Mariachi is strumming back into Colorado schools, led by a new generation of teachers

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Mari Meza-Burgos and Priscilla Arasaki are on the road again. They shuttle around instruments, their families in tow, ears to the ground for a sound that they are uniquely positioned to hear: a call — a “grito,” maybe — for mariachi.

They’re the teachers of teachers, leading workshops for current and future instructors who want to bring the Mexican musical tradition to their students. 

Contemporary mariachi ensembles typically consist — with some variation — of a singer, some trumpets, and a string section that includes violins and guitars, along with the “vihuela,” which with a higher-tuned sound than the guitar, and the “guitarrón,” providing the music’s low notes and rhythmic drive. The arrangement makes for an easy introduction in schools that already have orchestras, “you start with the string section and build from there,” Meza-Burgos said from a picnic table in Estes Park, where she’s leading a weeklong mariachi summer camp with Longs Peak as the backdrop.

But relying too heavily on established music programs leaves out crucial context the teachers consider important to a proper mariachi education.

“Teachers can teach music. If you give them a sheet and a score, they will rehearse it,” Arasaki said. “It’s the cultural component that they’re really missing.”

Arasaki and Meza-Burgos have more than 40 years of mariachi and education between them, but their current venture — a nonprofit they’re calling Cuerdas y Canciones (Strings and Songs) — is a brand new blend of their skills, a direct response to the momentum of youth mariachi in the state.

Middle and high school level programs are emerging, or in some cases reemerging, around the Front Range and northern Colorado. Last year, the Colorado High School Activities Association hosted the first statewide mariachi festival for high school students. In March, Skyline High School in Longmont hosted the second annual festival. 

Meanwhile, all-ages afterschool group, like the Colorado Youth Mariachi Program, co-founded and directed by Isahar Mendez-Flores, has grown from backyard lessons with seven students in 2016, to a two-season nonprofit with 80-plus students per year, run from a dedicated studio in Aurora.

And in the fall, MSU Denver will offer a degree in Mariachi Performance and Culture, the first of its kind in the state. The program will combine coursework from the music, Chicano studies and business departments, with elective classes that dive into folklore, literature and Latin American history.

The degree is the culmination of work by women like Meza-Burgos and Mendez-Flores, both of them founding members of MSU’s student club, Mariachi Los Correcaminos, which they started a decade ago with the support of Lorenzo Trujillo, an affiliate professor of music at MSU and stalwart of Colorado mariachi.

“So there’s momentum,” Arasaki said.

Still, they didn’t expect their new venture to take off quite so fast, Meza-Burgos added. They’ve already secured partnerships with Denver Public Schools and MSU, and presented at the Colorado Music Educators Association conference earlier this year. 

The conference struck a chord with Paul Haarala, who last week began his first year as the orchestra and mariachi director at Sunset Middle School in Longmont. 

“(Priscilla and Mari) were very much like: we want mariachi to be in schools, we want you to ask questions, we want you to be curious,”   Haarala said. “You don’t necessarily have to have grown up in the tradition to learn about it and then become a part of that community.” He left the session thinking mariachi was something he might like to teach in the future. 

When he accepted the job at Sunset and learned it came with a mariachi component, he called Arasaki and Meza-Burgos immediately. 

Eyes on the paper, ears on the group

Part of teaching mariachi is knowing which songs are appropriate for students. Arasaki recommends starting with “rancheras,” a subgenre with predictable rhythms and clear cut messages about love, patriotism and nature. “Corridos” can also work, she added, a subgenre similar to the ranchera with more of a storytelling element.

Other subgenres like “sones” and “huapangos” are more rhythmically complex and require groups to spend more time practicing together, time that most students don’t have.

“Let’s listen to some songs,” Meza-Burgos said to a line of five focused instructors, including Haarala, at MSU in early July. Their instruments were tucked away in cases, their laps covered in notebook papers and sheet music. “See if you can identify the genre.”

It’s the middle of a four-day course that Cuerdas y Canciones are offering. The class has just spent the morning learning some subgenre signatures: from straightforward qualities like instrumentation and rhythm, to more esoteric concepts like how a song should make its audience feel.

“Sones typically end in a da-da-da,” Meza-Burgos says, her voice rising. “Rancheras will end with a bam-ba-ba-da-ba.”

Arasaki taps her phone and the sound of violins spills out of the room’s speakers. The instructors sway, their toes tap-tap-tap at the linoleum floor. “Sone,” someone offers.

Correct! Meza-Burgo smiles.

Arasaki taps her phone again. A new song comes on, this one is slower. Some instructors scan their notebooks, others stare at the floor. A singer’s voice emerges and a couple of instructors’ eyes meet. “Corrido,” one suggests. Correct.

Then Meza-Burgos stumps them with a huapango. They play this game until it’s time for a lunch break.

“One thing we have been telling the teachers, the one thing I was told when I was getting into mariachi, is that you just have to listen,” Arasaki said. “You have to listen to as much mariachi as you possibly can.”

That’s more than just advice, it’s tradition.

While the oldest recognizable rhythms date back to the mid-1800s, mariachi as a class didn’t break into school systems until the 1960s and 70s, and even then it was isolated to strongholds of Mexican culture in the southwest like Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

Before that, the music was passed down through family members, and by playing at churches, celebrations and restaurants.

“The gigging element is really essential to mariachi because you’re learning songs by ear,” Meza-Burgos said. “You learn a bunch of repertoire where you’re not in a classroom.”

Part of working as a mariachi — the word describes both the musical genre and its performers — is taking requests from the audience, and tuning into what other members of the group are doing. It’s part classical, with its century-old songbooks and thickly laid traditions, and part jazz, with a necessary ability to improvise, riff and respond.

Or, as Mendez-Flores instructs her students: eyes on the paper, ears on the group.

“You have to be able to read the music. But you also have to listen. You have to be able to do both,” Mendez-Flores said. “You cannot play mariachi efficiently or authentically if you’re not listening.”

Eyes on the paper, ears on the group.

There are no teachers

Mendez-Flores started playing as a teen at Adam City High School in 2005, during an early wave of mariachi programs in Colorado schools. Adams State University in Alamosa started a student group in 2007, Bryant-Webster elementary kicked things off for Denver Public Schools in 2004.

She never intended to play. “I was one of the only brown students in violin, so I ended up in the mariachi class,” she said. “I was like. ‘No, I’m not going to do this. I’ll quit after two weeks.’”

Then she started to learn the songs. She started singing. She started listening outside of class time.

“I felt such a heavy connection, not just with the other students in the class, or to the music, but suddenly to my culture, to my family,” Mendez-Flores said. “It was so grounding. And to have that happen at what at 14, 15 years old?”

Soon after graduating, those same programs that transformed Mendez-Flores started to disband: Adams City, Abraham Lincoln and North high schools, “they all just started to fall away,” Mendez-Flores said.

Adam State’s mariachi group has managed to hang on because of volunteers like Lawrence Mora and Annette Moore, who have run the program for 16 and 17 years respectively. 

“Annette says it’s like trying to round up cats,” Mora said. “It’s just hard. But I love it. We do it for the students.” 

Community members love it, too, hiring the group out (locals fill in when there aren’t enough players) and donating to a scholarship fund dedicated to the school’s mariachi players. Students earn $1,000 to practice with the group once per week and perform when called upon.

Before COVID-19, the group, known as Corazón del Valle, was up to 15 members. Last year they only had one student. 

“You know, it’s supposed to be students joined by members of the community, but lately it’s just been members of the community and one student,” Mora said. But he keeps the program alive, “one day at a time,” he said, hoping that the high school mariachis from Taos and other nearby towns will make their way to Adams State. 

In Commerce City, Mendez-Flores watched her program cycle through music directors while their mariachi teacher struggled to align his program with the high turnover. Then the mariachi teacher left, and the program shuttered.

That broke her heart. So she went to college for music to become a mariachi teacher herself.

“Looking back I’m very surprised,” she said, laughing at the clarity of her 17-year-old self.

“Of course now I know there was a lot to it. The school was struggling, we were on academic probation, there were probably funding issues, but at the time I was sure, like, ‘It’s because there’s no teachers.’”

The major key

That’s where Arasaki and Meza-Burgos come in.

If there’s a downside to institutionalizing an oral tradition, it’s outweighed by the prospects of the next generation, by the possibility of a pipeline for students who want to attend MSU, maybe, or those who want to become teachers, concert performers, historians.

“With mariachi in schools, it’s a story of three things,” said Lorenzo Trujillo, the affiliate professor who helped get the MSU program off the ground 10 years ago. “It’s wider acceptance of this genre, empowerment of the students, and professionalization. It institutionalizes all this knowledge so it’s not just fly-by-night.”

The word “professionalization” comes up in multiple conversations, alluding to the conferences, competitions and concert halls that have pushed mariachi beyond its reputation as a music for local bars and Mexican restaurants.

“It’s really cool to see it grow, and people having success, and recognizing that it’s not just something that people go and drink margaritas at Casa Bonita and have a mariachi play,” said Brian Crim, director of mariachi and orchestra at Skyline High School. “It’s its own legitimate art form. And I think it’s finally getting recognized here.”

(Don’t worry, you can still drink margaritas at Casa Bonita and listen to mariachi.)

Crim is going into his ninth season as a mariachi director in the St. Vrain school district, where he expanded a K-8 program from a club to a class, and eventually took over Arasaki’s position as mariachi director when she left Skyline.

While Skyline’s general enrollment numbers have shrunk by almost 500 students over the past five years, to 1,083 students last year from 1,520 during the 2021-21 school year, reflecting a statewide trend, Crim said he’s seen enrollment in the mariachi class climb.

Haarala, at Sunset Middle School, started the year with 12 students enrolled in mariachi, with the option for more to join when their “lab” classes start three weeks into the semester. 

“I’ve been looking for a way for public school orchestras to have the same type of community feeling that marching band invokes. And I feel like mariachi is kind of a version of that,” Haarala said. “It’s outward facing, and it’s less about this perfect classical performance and more about, you know, enjoying it with the people that you’re performing for.”

When it all adds up

With institutionalization comes an opportunity for preservation — to mark what it means to be a mariachi at this moment in time.

There are rules about where to stand, how to hold an instrument, how to wear the “traje” — the elaborate suits and full-length skirts modeled after Spanish horse riding outfits.

“You don’t wear a traje just to wear a traje,” Mendez-Flores said. “It’s symbolic, it represents Mexican pride, you have to respect it.”

There’s also an element of audience engagement that differs from a classical orchestra, Meza-Burgos said.

“If you have an audience who is familiar with the mariachi tradition, they might come off as rowdy to classical musicians,” she said. “But that’s a tradition, to do the gritos, or to dance, to clap. So we also teach the instructors to invite their audiences to engage in that tradition.”

Of course, teaching these things in a classroom means applying pedagogy to what has for decades been a learning-by-doing trade. This is where Mendez-Flores excels.

“I get so nerdy about it,” she said.

Lately she’s been thinking a lot about vibrato, the pulsating pitch in a singer’s voice, and how it should match the strumming of the guitarrón and the wavering violin note.

“I was having this conversation with Mari (Meza-Burgos) the other day. Like, you can tell this group practices together so often and this one doesn’t, because they’re not as tight. But then it’s like, wait, what does tight mean? Like what does that actually sound like?” Mendez-Flores said.

“It’s when the vibrato matches the guitar strumming, and the trumpets blend with the violin, it’s all these things. So many little tiny things.”

It’s all of those things — from listening for tiny harmonies to rousing concert hall crowds — that Cuerdas y Canciones hopes to instill in their educators.

More than just knowing how to clean your traje and hold your vihuela, their work is an acknowledgement that a centuries old tradition is changing, that something once passed down from father to son will be passed down from teacher to student, and that doing so will continue to expand the boundaries of where mariachi will go.

Where exactly that is, the women don’t know yet. They nod to Texas’s robust mariachi programs and statewide competitions, and big high school gatherings in New Mexico. They hope to implement an artist-in-residence program to host professional performers alongside music teachers in schools, and to host quarterly jam sessions for teachers across musical genres.

What’s most important is the community they are building, Meza-Burgos said. 

“I guess we don’t really know what the impact will look like in Colorado for a few years,” she added. But they’ve put in the work, and they’ll figure it out as they go. That’s part of being a mariachi.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.