Word: mariachi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...slack-jawed and moronic; the bassist, his pasty skin framed by long dark lifeless hair, is a ringer for Mario Montez. Their new guitarist, the one discovered in a men's room, has powdered his face and lipsticked his already feminine mouth. The lead guitarist is dressed in black mariachi pants and spiky teased hair; there is a gold ring in his ear and a red cancerous star on his chest. Heavily made up with eye-shadow, lipstick and rouge, Keith Richard wraps two spindly arms around a sleek black guitar and forces the opening bars of "Jumping Jack Flash...
...Nixons, joined by David and Julie Eisenhower, tootled out to the helipad in one of the fringed-top presidential golf carts. As Nixons and Johnsons shook hands all around, Francisco Ruano, resplendent in rich brown deerskin bolero and blue-and-silver sombrero, led his Guadalajara Boys mariachi of eight Mexican-American musicians in a fair approximation of Happy Birthday. The band was Nixon's own idea; he discovered it at El Adobe, a favorite restaurant in nearby San Juan Capistrano, and pronounced their sound "beautiful." After The Yellow Rose of Texas, Nixon exclaimed: "Now let's get that...
More recently, Méndez Arceo embellished the cathedral with a different kind of innovation, this time borrowed from CIDOC-a "Pan-American" Mass, complete with traditional Latin American rhythms, bespangled mariachi, strumming guitars and wailing trumpets. The cathedral is packed every Sunday for the two "mariachi Masses," and many in the crowd are young men, an unusual sight in Latin American churches. After Mass, the bishop mingles with the crowd outside, chatting in one or another of five languages with foreign visitors, and pausing occasionally to give a parishioner a warm abrazo...
Much of the company's repertory is tied, perhaps too closely, to relatively recent aspects of Mexican culture, notably the 19th century mariachi music of the French-Spanish upper class. Some of the numbers look to those with long memories, a little like the big musical bit just before, say, Ramon Novarro and Dolores del Rio could have met by moonlight in some hypothetical Latin extravaganza. Far more striking are the pieces in which Choreographer Hernandez has reconstructed, mostly out of ancient manuscripts and drawings, something resembling the ritualistic processions and dances of Mexico's Indian prehistory...
After dinner, a trip to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, 40 minutes outside the city, to see the son et lumiére spectacle drops the spectator nearly 2,000 years back in time. A bit off the beaten track for tourists is the Plaza Garibaldi, where wandering mariachi bands play, adding the vibrancy of guitars to the blare of trumpets...