20 July 2009

A Tale of Two Mariachis

Nati Cano, Mark Fogelquist use music to foster pride in Latino community

 

Mariachi Chula Vista, comprised of student musicians from San Diego, performed at the 2009 Folklife Festival in Washington.

Mariachi Chula Vista, comprised of student musicians from San Diego, performed at the 2009 Folklife Festival in Washington.

By Ralph Dannheisser
Special Correspondent

Washington — Blending talent and drive, Nati Cano has followed an impressive road from his humble beginnings in rural Mexico to a top spot in the world of mariachi music.

But the path to mariachi prominence would seem a far less likely one for Mark Fogelquist, the grandson of Swedish immigrants to the United States, who grew up in Washington state.

Both Cano and Fogelquist led their respective groups — Cano’s, a top professional band, Fogelquist’s, a prize-winning high school aggregation — in featured performances at the 2009 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington.

This year, one of the festival’s highlighted themes was the world of Latin American music. Performers came from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Paraguay.

The inclusion in the lineup of Cano’s Los Angeles-based band and the kids from the Chula Vista, California, high school mariachi class that Fogelquist teaches served to illustrate the impact that Latino music — and Latino culture generally — is having in the United States.

Cano has been advancing that process for more than 50 years, working to establish mariachi as a serious art form.

Born in 1933 in Ahuisculco, a small town in Mexico’s western Jalisco state, Cano grew up in a family of day laborers and folk musicians. At age 6, he began to play the vihuela, a small guitar-like instrument, and joined his father and grandfather in performing at local cantinas.

He soon came to believe that mariachi musicians were undervalued. “When I was raised, to be a mariachi was to be a second-class citizen. I determined I would try and change that image,” he said between festival sets with his group, Mariachi Los Camperos.

“I want the audience to understand that this is not cantina music. ... This is art,” he said.

After studying violin for six years at the Academy of Music in Guadalajara, Mexico, Cano toured Mexico with a classical chamber music orchestra, then moved to Los Angeles with the Mariachi Chapala band to continue his efforts to promote respect for the genre.

In 1968, Cano, by then music director of Mariachi Los Camperos, opened a Los Angeles restaurant that he used as a showcase for the band. Efforts to have his music taken seriously advanced in 1990 when Cano was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His reaction when he won the award, he said, was “to prove why I got it.”

Contributing to that proof, the group has won two Grammy Awards, which recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry. In 2005, the group won for best musical album for children and in 2009 for best Mexican regional album.

Cano proudly recalled an incident that occurred several years ago when Los Camperos made a guest appearance with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Philharmonic members “were rehearsing our music and they didn’t know that I understood English. So one violinist says to another, ‘This is beautiful. This is difficult. This is not easy.’ That’s a big compliment to our music!”

As for the Folklife Festival venue, Cano said, “For us, this is the most important performance. It’s good for us, for our spirit. We learn from other musicians, they learn from us. There is so much talent!”

Fogelquist, whose father taught Spanish at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), says he first heard mariachi music when he spent a summer in Guadalajara at age 13 and “just instantly fell in love with it.” He wrote his master’s thesis at UCLA on mariachi. Then, having earned a degree in ethnomusicology, he says, “I bought a Mexican restaurant in Orange County [California] and played mariachi music for a living for 20 years.”

His shift to teaching in 1993 came when school administrators from Wenatchee, Washington, came into his restaurant for dinner while they were in California seeking bilingual teachers to serve the growing number of Mexican farm workers’ children in their area. They hired him and he spent eight years in Wenatchee. Early in his tenure, he convinced the district to start a mariachi program.

In 2001, Fogelquist was recruited to inaugurate a similar program in Chula Vista, California, near San Diego. He has been teaching classes and leading Mariachi Chula Vista — the performing group composed of 16 students — ever since.

The group has won multiple national awards, though almost none of its members had any musical training before signing up for Fogelquist’s class. “The kids have to learn to read music, they have to learn the basics of the history of the mariachi tradition, they have to take a year of vocal music,” he says.

Fogelquist sees the exposure as promoting a sense of self, heritage and pride among his students.

Three recent graduates, he said, now are playing with top-notch professional groups in the Los Angeles area, “making a living, playing every day.”

Fogelquist says the youngsters have been thrilled by their Folklife Festival experience. “The events here at the festival, they see all these groups from other parts of Latin America and other areas. They’re just wide-eyed,” he says.

Perry Chacon, 18, graduated this year, but still plays with the band. He plans to attend community college and then study ethnomusicology at UCLA. Conversations with professional performers at the festival “have inspired me even more to go into the field,” he said.

See videos of Mariachi Chula Vista and Mariachi Los Camperos.