You don’t think about these things until they happen, and having just experienced it, I realize that being holed up in a Guatemalan village eatery while wild rain runs river-ish in the street is greatly enhanced when a mariachi band is holed up in the same joint.
Reflecting on it, I would like to change my answer to “what would you bring if you could only bring one item and were stranded on a desert island?” from Megan Fox to Los Principes Mariachi Band.
I took a tuc-tuc to San Felipe, the village next to Antigua where Mariachi bands roam and the street dogs play. Mariachi bands often hang out near the church. I needed to find a mariachi for the Third Annual Mariachi Pub Crawl that my friends and I started doing three years back when we realized that there was nothing on this green earth to prevent us from doing it.
I arrived in San Felipe just as the dark clouds descended from the hills. No Mariachis in sight. I walked up to a wooden stove in front of a cafeteria where one woman was hard at work making tortillas and the other stirred various stews and soups. I asked them if they knew of any Mariachi bands and they told me a resounding, “Sí, there will be one here in five minutes if you can wait.”
Hungry, I decided to grab lunch—cow tongue soup. Ominously, with the unhurried gansta-gait that mariachis walk with, the six members of the Mariachi group Los Principes filed in.
This outfit played last year’s crawl. “Lucas,” one of them said, remembering my name.
They nodded in smiling, por supuesto, agreement when I told them that the coming Thursday we once again needed their mad Mariachi skills for a pub crawl.
Then came the rains. In Guatemala there is an old saying “Frogs are falling from the sky” during sudden downpours that seem like a rehearsal for the apocalypse.
Women rushed outside to rescue their baskets of vegetables. The bustling street emptied and became a river. A few brave vehicles and motorcycles puttered cautiously through it. Then the waters rose and started pouring into the restaurant. Doors and gates were closed to quell the stream just as the Mariachi band, realizing that no one was going anywhere, started to play.
It seemed appropriate, having the band play the story. After all, Mariachi music is storm music that resonances like tequila tastes s It’s music about love and its betrayal, revolutionary heroes and horses–even chickens get their shout out with entire songs dedicated to their glory. It’s sobbing desperado music sung in taverns about late night gun battles, bandits and horse thieves that swings and sways and toasts to lost loves, and beautiful, unreachable women.
The State of Mariachi Music
When Cortes rolled up to Mexico, the Aztecs were rocking with rattles, drums, reed and clay flutes, and conch-shell horns that we imagine must have rocked the temple. These instruments abruptly gave way to the imported music that used violins, guitars, harps, brass horns and woodwinds.
Indian and Meztizo musicians learned how to play the Spanish’s music and started building their own instruments, giving them unique shapes and tunings.
Mariachi, like its spokesdrink tequila, can be for some an acquired taste, but it’s one that plenty are acquiring. Ramon Rivera is director of a mariachi program of Wenatchee School District with 300 students and says “Its popularity has exploded, and music programs all around the country are bursting with enthusiasm.
Daniel Sheehy, mariachi expert and director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife agrees, says that Mariachi bands are no longer confined to states along the U.S. border or American cities. “Mariachi has all the ingredients to make it a powerful movement,” Sheeny said. “It’s infectious and honest music and a touchstone of identity.”
Today more than 500 U.S. public schools now offer mariachi as part of their music curricula.
And this Thursday starting at The Terrace Hostel, will be Antigua’s 3rd annual Mariachi pub craw. This year we are making those hangovers mean something as the event will double as a fundraiser for The Integral Heart Foundation as a way to ying out our yangs during what he hope will be a music filled saturnalia night of bacchanalian bass-ass-ery.
