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Once a Rock Star, Now a Matriarch of Mariachi
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/arts/music/21brow.html
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By Patricia Leigh Brown
Sep. 19, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO
EVEN now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, wearing Mephisto slippers and a far-from-revealing hoodie, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario.
“I would flirt with him,” she recalls wryly, her come-hither eyes and heart-shaped lips still echoing the days when she was decreed “Rock’s Venus” by Rolling Stone. “One night I heard music and ran to the window. I peeked through the curtain, and there was Mario with two taxis full of mariachis serenading me with firecrackers.”
To Ms. Ronstadt, whose roots are deeply embedded in Mexican soil, it was the ultimate seduction. “These are big-voiced songs, filled with the exuberance of nature, the fertility of the earth, love and romance,” she says of mariachi music, the focus of much of her artistic passion since she abdicated the throne of rock Venus-dom in the early ’80s. “They’re about growing the land, and romance blooming in that context. The songs are more complex sexually, I think, than the romantic love we grew up on.”
A mistress of self-reinvention who likens her resolve to “a Mexican crossed with a Sherman tank,” Ms. Ronstadt’s post-“Heart Like a Wheel” career has included pop standards with Nelson Riddle, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” onstage for Joseph Papp (she was nominated for a Tony), twangy Appalachia (with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris), French Cajun (her recent “Adieu False Heart” with Ann Savoy) and of course, with “Canciones de Mi Padre,” mariachi which reconnected her to her Tucson childhood as the granddaughter of a German-Mexican mining engineer and rancher whose mariachi band serenaded the populace from a now-defunct bandstand in the city’s central plaza.
Today Ms. Ronstadt, whose zeal for eclecticism extends to her décor a cross between the Hubbell Trading Post in Arizona and Mario Buatta is transforming herself again, this time as the consulting artistic and educational director of the Mexican Heritage Plaza’s 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival in San Jose, Calif. Next Saturday she will perform there with artists like Lila Downs and Aida Cuevas as part of a tribute to three dead mariachi divas, including her own musical heroine, Lola Beltran.
The event, which runs through Sept. 28, is one of dozens of mariachi festivals and conferences that have flourished around the country since the San Antonio International Mariachi Conference was founded in 1979. Since then the festivals have become a Latino cultural phenomenon, drawing thousands of fans annually to places like Tucson; Albuquerque; Fresno, Calif.; Wenatchee, Wash.; and the Hollywood Bowl. Most notably they have become a mecca for young Mexican-American musicians dressed in “trajes de charro,” traditional spangled outfits with butterfly-shaped ties and sombreros, who come for hands-on workshops with celebrity masters like Nati Cano and Randy and Steve Carrillo of Mariachi Cobre. For young mariachis it is the equivalent of studying guitar with Keith Richards and vocals with Mick Jagger.
“There’s a totally different energy exchanged,” Ms. Ronstadt says of the mariachi scene, which draws entire extended families, as opposed to single-generation rock audiences. “There’s not some drunk yelling out ‘Heat Wave’ when you were singing ‘Heart Like a Wheel.’ ”
In conversation Ms. Ronstadt’s migraine-inducing intelligence can ricochet in a heartbeat from the long-chain amino acids found in nopal juice, used by traditional Mexican builders to fortify plaster, to the musical influence of Jiminy Cricket (“his falsetto was a killer”). She is no shrinking violet, having made international headlines in Las Vegas four years ago when she ran afoul of the Aladdin Resort & Casino management for calling the “Fahrenheit 9/11” director Michael Moore a “patriot.” (On Republicans her general stance is: You’re no good.)
Though its precise origins are sketchy, mariachi emerged in northwestern Mexican state of Jalisco in the late 19th century, sung by musicians who traveled from village to village for saints days and fiestas. During the Mexican revolution mariachi soldiers played corridas to Pancho Villa and other heroes; afterward the rousing melodies incorporating indigenous rhythms became a patriotic symbol of Mexican nationhood.
Despite its prominence, including the “singing charro” movies and radio broadcasts of the 1930s, the genre was viewed as slightly déclassé, its musicians as “human jukeboxes regurgitating whatever tune the customer requested,” in the words of Daniel Sheehy, acting director of the Smithsonian Latino Center and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
It was in America, unexpectedly perhaps, that the image began to change. Almost 30 years ago the San Antonio conference, spawned by the Chicano movement, helped legitimize the musicians as marquee performers and inspire inclusion of mariachi in national music education. Today some 500 public schools offer mariachi classes along with choir and orchestra.
“It was a cultural and educational breakthrough, putting a new frame around an old music and Mexican culture on the main stage of American society,” Mr. Sheehy said.
Ms. Ronstadt used her stardom to raise the profile of Mexican music. “Canciones de Mi Padre,” released in 1987 and her first album of traditional mariachi music, became the biggest selling non-English album in United States history at the time, with sales of more than two million copies. The next year it was adapted for a Broadway show, in which she appeared in full Mexican costume, complete with fake braids.
“She put us on center stage,” said Mr. Cano, 75, a national heritage fellow who recently performed with the mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán and the Mexico City Philharmonic in Los Angeles. “After Linda mariachis became popular in concert halls, not just at the cantinas and the piñata parties.”
Through the music of her father and grandfather, Ms. Ronstadt seemed finally to inhabit herself, like Peter Pan finding his shadow. On the radio the soulful melodies of traditional mariachi ensembles still lie under the radar, though individual artists accompanied by mariachi bands, like Vicente Fernández, regularly top the Latin charts. For many Mexican-Americans, mariachi remains the emotional soundtrack of daily life, performed at baptisms, weddings, birthday parties, funerals.
“It wasn’t being played commercially,” observed José Ronstadt, Linda’s cousin, the festival M.C. and a Telemundo news anchor in Los Angeles. (He calls himself as “the talking Ronstadt.”) “But it was still being played in the heart.”
The music emanates a sense of place, where young couples stroll arm in arm and dance under strings of lights in village plazas. “There’s a lot of homesickness in Mexican music, a profound yearning because of the need to migrate, which is why I relate to it so much,” Ms. Ronstadt said, sitting on her chintz sofa sipping tea, her drug of choice. “I left home when I was 17, and it was quite a wrench. I was homesick my whole life.”
To hear her talk about her girlhood memories the smell of wool on the Navajo blanket she would lie on as she begged her parents to sing, her father on the guitar and her mother on the banjo is almost to forget about Ms. Ronstadt’s other life. That’s the one with the platinums and Grammys, the much-publicized romances with George Lucas and Jerry Brown, the Annie Leibowitz photo of her flung across her bed in a harlot-red camisole that she now somewhat disdainfully calls the “sprawling picture.”
For Ms. Ronstadt being a rock star was something of an out-of-body experience, despite being one of her generation’s sexiest brunettes. She compares the Troubadour in West Hollywood, Calif., during the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s to the Weimar Republic in Germany, “when no one had a dowry, thus rendering virginity unimportant.” She continues: “Were we supposed to be earth mothers hoeing the garden and having babies, or be tough and knock back Southern Comforts like Janis Joplin? It was a hard thing to figure out.”
Unlike Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell and Ms. Harris, contemporaries she reveres, Ms. Ronstadt was marketed as “this sexualized being, somebody else’s version of me walking around with my name,” she said. “It became a strange distortion. Eventually I had to put out the complete version of who I was.”
She moved back to Tucson, literally and musically, adopting two children Mary Clementine, now 17, and Carlos, now 14 when she was in her early 40s. She has never married. “I’m very bad at compromise, and there’s a lot of compromise in marriage,” she says. “Even swans aren’t as monogamous as they say.”
She is not a having-it-all mom, deciding early to limit her touring so that Mary, who is into fashion design, and Carlos, who likes Rob Zombie and Motorhead, would not become “tour sausages.” In Tucson, where she grew up in a large musical family the von Trapps with cactuses she had hoped to give her children a life resembling her own, in which boys and girls rode ponies to the drugstore to buy a Coke. But that Tucson is long gone now. “People knew who my father was and who my grandfather was and whether they welshed on their deals,” she said. “That was very important to me. That’s very hard to establish now.”
So though she maintains a house in Tucson, she moved with the children back to her old neighborhood here in San Francisco, a place with sidewalks where she had lived during much of the ’80s. She keeps her recent Alma Award from the National Council of La Raza in the living room and her Grammys in the basement.
She has been running around San Jose with gusto, a mariachi ambassador and talent nurturer whose recent presence at a community garden in a low-income neighborhood brought to mind Princess Grace in Monaco. (Only this princess asked the gardeners, “Does Monsanto come and break your legs if you save seed?”)
She has embarked on a mission to green the festival with seminars on traditional straw-bale construction and organic tacos, calling the prevalence of diabetes in the Latino community she is borderline herself a “murder machine.”
In recent years the festival which drew 40,000 people last year and the nonprofit Mexican Heritage Corporation have engendered controversy among mariachis by expanding beyond the pure form to incorporate other Latin-music headliners. This year they include Ms. Downs, a Latin alternative artist; the norteño band Los Tigres del Norte; and Ersi Arvizu, a boxer-singer and product of the East Los Angeles sound. (Ms. Arvizu’s producer, Ry Cooder, will play backup.)
Marcela Davison Aviles, president and chief executive officer of the corporation, compared the mariachi festival to Mostly Mozart and said the genre “does not belong in a box, like some precious art object viewed from afar.”
It was Ms. Aviles, a Harvard and Stanford law graduate who grew up in Tucson, who brought in Ms. Ronstadt, hoping she would do for the festival what Plácido Domingo did for the Los Angeles Opera. (Both women were presented at the Tucson Cotillion, “but I went to Timothy Leary, and Marcela went to Harvard,” Ms. Ronstadt said.)
The singer herself, a voluminous reader, argues that mariachi has historically been “about roots and branches.” She is an unabashed fan of younger artists like Ms. Arvizu and Ms. Downs.
She continues to be involved in humanitarian groups like the Samaritan Patrol along the border in her beloved Sonoran Desert, where she cleans feet and applies bandages. “If there was a plane crash killing 100 people in the desert, there’d be an outcry,” she said. “But 100 people dying on foot? They don’t care.”
Even as she plans six shows this year and a new album with Ms. Savoy, the festival seems to be a funnel for her mile-a-minute mind as she spins ideas about green building workshops, sustainable agriculture demonstrations and a little eco-Mexico with organic green onions, fresh juices and guitarmakers from Paracho, in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
Touring the community garden in East San Jose the other day, chatting away about nitrogen in the soil amid rustling corn, Doña Linda was in her element.
“At this point in my life, I’m not as single-mindedly focused on music,” she said. “I’m really focused on how do you stop erosion.”
A correction was made on Sept. 28, 2008: An article and a picture caption last Sunday about Linda Ronstadt’s involvement in a mariachi festival in San Jose, Calif., misstated the name of the event. It is the 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival, not the 17th Annual International Mariachi and Latin Music Festival. The article also misspelled the surname of a festival performer. She is Ersi Arvizu, not Arvisu.
How we handle corrections
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/arts/music/21brow.html
Share full article
By Patricia Leigh Brown
Sep. 19, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO
EVEN now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, wearing Mephisto slippers and a far-from-revealing hoodie, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario.
“I would flirt with him,” she recalls wryly, her come-hither eyes and heart-shaped lips still echoing the days when she was decreed “Rock’s Venus” by Rolling Stone. “One night I heard music and ran to the window. I peeked through the curtain, and there was Mario with two taxis full of mariachis serenading me with firecrackers.”
To Ms. Ronstadt, whose roots are deeply embedded in Mexican soil, it was the ultimate seduction. “These are big-voiced songs, filled with the exuberance of nature, the fertility of the earth, love and romance,” she says of mariachi music, the focus of much of her artistic passion since she abdicated the throne of rock Venus-dom in the early ’80s. “They’re about growing the land, and romance blooming in that context. The songs are more complex sexually, I think, than the romantic love we grew up on.”
A mistress of self-reinvention who likens her resolve to “a Mexican crossed with a Sherman tank,” Ms. Ronstadt’s post-“Heart Like a Wheel” career has included pop standards with Nelson Riddle, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” onstage for Joseph Papp (she was nominated for a Tony), twangy Appalachia (with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris), French Cajun (her recent “Adieu False Heart” with Ann Savoy) and of course, with “Canciones de Mi Padre,” mariachi which reconnected her to her Tucson childhood as the granddaughter of a German-Mexican mining engineer and rancher whose mariachi band serenaded the populace from a now-defunct bandstand in the city’s central plaza.
Today Ms. Ronstadt, whose zeal for eclecticism extends to her décor a cross between the Hubbell Trading Post in Arizona and Mario Buatta is transforming herself again, this time as the consulting artistic and educational director of the Mexican Heritage Plaza’s 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival in San Jose, Calif. Next Saturday she will perform there with artists like Lila Downs and Aida Cuevas as part of a tribute to three dead mariachi divas, including her own musical heroine, Lola Beltran.
Image
Linda Ronstadt has embraced the 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival.
Credit...Josie Lepe/San Jose Mercury News
Linda Ronstadt has embraced the 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival.
Credit...Josie Lepe/San Jose Mercury News
The event, which runs through Sept. 28, is one of dozens of mariachi festivals and conferences that have flourished around the country since the San Antonio International Mariachi Conference was founded in 1979. Since then the festivals have become a Latino cultural phenomenon, drawing thousands of fans annually to places like Tucson; Albuquerque; Fresno, Calif.; Wenatchee, Wash.; and the Hollywood Bowl. Most notably they have become a mecca for young Mexican-American musicians dressed in “trajes de charro,” traditional spangled outfits with butterfly-shaped ties and sombreros, who come for hands-on workshops with celebrity masters like Nati Cano and Randy and Steve Carrillo of Mariachi Cobre. For young mariachis it is the equivalent of studying guitar with Keith Richards and vocals with Mick Jagger.
“There’s a totally different energy exchanged,” Ms. Ronstadt says of the mariachi scene, which draws entire extended families, as opposed to single-generation rock audiences. “There’s not some drunk yelling out ‘Heat Wave’ when you were singing ‘Heart Like a Wheel.’ ”
In conversation Ms. Ronstadt’s migraine-inducing intelligence can ricochet in a heartbeat from the long-chain amino acids found in nopal juice, used by traditional Mexican builders to fortify plaster, to the musical influence of Jiminy Cricket (“his falsetto was a killer”). She is no shrinking violet, having made international headlines in Las Vegas four years ago when she ran afoul of the Aladdin Resort & Casino management for calling the “Fahrenheit 9/11” director Michael Moore a “patriot.” (On Republicans her general stance is: You’re no good.)
Though its precise origins are sketchy, mariachi emerged in northwestern Mexican state of Jalisco in the late 19th century, sung by musicians who traveled from village to village for saints days and fiestas. During the Mexican revolution mariachi soldiers played corridas to Pancho Villa and other heroes; afterward the rousing melodies incorporating indigenous rhythms became a patriotic symbol of Mexican nationhood.
Despite its prominence, including the “singing charro” movies and radio broadcasts of the 1930s, the genre was viewed as slightly déclassé, its musicians as “human jukeboxes regurgitating whatever tune the customer requested,” in the words of Daniel Sheehy, acting director of the Smithsonian Latino Center and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Image
Linda Ronstadt, in her San Francisco home, is serving as the consulting artistic and educational director of the Mariachi and Latin Music Festival.
Credit...Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Linda Ronstadt, in her San Francisco home, is serving as the consulting artistic and educational director of the Mariachi and Latin Music Festival.
Credit...Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
It was in America, unexpectedly perhaps, that the image began to change. Almost 30 years ago the San Antonio conference, spawned by the Chicano movement, helped legitimize the musicians as marquee performers and inspire inclusion of mariachi in national music education. Today some 500 public schools offer mariachi classes along with choir and orchestra.
“It was a cultural and educational breakthrough, putting a new frame around an old music and Mexican culture on the main stage of American society,” Mr. Sheehy said.
Ms. Ronstadt used her stardom to raise the profile of Mexican music. “Canciones de Mi Padre,” released in 1987 and her first album of traditional mariachi music, became the biggest selling non-English album in United States history at the time, with sales of more than two million copies. The next year it was adapted for a Broadway show, in which she appeared in full Mexican costume, complete with fake braids.
“She put us on center stage,” said Mr. Cano, 75, a national heritage fellow who recently performed with the mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán and the Mexico City Philharmonic in Los Angeles. “After Linda mariachis became popular in concert halls, not just at the cantinas and the piñata parties.”
Through the music of her father and grandfather, Ms. Ronstadt seemed finally to inhabit herself, like Peter Pan finding his shadow. On the radio the soulful melodies of traditional mariachi ensembles still lie under the radar, though individual artists accompanied by mariachi bands, like Vicente Fernández, regularly top the Latin charts. For many Mexican-Americans, mariachi remains the emotional soundtrack of daily life, performed at baptisms, weddings, birthday parties, funerals.
Image
Performers at the mariachi festival this month have included Los Tigres del Norte, with fans.
Credit...Josie Lepe/San Jose Mercury News
Performers at the mariachi festival this month have included Los Tigres del Norte, with fans.
Credit...Josie Lepe/San Jose Mercury News
“It wasn’t being played commercially,” observed José Ronstadt, Linda’s cousin, the festival M.C. and a Telemundo news anchor in Los Angeles. (He calls himself as “the talking Ronstadt.”) “But it was still being played in the heart.”
The music emanates a sense of place, where young couples stroll arm in arm and dance under strings of lights in village plazas. “There’s a lot of homesickness in Mexican music, a profound yearning because of the need to migrate, which is why I relate to it so much,” Ms. Ronstadt said, sitting on her chintz sofa sipping tea, her drug of choice. “I left home when I was 17, and it was quite a wrench. I was homesick my whole life.”
To hear her talk about her girlhood memories the smell of wool on the Navajo blanket she would lie on as she begged her parents to sing, her father on the guitar and her mother on the banjo is almost to forget about Ms. Ronstadt’s other life. That’s the one with the platinums and Grammys, the much-publicized romances with George Lucas and Jerry Brown, the Annie Leibowitz photo of her flung across her bed in a harlot-red camisole that she now somewhat disdainfully calls the “sprawling picture.”
For Ms. Ronstadt being a rock star was something of an out-of-body experience, despite being one of her generation’s sexiest brunettes. She compares the Troubadour in West Hollywood, Calif., during the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s to the Weimar Republic in Germany, “when no one had a dowry, thus rendering virginity unimportant.” She continues: “Were we supposed to be earth mothers hoeing the garden and having babies, or be tough and knock back Southern Comforts like Janis Joplin? It was a hard thing to figure out.”
Unlike Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell and Ms. Harris, contemporaries she reveres, Ms. Ronstadt was marketed as “this sexualized being, somebody else’s version of me walking around with my name,” she said. “It became a strange distortion. Eventually I had to put out the complete version of who I was.”
Image
In 1988 Ronstadt appeared on Broadway in “Canciones de Mi Padre,” based on her album of that name.
Credit...George Rose/Getty Images
In 1988 Ronstadt appeared on Broadway in “Canciones de Mi Padre,” based on her album of that name.
Credit...George Rose/Getty Images
She moved back to Tucson, literally and musically, adopting two children Mary Clementine, now 17, and Carlos, now 14 when she was in her early 40s. She has never married. “I’m very bad at compromise, and there’s a lot of compromise in marriage,” she says. “Even swans aren’t as monogamous as they say.”
She is not a having-it-all mom, deciding early to limit her touring so that Mary, who is into fashion design, and Carlos, who likes Rob Zombie and Motorhead, would not become “tour sausages.” In Tucson, where she grew up in a large musical family the von Trapps with cactuses she had hoped to give her children a life resembling her own, in which boys and girls rode ponies to the drugstore to buy a Coke. But that Tucson is long gone now. “People knew who my father was and who my grandfather was and whether they welshed on their deals,” she said. “That was very important to me. That’s very hard to establish now.”
So though she maintains a house in Tucson, she moved with the children back to her old neighborhood here in San Francisco, a place with sidewalks where she had lived during much of the ’80s. She keeps her recent Alma Award from the National Council of La Raza in the living room and her Grammys in the basement.
She has been running around San Jose with gusto, a mariachi ambassador and talent nurturer whose recent presence at a community garden in a low-income neighborhood brought to mind Princess Grace in Monaco. (Only this princess asked the gardeners, “Does Monsanto come and break your legs if you save seed?”)
She has embarked on a mission to green the festival with seminars on traditional straw-bale construction and organic tacos, calling the prevalence of diabetes in the Latino community she is borderline herself a “murder machine.”
Image
Pepe Aguilar
Credit...Josie Lepe/San Jose Mercury News
Pepe Aguilar
Credit...Josie Lepe/San Jose Mercury News
In recent years the festival which drew 40,000 people last year and the nonprofit Mexican Heritage Corporation have engendered controversy among mariachis by expanding beyond the pure form to incorporate other Latin-music headliners. This year they include Ms. Downs, a Latin alternative artist; the norteño band Los Tigres del Norte; and Ersi Arvizu, a boxer-singer and product of the East Los Angeles sound. (Ms. Arvizu’s producer, Ry Cooder, will play backup.)
Marcela Davison Aviles, president and chief executive officer of the corporation, compared the mariachi festival to Mostly Mozart and said the genre “does not belong in a box, like some precious art object viewed from afar.”
It was Ms. Aviles, a Harvard and Stanford law graduate who grew up in Tucson, who brought in Ms. Ronstadt, hoping she would do for the festival what Plácido Domingo did for the Los Angeles Opera. (Both women were presented at the Tucson Cotillion, “but I went to Timothy Leary, and Marcela went to Harvard,” Ms. Ronstadt said.)
The singer herself, a voluminous reader, argues that mariachi has historically been “about roots and branches.” She is an unabashed fan of younger artists like Ms. Arvizu and Ms. Downs.
She continues to be involved in humanitarian groups like the Samaritan Patrol along the border in her beloved Sonoran Desert, where she cleans feet and applies bandages. “If there was a plane crash killing 100 people in the desert, there’d be an outcry,” she said. “But 100 people dying on foot? They don’t care.”
Even as she plans six shows this year and a new album with Ms. Savoy, the festival seems to be a funnel for her mile-a-minute mind as she spins ideas about green building workshops, sustainable agriculture demonstrations and a little eco-Mexico with organic green onions, fresh juices and guitarmakers from Paracho, in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
Touring the community garden in East San Jose the other day, chatting away about nitrogen in the soil amid rustling corn, Doña Linda was in her element.
“At this point in my life, I’m not as single-mindedly focused on music,” she said. “I’m really focused on how do you stop erosion.”
A correction was made on Sept. 28, 2008: An article and a picture caption last Sunday about Linda Ronstadt’s involvement in a mariachi festival in San Jose, Calif., misstated the name of the event. It is the 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival, not the 17th Annual International Mariachi and Latin Music Festival. The article also misspelled the surname of a festival performer. She is Ersi Arvizu, not Arvisu.
How we handle corrections