In Arizona Theatre Company’s “American Mariachi,” a group of girls gets together to form a mariachi band.
It takes place in the early 1970s, when males, females and mariachi didn’t mix. It’s also about the time that Leonor Xóchitl Pérez, then a junior high student, first fell in love with the music.
“For me, my parents were immigrants and they did not like the idea of my being a mariachi musician,” says Pérez, a San Diego-based educator and the founder of the Mariachi Women’s Festival (which will be coming to Tucson in May).
“My parents didn’t understand the concept. … They wanted me to be a concert violinist. Their take is I was going backwards.”
But she continued to play in a school-based group until she was 16. Then, “They took my violin and mariachi away.”
After she graduated from high school, Pérez won an internship and left for Washington, D.C. Her mother wasn’t aware that she was going to support herself as a member of Mariachi de las Americas.
When she returned to her Los Angeles home years later, she left mariachi behind, picking it up 10 years later, while she was working on her Ph.D. at UCLA.
By that time, it was not unusual for women to be in mariachi groups, thanks to the school-based programs that took hold at the time she discovered her passion for mariachi.
In Tucson, it was Los Changuitos Feos, an all-boys mariachi group launched in 1964, that gave a higher profile to the music in the Old Pueblo.
“Despite the presence of a mariachi group at La Fuente (restaurant) from 1960 on, and the emergence of the local mariachi group Mariachi Los Tucsonenses around that same time, Los Changuitos Feos by far had the biggest initial impact on Tucson’s mariachi scene,” says Daniel Buckley, whose film, “The Mariachi Musical,” is expected to be released next year.
“They crossed over into the broader community and really brought much more attention to the art form than anyone else, at least initially.”
But it wasn’t until the 1980s, when mariachi programs were offered in schools, that Los Changuitos Feos allowed girls to join, says Buckley. That was six months after the youth group Mariachi Nuevo added girls, he adds.
“Girls were the best violin players,” says Buckley. “It was hard to get boys to play violin; it was considered a girl’s instrument.”
Mixed-gender groups “changed the dynamic,” says Buckley.
Tucsonan Monica Trevino, who Buckley says has “the voice of a god,” discovered mariachi in a school-based program here. But when she went to Los Angeles to pursue a dream singing mariachi, she ran into obstacles.
She was playing with a group and gaining experience when she called the hottest group around, Mariachi Los Camperos De Nati Cano, hoping to join the then-all-male group.
“They wouldn’t respond,” says Trevino, who would eventually tour with Linda Ronstadt.
“But I kept calling.”
Her persistence paid off. She joined the group and sang with them for eight years.
“I was home,” she says. “I was where I was born to be. Stage was home, the guys were like my family. It was an amazing, amazing time.”
