Gustavo Rojo Dot Com

Anastasia Wilkins calls herself a “typical teenager.” Her bedroom, its walls painted in pink and white stripes, is strewn with clothes. She runs on her high school’s track team and wears a retainer. When she listens to music, it is likely to be oldies or country and western.

For nearly a decade, though, the bright-eyed 17-year-old has directed her passion toward singing and playing violin and vihuela — a small five-string guitar — in school mariachi ensembles. Last November, on an evening she said she hoped would never end, her dedication to mariachi paid off: At the largest national competition for school mariachi ensembles and singers, members of Mariachi Vargas, Mexico’s preeminent mariachi group, crowned Wilkins best vocalist in the United States for her throaty performance of a song called “No Puedo Olvidarte,” or “I Cannot Forget You.”

“I know that I’m singing correctly when I see people cry,” said Wilkins, a second-generation Mexican American whose Spanish is so patchy that her Spanish teacher translates song lyrics for her.

In the Southwest, mariachi school programs have exploded over the past 30 years, and they are popping up in other parts of the nation. And nowhere has the mariachi arts craze caught on more than in South Texas, and especially San Antonio, where more than 40 percent of the population is of Mexican origin. At least 50 schools in San Antonio and 250 others in Texas offer mariachi programs, said Cynthia Muñoz, a public relations executive whose firm organizes the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza.

Mariachi is so big in Texas that from San Antonio south to the border, schools with mariachi ensembles outnumber those with jazz bands, music educators say. Drawn to mariachi for its festive rhythms and melodic songs about homeland, liquor and love, the students learn music theory and can become accomplished singers and instrumentalists.

“I hate the word ‘mariachi’ ” used to describe the players, said David Zamarripa, mariachi instructor at downtown San Antonio’s Fox Tech High School. “I want them to be ‘musicians.’ “

Most mariachi students are Mexican Americans or other Hispanics, although mariachi educators say the music attracts students of all kinds. Some think mariachi may be on the verge of a breakthrough to the mainstream, much as jazz once transcended its southern black roots to seize the imagination of the nation.

For now, students and directors say, mariachi connects many Mexican American and other Hispanic students to a heritage, and even a language, that is often only dimly familiar.

The other afternoon, a few members of Fox Tech’s mariachi ensemble took a break after practicing for an upcoming competition in the South Texas town of Alice. The ensemble — eight violin players, three trumpet players, one guitar, two vihuelas and one oversize bass guitar called a guitarrón — practices during one class period and for an hour each day after school.

“I didn’t expect to be able to learn or hear mariachi here,” said violin player Marcelino Castillo, 18, who immigrated to Texas from Mexico nine years ago and began learning mariachi as a sixth-grader in San Antonio. The senior also plays in a professional ensemble that performs in a local Mexican restaurant on weekends. “It makes me keep in touch with my roots,” he said.

Another violinist, Desarae Rodriguez, shrugged when asked about her ancestry. “I don’t know what I’m reading all the time,” Rodriguez, 17, said of the lyrics. “But I grew to love it.”

Other students take up mariachi for its timeless song topics and trajes de charro — the flamboyant mariachi uniforms, with their short embroidered jackets, wide-brimmed hats and flashy neck scarves — which lend cachet to the music, students say, and allow them to skirt the “band nerd” label.

“The music is so cool,” said Jeff Nevin, a music professor and mariachi instructor at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif. “Your image of a kid getting on the bus and carrying a violin case and getting teased — it isn’t really true if he’s got a mariachi suit.”

Teaching mariachi in schools is a purely American concept. South of the border, mariachi is rooted in folk music of rural western Mexico and passed from generation to generation, its notes and lyrics rarely written down or studied formally.

San Antonio’s mariachi mania began in the 1960s, boosted by a handful of Catholic churches that began showcasing mariachi ensembles during Mass, and early Spanish-language radio stations. A decade later, San Antonio’s school district started one of the nation’s first school mariachi programs.

Several Texas colleges and universities, among them the University of Texas-Pan American in Laredo and the University of Texas at Austin, now lure high school mariachi players with courses, ensembles and scholarships. At Texas State University in San Marcos, administrators are designing what they say will be the nation’s first four-year music education degree with a certification in mariachi.

Wilkins, who won a $1,500 scholarship and a day at a spa for her November victory, is planning to attend Texas State for its elementary education program and its mariachi group.

“I don’t want to stop,” she said.

There are a few obstacles to mainstream mariachi. For one, public school music funds are often meager. At Fox Tech High, which offers six mariachi classes but no jazz band or orchestra, the $1,500 mariachi budget has not grown in four years, even as enrollment in mariachi courses has doubled, to nearly 100 students. To save money, Zamarripa, the mariachi instructor, borrows instruments from other schools and writes song scores himself, he said.

But mariachi’s reputation as cheesy cantina music may be its chief barrier to the mainstream. Despite mariachi’s firm foothold in Texas schools and the growth of regional contests, there is no mariachi category in major statewide music competitions. Those are reserved for jazz bands, orchestras, concert bands and choirs.

“Instead of looking at mariachi as a Mexican ensemble that plays at restaurants, people should step back a little bit and look at mariachi as a music ensemble,” said John Lopez, director of multicultural music programs at Texas State University, north of San Antonio.

Wilkins said she thinks mariachi deserves more respect, but she’s not sure regulated competition is the answer. “Then you wouldn’t have as much freedom,” she said. “And that’s what’s fun about mariachi.”

read / The Washington Post Monday, April 12, 2004