The rest of the rehearsal was a chorus of instructions:
“OK, listen, let’s perform it now. Perform it.”
“Punch it! Build it up!”
“Make sure that everybody stops at the same part of the bow!”
“More aggressive! That first note is too, too soft.”
“Make sure you guys start together, together, together!”
“From the top, ahora sí!”
Until just a few weeks before, Zárate was directing the mariachi program at a nearby middle school. Then the high school director stepped down, and with the end of summer approaching, the school district urged Zárate to take the job. Now he was responsible for the high school and overseeing two middle schools whose mariachis had bled students during the pandemic. There was no replacement for him yet at one school, and the other was led by a fairly new director. The administrative work alone seemed overwhelming. “I wasn’t mentally ready for this,” he said. But he accepted the post out of a sense of . Now he was supposed to rebuild the whole program, even as he trained the high school’s varsity group to compete at the first and most decisive contest of the year, the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza, in December.
Katherine Schulten
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