LAST WEEK, an unprecedented liaison of creative minds took place in a house near the Sea Cliff neighborhood in San Francisco. The folks from CreaTV San Jose, a cable-access powerhouse, were on hand to film what turned out to be an inspiring, momentous occasion.
Activist and labor leader Dolores Huerta, co-founder and first vice president emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, drove in from Stockton to meet with Linda Ronstadt and talk about what will be going down for this year’s San José Mariachi and Mexican Heritage Festival. Huerta is now 80, but she exudes the same revolutionary attitude she did decades ago. Ronstadt, as most know by now, is the artistic director of the festival. At the meeting, Ronstadt and Huerta engaged in a conversation, parts of which will be streamed live from the festival’s website (http://sanjosemariachifestival.com) within a few weeks. The house was then opened up to members of the press.
Since 2010 marks both the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, the plans are only beginning to unfold. Ronstadt informed us that one of the themes this time around would be the Soldaderas, the female soldiers who fought in the Mexican Revolution. “I thought it was really important to see what this war was like from a woman’s point of view,” Ronstadt explained. “Because women and children are always the most horrifically cruel victims of war.”
On another front, the festival is about connecting youth with their roots. Ronstadt said that in Mexican and Latin-American cultures, families are much more of an extended unit. The norm is for everyone, grandparents and grandkids, to all coalesce. The festival helps to give kids a sense of family history through the music. “Kids today don’t know who they are,” she said. “[The festival] gives them a chance to learn about who they are. Their background is Mexican—it resonates, it says ‘Yes, you are; it’s something to be proud of,’ it connects them back to their grandparents. We don’t have that so much here now. Everybody’s living in their own little pod. There’s a teenage pod, a toddler pod, a grandparents pod. They’re not connected, and I think Mexican culture does that.”
As an example, Ronstadt said that when she originally toured her Canciones de Mi Padre album more than 20 years ago, she didn’t know who was going to show up. She had already done all the rock & roll gigs, for 40,000 people, summer after summer, year after year, but when she took the Mexican show out on the road, she had no idea what was going to happen. Were people going to scream for “It’s So Easy”?
“People brought their children. They brought their grandmas. The whole family showed up,” she recalled. “In all my rock & roll touring years, I’d never seen any little kids out there, or any grannies. Ever. I was thrilled. And the other cool thing [unlike rock audiences] is they know exactly where to yell in the music. They were my favorite audience I ever had.” To this day, that album is the biggest selling non-English record in American history. Continuing, she said that the festival is designed “to create that resonance, so people can have a sense of who they are. And who you are has to be reflected back at you from the greater community.”
Huerta added that mariachi music can have the same intricacies as classical music, as far as the rhythms and the way components interplay with each other. “The mariachi is an ambassador of goodwill,” she said. “Especially when you think of all the racism that has been directed against people from Mexico—they’re lazy and this and that—the mariachi is such an incredible statement of beauty. There’s no one that can listen to Mariachi music without being thrilled.”
