Mariachi Roots
From its misty roots to its present-day performances, mariachi music has come to be associated worldwide with a celebration of the joy, tragedy and passion inherent in Mexican culture.
The roots of the La Frontera Tucson International Mariachi Conference are solidly embedded in the multicultural communities of Southern Arizona, particularly those of Tucson’s Mexican Americans. It is believed to have begun in the early 1960s when a priest with a vast collection of mariachi music, Father Arseñio Carrillo, played a few songs for Father Charles Rourke. The group—known in Tucson by its Spanish moniker, “Los Changuitos Feos”—would become by 1964 one of the most influential mariachi ensembles to emerge in Tucson.
Years had passed, and the mariachi music began to gain wide recognition. In 1982 the Tucson Festival Society became the official sponsor of the Tucson Mariachi Conference. It was not hard to convince influential Mexican American entrepreneurs that a mariachi conference would be a good thing for Tucson, especially its Mexican American community. Many influential Mexican Americans as well as non-Hispanics got involved.
The Tucson Festival Society then decided that it should take the Conference to what it considered to be the best of the Hispanic philanthropies in town, La Frontera. La Frontera Center was a non-profit, free mental-health clinic founded in 1968 to serve the needs of the primarily Mexican American residents of south Tucson. Less than two months before the Conference, La Frontera agreed to accept the challenge.
La Frontera set in motion a massive mobilization of volunteers and resources to make the first Conference happen, a task nothing less than remarkable. The concert was a sold-out event with about 9,000 in attendance.
Although the success of the first Tucson International Mariachi Conference was modest at best, it prepared the ground for the founding of what would become a source of great pride in Southern Arizona. In each successive year, Conference organizers focused on ways of improving and expanding the program offerings.
Another important development in the history of the Tucson International Mariachi Conference was securing the contribution of Tucson’s distinguished, homegrown artist, Linda Ronstadt. When asked why she chose to get involved, Ronstadt replied that it had to do with acknowledging the virtuosity of the mariachi tradition itself. She also was instrumental in introducing folklórico dancing into the Conference program. Without dancing, Ronstadt insisted, the music “then becomes this rigid, sterile form.”
In subsequent years, the Tucson International Mariachi Conference became nationally and internationally recognized as the leading proponent of the mariachi tradition anywhere in the world. Yet, for many Tucsonans the impact of the annual event has been immeasurable. The effects of the Tucson International Mariachi Conference have indeed been profound and widespread. Yet nowhere are they more deeply felt than in Tucson’s up-and-coming generations.
