Mariachi music has become deeply rooted in the United States, where it has taken on unique characteristics and even influenced its Mexican counterpart. For many decades, it has helped shape the cultural landscape of the southwestern part of the United States and beyond, where it remains a popular form of music, especially among the Hispanic community. Its popularity has grown noticeably since the late 1970s, thanks to mariachi programs in churches and schools, as well as mariachi concerts, festivals and conferences.

In his recent book La Música Va a Otra Parte (79-82), historian Álvaro Ochoa cites a description of an 1845 California fandango where an early mariachi performed “El Maracumbé” and “La Vaquilla,” among other sones. Exactly when the first mariachi-related ensembles appeared in what is now the United States is unclear, but we know that by the 1940s, a number of outstanding modern mariachi groups either immigrated to or were formed in the Los Angeles area, a region that has in many ways become to the United States what Mexico City is to Mexico as an urban mecca of mariachi music. In 1961, Nati Cano reorganized Los Camperos, which became the best-known U.S. mariachi and the country’s pioneer group in popularizing this music among non-Hispanics. In 1969, they opened La Fonda de Los Camperos restaurant in Los Angeles, the world’s first venue of its type designed to showcase a mariachi. Other U.S. groups followed suit, and eventually this concept was adopted in Mexico.

Mariachi Uclatlán, founded in 1961 at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Institute of Ethnomusicology, pioneered the academic mariachi tradition, and today educational institutions throughout the Southwest offer classes in mariachi music. Mariachi Cobre, the first prominent Mexican-American mariachi group, was founded in Tucson, Arizona in 1971, but it had its roots in Los Changuitos Feos, a church-sponsored youth group founded in that city in 1964 — two years before the mariachi Mass existed.

By the late 1960s, violinist Jesús Sánchez — the UCLA ethnomusicology department’s adjunct faculty native artist who mentored Mariachi Uclatlán — was teaching mariachi music in several Los Angeles-area public schools, and mariachi classes soon spread to other parts of southern California. The cradle of mariachi education in Texas is San Antonio, where by the middle 1960s music educators Isabel “Belle” San Miguel and Mary Esther Bernal were already teaching mariachi songs in their guitar- and piano-based school music classes. These classes became even more popular after Texas passed its Bilingual Education Act in 1968, a bill championed by Mary Esther’s husband, state Senator Joe Bernal. Trumpets and violins were added after that, and the San Antonio Independent School District soon began offering dedicated mariachi classes. In the 1970s, Mariachi Javelina, Texas’ first college-level mariachi group, was founded at Texas A&M University–Kingsville (formerly known as Texas A&I) by pioneering mariachi educators Héctor Guerra and Juan Ortiz.

During the 1970s, hundreds of South Texas children and adults learned to play mariachi music in churches and schools. This emerging contingent of mariachi musicians, along with others of similar interest from around the country, provided the fertile ground necessary for the world’s first international mariachi festival and the movement it would engender.

The first International Mariachi Conference was held in San Antonio, Texas in 1979. This groundbreaking event, organized by music educator Belle San Miguel (Ortiz) and mariachi musician Juan Ortiz, featured Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán and had a powerful impact on U.S. mariachi students, musicians and aficionados. Attendees of those earliest conferences included mariachi legends Silvestre Vargas and Rubén Fuentes, Mariachi Cobre leader Randy Carrillo, pioneer mariachi educator Mark Fogelquist, mariachi historian Jonathan Clark and entrepreneur Cynthia Muñoz, among others too numerous to mention. Within a few years, mariachi festivals and conferences proliferated in the United States, engendering what has often been termed as a “mariachi movement.” (Mexico celebrated its first international mariachi festival — the Encuentro Internacional del Mariachi —15 years later, in 1994, and other countries have since followed suit.) An outgrowth of this movement was Linda Ronstadt’s 1987 Canciones de mi Padre album and tour, which led to a noticeable increase in U.S. mariachi concerts, festivals and conferences — the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza being one of these.