requires more, says Ricardo Cisneros, who plays with the band Los Galleros at El Rey restaurant in Montebello. “Today you must know how to read music, how to follow arrangements.” The few who succeed here could wind up in bands with regular jobs or, eventually, buy their own restaurants. One such restaurant is La Fonda on Wilshire Boulevard, whose owner, Nati Cano, and his band, Los Camperos, backed Linda Ronstadt’s performance at this year’s Grammy Awards. Most, like El Cochero, will continue to pursue their art in the streets. The street is where the music has heart.

OVER AT LA BOYLE, it is late, and most of the groups have gone off to their jobs. A few men still sit on boxes, backs propped against the wall of the doughnut shop, which will soon close.

Leandro stands nearby, listening to the older mariachis tell their stories. El Cochero has a half-pint of whiskey and is telling about his son, who lives in San Jose and plays trumpet in a mariachi group, carrying on the tradition.

Leandro’s posture is wilted by having waited all night with no luck. He leans now against a car and looks tired, but he persists. “Without the music,” he says, “I could not live.”

Just then, a car full of mariachis pulls up. They need another guitar player for a private party. Leandro climbs in and they take off, leaving only El Cochero to talk in the glow of the street lamp about a song he wrote for a Cuban girl he met years ago in Salinas. El Cochero holds his guitar close to his chest, closes his eyes and sings the song.