THE CHANGO PARENT
Alexander Martinez said he's excited about the anniversary reunion and concert. His son Robert was one of the early members, and Martinez and his wife were active parents. "It was nice to get the kids involved and keep them from doing bad things. Keep them out of trouble," he said, laughing.
Martinez said he remembers that all of the kids loved music and practiced constantly. "He loved it and I wanted him to keep connected with our Mexican culture."
Martinez's daughter, Dora, is only two years younger than her Chango brother, but by association she got to experience what her brother did, traveling with the group everywhere they went. "That was really great. I got to see my brother out of his element and see him as an actual performer and watch the audience be so appreciative of their talent."
"When we were in Wyoming they played for the prison inmates in the state penitentiary. We sat in the back with other families and all the inmates were in front," she recalled.
At one point they stopped and decided to play some music by Little Joe Y La Familia, with member Bobby Gastelum pulling out his saxophone. The prisoners went wild. Dora noted that most of them were Latino, which made this particular show, out of all of them, important and heart-felt.
In the early 1970s, the Changos broke from the Catholic Church and the group became solely parent-led. Joe Mendoza was the group's long-time director, but when he became ill in 2000, Betty Villegas took over and even stayed on for another decade after her daughter Olga graduated from high school.
Villegas went to high school with that early generation of Changos, but her own early experiences with mariachi came from her mother, who listened to rancheros and mariachi records in the home. "Every month when she'd get her monthly check she'd pay bills, buy groceries and go downtown to buy an album."
That seemed to end when Villegas was 16 and her mother passed away. When Olga was in third grade, Villegas worked at a bank and Mendoza came in to make a deposit. She got up the nerve to ask if her daughter could attend a practice. She watched the group and told her mother she wanted to come back. For many years she was one of the youngest Changos.
"I really believed in the program and believed in the organization and truly believe it was a way to keep the culture alive," she said.
"I reflect back and think about why this was important to us, and perhaps among many things it was a way to keep my mom alive," Villegas said, tears welling up in her eyes. Olga is named after her grandmother.
"She has my mom's ranchera soul."
TEAM WORK, INDEPENDENCE AND EDUCATION
Sitting in the music room at Pueblo High School, Johnny Contreras, director of the school's mariachi program Mariachi Aztlán de Pueblo High School, reflected on growing up in Tucson and playing music at home. The Changuitos wasn't his first group. He learned guitar from his father and joined Mariachi Nuevo de Tucson. That group's director's health began to decline, and Contreras decided to join the Changos.
Contreras said at that point he could have started a new group with his friends and start working around town, but his father explained to him that he needed to be part of a structured group and the scholarship was important, too. Contreras used his scholarship funds to go to Pima Community College for almost three years, and eventually he left Tucson to become a professional mariachi musician.
It was when he was living in Chicago that he got a call to come home to lead the program at Pueblo. His time with the Changos, he said, made it easy to step in and teach mariachi. It's second nature.
"Maybe I didn't know the ins and outs but I knew what to do," he said.
"Stepping into a classroom with kids who wanted to learn mariachi, this was stuff I had done since I was a kid, "Yeah I can do this,' I told myself."
Maybe what finally keeps them there besides that love of music is that cultural connection. "I've had students walk in here feeling like they couldn't get into anything else and now they have to take this class. They learn to play 'Las Mananitas,' and immediately I see the change. I see it almost every year," he said.
"A kid will come up, 'You know that song? I played it for my grandmother and she cried.' All of a sudden there's that spark. Yes they may be close to their grandparents, but then that connection."
Sure, food is a cultural connection, but then now all of a sudden they are connecting on another level with music, Contreras said. "I understand because it's what I did when I was a kid. I played a song for my Nana and she cried."
Randy Carillo, founder of Mariachi Cobre, became a Chango in 1967 when he was 13. He's 60 today and has been playing mariachi most of his life. He owes it to the Changuitos, he said, but really it was his mom and dad he credits most. Oh, and yeah, the Beatles.
"The British invasion was going on at the time and everybody wanted to play in a rock 'n' roll band. My friend Ted Ramirez, he used to be with the Santa Cruz River Band; we were just kids and we wanted to play the guitar," he said.
"But my parents were the ones who were very instrumental to introducing me to Mexican-American music," and eventually his mother asked if he wanted to audition for the Changuitos. He graduated from school in 1971 and "that's when I founded Mariachi Cobre."
The folklore? The history? The birth of the mariachi movement in Tucson? Is it true? Carillo, from his home in Florida, said yes. Because of the Disney connection when the group played in Disneyland every Cinco de Mayo, there was a relationship between the group's members and Disney. In 1971, Cobre played in Disney World and were asked to return permanently a few years later.
The connection to the start of the Tucson mariachi conference—Carillo said Cobre formed from Changuitos and when his brother Steve chaperoned the Changos at the San Antonio conference, and the Cobre's were there, too. "The Changuitos won that year and when my brother got back to Tucson he said he wanted to do that in Tucson," he said.
So Cobre helped by starting discussions with members of Mariachi Vargas, and the planning began. And there's been more.
"I believe that wherever mariachi has caught fire, the Changos do play a very large part. I know I keep bringing up my parents, but all the parents have sacrificed and supported their kids the past 50 years," Carillo said.
"To me that's amazing. If not for those parents, it wouldn't have gone on this long and it wouldn't have been the force that it was to so many children."
