Mission: Mariachi

The image of mariachi music, which will be saluted this weekend in a pair of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, is one of lighthearted celebration and fun. It’s music, much like zydeco or samba, that can lift you out of the darkest mood as surely as a baby’s smile.

But you can bet that at some point in the marathon shows Saturday and Sunday that emcee Rodri Rodriguez will cut through the merriment to express some sobering thoughts about troubled social conditions around the world.

To this 41-year-old native of Havana, activism is as natural as being caught up in the liveliness of Mexico’s foremost folkloric music--mariachi.

“I always thought that politics and art shouldn’t mix,” she said, sitting in the living room of her Hollywood Hills home, which doubles as an office for Rodri Productions. It has put together the annual Mariachi USA Festival at the Bowl since 1990.

“But, when you have 18,000 people under the same roof you must take advantage of the opportunity to make comments to the benefit of the majority of them. So my message this year is: Regardless of your political or social position, regardless of your race, human rights must be respected.”

This year’s lineup at the festival, which begins at 6 p.m. Saturday and 5:30 p.m. Sunday, features nearly a dozen acts, all of which appear both days.

Among them: the usual headliner--Los Angeles’ acclaimed Mariachi Sol de Mexico--as well as a return visit by Junko Seki, who is believed to be the first Japanese mariachi singer, and the eclectic music of Quetzalcoatl, a superb Los Angeles quartet that is making its festival debut.

But the person who’ll really set the tone for the weekend is Rodriguez, who over the years has evolved from simply the host and producer of the event to its conscience.

In fact, she often describes herself as an activist, not a concert producer. It was a role she discovered early in life.

“I became an activist at age 5,” says Rodriguez, who was born to a working-class family. It was at that young age that she remembers standing on a seat in a movie theater and shouting at the screen, which was showing the propaganda of Fidel Castro’s new revolutionary government.

In 1962, Rodriguez’s parents sent her to Miami, where she was to wait in a refugee camp until her parents would join her a few months later. But that plan was thwarted when Castro soon after shut down the freedom flights and Rodriguez ended up in an Albuquerque foster home for seven years.

Though she missed her family, the separation taught her the value of discipline and molded her character, she believes.

“In school, I was the outcast, the alien, I didn’t have my parents,” she says. “So I was going to make sure I spoke the best English in class.”

Eventually reunited with her parents, the family moved to Los Angeles around 1970 and she began working as a switchboard operator at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, while her father worked as a shipbuilder and her mother as a seamstress.

Over the next few years, Rodriguez moved ambitiously in a variety of directions--taking acting lessons and, most important, writing music reviews for the L.A. weekly Cuban newspaper 20 de Mayo. It was the latter that pushed her into concert production.

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She was appalled by the poor production values of many of the shows she saw and eventually found herself booking Spanish singing legend Raphael at the Casa de Espan~a.

Soon she was producing concerts here and overseas, including Julio Iglesias’ first U.S. gig in 1977 at the Shrine Auditorium.

Also, for a year in the mid-’70s she took a position doing national promotions for Latin International, distributors of the EMI Latin label in the United States and Puerto Rico, and continued producing concerts in Latin America. But around 1990, worn out from the travel involved with those jobs and feeling that she was in something of a dead-end, she set about to find a new challenge. That’s when she started Mariachi USA, first as simply a one-day event at the Bowl.

“I’m fulfilling the goals I set for myself when I started--to create an annual event here, to have my office at home and to have my parents living with me,” says Rodriguez, who also hosts a weekly talk show Sundays at noon on KFI-AM (640).

The show, not surprisingly, looks at social issues, often from a Latino perspective.

“No matter what I do in the future, I’ll always be an activist,” she says. “Whenever something is not right, whenever someone is being harmed or damaged unfairly, I become an activist. And you don’t need politics to do that.”

* The seventh Mariachi USA Festival will be held Saturday and Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl. Saturday: 6-10:30 p.m.; Sunday: 5-9:30 p.m. Tickets: $12.50 seats are available for Saturday; Sunday, $12.50-$125.00. Ticketmaster, (213) 480-3232, (714) 740-2000, (805) 583-8700, (619) 220-8497.