It began with the editorial in the Review-Journal, criticizing "questionable pork projects" stuffed into the $388 billion spending bill Congress passed last month. The paper took particular umbrage at $25,000 that had been earmarked for a mariachi music program in Clark County schools. It was money Sen. Harry Reid had provided and later defended to the R-J as helping "improve the quality of life for Nevadans."
Obviously, $25,000 represents very little of $388 billion—my calculator flashed an error when I tried to compute it—but we're not exactly running a budget surplus in the U.S. these days, so maybe the R-J had a point.
Not long after, a reader wrote in to express her "sheer disgust" about the appropriation. It showed "blatant preference to a certain ethnic group in our public school system. There are many students of many other ethnic backgrounds who attend our public schools but do not have the opportunity to learn the music of their heritage or country."
All of which raised the rather obvious question, apparently unasked to that point: Were the kids any good? The R-J reader had a point. Clark County's program has been targeted at schools with large Latino populations, and when I visited kids at Rancho High School and J.D. Smith Middle School on the northwest side of town, most were Latino. But at the Las Vegas Academy, most of the mariachi students were white or Asian, said Javier Trujillo, who runs the program.
"All this is music," adds Orlando Marquez, the mariachi teacher at J.D. Smith. "You don't have to be Mexican to play it. We're not building mariachis to play in cantinas. We're building musicians." And the program in three short years has grown to include 10 schools and around 1,100 students.
On my first trip out to Rancho High School, Principal Bob Cresto couldn't resist parading one smart mariachi student after another in front of me. "What's your GPA?" he interrogated them. The kids, to a person, said they didn't know. "You know," Cresto insisted, and the kids offered up 2.5, 3.0, 3.5. The kids have to maintain a 2.0 to stay in.
Cresto was quick to endorse the project—which is part of a growing trend toward alternative music education—and quick to shrug off the costs. He called the $25,000 "a drop of water in the bucket. How much do we spend on football? We're always trying to have a reason to get kids to come to school. The money we spent on this whole program is equal to about two tubas."
Or, the $25,000 from Reid might fund two of the 10 schools. VH-1, through Cox Cable, donated $50,000 worth of mariachi instruments. Mariachi bands use regular guitars and violins and trumpets. Plus they use the oversized six-string guitarron, a sort of guitar on steroids, and, at the other end of the string spectrum, the petite vihuela. You can't just walk into your average music store and pick up these instruments. Trujillo says he spends plenty of time just writing grants. His goal is to make the mariachi program self-sufficient.
The mariachi students at Rancho told me that playing the music was what made school worthwhile. They all looked like they were having a great time, and most were dedicated. Many stayed after school to practice. They practiced at home. They sang choruses exuberantly. If the violins sometimes sounded a little, ahem, screechy—well, that's the sound of high school violins everywhere. But they plucked with pluck, and on most of the songs, whenever I closed my eyes, the earthy happiness of the music always got my toe tapping.
"If you have problems at school, it's something that gets you out of your head," said 15-year-old Diana Godinez, who plays the violin.
Juan Sanjuan, a burly 15, planted his legs in a wide, proud stance whenever he played the guitarron. He was like a proud mountain. "It's the joy of playing," he told me. "When I get angry, I play. When I can't get a song, I stay home and practice. I don't go on the street." He and some of his musician friends have even managed to score a paying gig at a local market.
Violinist Carlos Valenzuela started off in orchestra, until he saw the mariachi band play at an open house last year. "The mariachis blasted us away," he explained. "I saw the feeling and the excitement. They were into it. They became part of the music." And so has he—he practices every day and every night. When I asked him about the critics, he shrugged. "You're so into it you don't really care about any other's opinion."
Juan was a bit more ornery. "I don't want to start saying anything because I'd start saying inappropriate things."
The mariachi curriculum includes history and geography, and the kids carry the pride of being part of the tradition. According to researcher Jonathon D. Clark, who wrote the entry on mariachis for the Latino Encyclopedia, the music was native to western Mexico, where players were "commonly associated with the rural fiesta or fandango." Earlier mariachi wore peasant garb—they didn't begin to adapt to the modern horseman's suit (or traje de charro) until after the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The music took off when it reached Mexico City in the 1920s, and reached its apotheosis in the '30s, when the greatest mariachi group of all, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, arrived in the capital.
The kids at Rancho have already performed at the Mandalay Bay at a conference of school superintendents. In February, they head to Reno to play at the national conference of the American String Teachers Association. Last week, they taped a performance at the school for Univision, which will be broadcast on Channel 15 New Year's Eve.
The Univision cameraman was late arriving, so the kids rehearsed their music one last time. Most said they weren't nervous. After all, they had practiced pretty relentlessly over the last few weeks. Only Luis Sanjuan, Juan's 14-year-old brother, 'fessed up to feeling the butterflies. He was the large ensemble's only trumpet player. He glanced toward the violins and guitars. "If they make a mistake they can hide behind each other. If I make a mistake, I stand out."
To add a little extra pressure, the kids did the taping without any music. Cresto has ordered them mariachi uniforms, but they haven't yet arrived, so they took the stage in matching black pants or long skirts, white shirts, and flowery red bow ties called muños.
When they finally got onstage, their teacher, Gabe Cardena, ordered them to spit out their gum, and a few moments later, they blasted through a short set of songs, unfazed by the stage lights and the cameraman. On the stage, their sound had more body and breath. They sounded both serene and festive.
"It was cool," said Mirabel Carrasco, a 17-year-old violinist and singer. "Even though I didn't get to sing, it was cool."
It was.