There was a time when I squirreled away every available dollar
to buy plane tickets to faraway places, but ever since I got my old bike fixed
up I’ve been taking voyages of discovery in the neighborhoods surrounding my
little hill in Echo Park. On a good day, with the wind at my back, I can be
downtown in 10 minutes or on Hollywood Boulevard in 15. The bicycle strips away
different layers of Los Angeles, and it allows for the kind of chance encounters
usually reserved for foreign travel. Cars, for the most part, have their predetermined
trajectory, usually the shortest distance between here and there. But on the
bicycle there is a direct exposure to the air, the elements and the people,
and since the motor is muscle, the pace is human. The effort I invested in traveling
to foreign lands I can now approximate on my bicycle.

The other day, while cruising Echo Park Boulevard, I stopped
to listen to a mariachi band warming up near the lake. Channel 52 was there,
too, and from the setting it was clear that the band was going to play a brief
interlude in the background while the on-camera talent, with her careful hair
and studied exuberance, provided commentary for her viewing audience. Later,
farther down the road, near the corner of Sunset and Virgil, I heard the gushing
refrain of yet another mariachi band. This one, though, was different: The guitars,
violins and trumpets that make up this style of music were being played by young
women in full getup. This mariachi band was all women!

Mariachi Divas is an all-girl group of eight or nine or 11 musicians
— depending on the nature of the gig — who, according to group spokesperson
and trumpet player Cindy Shea, claim Mexican, Cuban, Honduran, Samoan and “pure-blooded
American” roots. This group was hot, but how does it stack up against a more
typical mariachi group, especially in a male-dominated arena that owes its lifeblood
to tradition? “Music must evolve or die,” Shea says. “We can do exactly what
they are doing, but we can do more.” Mariachi Divas is what Shea calls a “cheating
mariachi group”; it draws from different sources, “like the female version of
Ozomatli.” Mariachi Divas, she believes, “truly represents L.A. Mariachi music
belongs to the world.”

Mariachi music has its origins, like the modern state of Mexico
itself, in that weird marriage of indigenous root and colonial ambition. The
basic elements might have grown out of Jalisco’s rural traditions, but the instrumentation
— the guitars, violins and trumpets — came from Europe. The influence of African
slaves, as in other places in the Americas, added rhythm. The dress we’ve come
to identify with this music — tight pants with silver studs, the short jackets,
wide belts and sombreros — is a mix of a military uniform, swanky horseman’s
garb and the clothing of rich landowners.

Mariachi music became part of the urban cultural landscape during
the 1920s and ’30s, when essentially rural orchestras, with their vocalists
crooning ranchera tunes, were used at political rallies as a way to lure
the vote. Garibaldi Plaza in Mexico City became the place to hire a mariachi
band for weddings or simply to back up a suitor, like a mobile karaoke. Mariachi
music followed Mexican immigration in the 1950s and ’60s into Latinized areas
of the U.S. such as Los Angeles. Today this style of music is the quintessential
expression of Mexican culture, a source of both passion and pride on both sides
of the border.

Could mariachi music ever be my music? There was that little
bar in Ensenada where the mariachis played about three feet from the audience
and the full force of the trumpets almost knocked me off my barstool. But this
experience was different: The plaintive bluesy wail of the ranchera-style
vocals seemed to mix with the dust of tradition and the very weight of history
and rise up from the streets on the Eastside of Los Angeles. For today, at least,
the sweep of the violins and the punctuated passion of the trumpets lightened
my heart and carried me away down the boulevard.

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