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Mariachi music has been a staple of Mexican for many years. The music is filled with dancing, excitement, and splendor. Typically everyone loves mariachi music, but recently it has been on a decline.
Prompt 1. Where did mariachi music come from and when is it most commonly used?
Prompt 2. What are some factors attributing to the decline of mariachis popularity?
Prompt 3. What plaza is where mariachi is primarily played and what factors are causing there to be less music played there?

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By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY

MEXICO CITY — For more than six decades, Garibaldi Plaza has held a special place in Mexican culture as a kind of day-labor center for mariachi musicians.

Hundreds roam the Mexico City square in their elaborate charro suits, waiting for customers to hire them for a wedding, a baptism or just a serenade. They stand in the bus lane on Lazaro Cardenas Avenue and beckon to passing cars, ready to burst into a brassy rendition of Cielito Lindo or someone's favorite love song at a moment's notice.

"This is Mexico's heart and soul, right here," says trumpeter Erik Hernández, looking over the crowd of fellow musicians.

But Garibaldi Plaza has become a dangerous place. Muggers and drug peddlers lurk in its rundown side streets. Drunks and glue addicts use its dark corners as bathrooms. Tourist guides warn visitors not to go there alone.

To keep the show going, the Mexican government has launched a $25 million project to clean up Garibaldi. It's flooding the square with police, installing security cameras, painting facades and building a museum and music academy.

The overhaul of Garibaldi Plaza is part of a bigger problem in Mexico. The country is trying to keep tourists coming despite a terrifying wave of crime that has battered tourism and deflated Mexicans' morale, says Miguel Ortiz Cázares of the Mexican Mariachis Union, which oversees musicians in the plaza.

"This is like a little version of Mexico," Ortiz says. "When Mexico suffers, Garibaldi suffers."
A musical staple
In Mexico, mariachi music is a staple of family gatherings.

"When someone is born, you get a mariachi. When someone dies, you get a mariachi. You get them for graduations, confirmations, weddings, reunions, birthday parties, wakes, you name it," Hernández says.

He looked at his watch. It was 4 p.m. "Usually by this time, someone has hired us to go to a cemetery already," he said.

Garibaldi Plaza, wedged in a working-class neighborhood, began attracting itinerant mariachi musicians in the '40s because of the nearby Tenampa nightclub.

Many of the musicians were transplants from Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city and the birthplace of the mariachi tradition.

These days, many mariachi bands have booking offices, websites and toll-free phone numbers. Nevertheless, clients prefer to come to the plaza, where they can hear a few songs first and haggle over the price, Hernández says.

About 2,500 mariachis hold union cards to work in the plaza, but as many as 4,000 may circulate through on a busy weekend, Ortiz said. One song by a 10-piece band costs $6 to $9, or a customer can hire a band for $280 an hour.

Although the mariachi tradition continues, the plaza has been on the decline for years.

Several nightclubs, including the landmark Santa Cecilia restaurant, have closed down. The smell of sewage often wafts over visitors because of drainage problems. Glue-sniffing addicts hang around the edges of the square and beg for money.

"It's a difficult area at night," said Luis López Ponce, a police officer.

The Colonia Centro neighborhood, which includes Garibaldi Plaza, was the most dangerous part of Mexico City in 2009. There were 2,989 crimes reported from January through June. Two of Mexico's roughest neighborhoods, Tepito and Morelos, are nearby.

Much of the crime is related to battles among drug syndicates, according to the government.
A nationwide cleanup effort
In the past two years, Mexico has embarked on a nationwide sprucing-up effort as part of the 200th anniversary of its 1810 War of Independence from Spain. The government has spent billions of dollars on infrastructure projects. It has more than doubled the size of its federal police, from 12,900 officers to 32,300, in an effort to bring crime under control.

In Garibaldi, the city installed security cameras and lights, put in benches and concrete planters, replaced the drainage system and planted a garden of blue agave, the spiky plants used to make tequila. A sleek glass building was erected as the future home to the Museum of Tequila and Mezcal.

On a recent afternoon, work crews spread stucco on buildings near the old Santa Cecilia nightclub. Four police cars and a squad of police armed with assault rifles patrolled the plaza.

"Before, there used to be three police for all the people in the plaza. Now there are like 20 during the day and 50 at night," said Alfredo Nambo, a guitar player.

"It feels safer," said Alejandro Martínez, an upholsterer. His son was turning 13, and the Martínez family had come to the plaza for a rousing round of Las Mañanitas, the traditional Mexican birthday song.

"Garibaldi Plaza is where you come to celebrate things," he said. "And right now, Mexicans need a place where we can feel good about ourselves."

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Mexico protects its mariachi plaza - USATODAY.com

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By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY MEXICO CITY - For more than six decades, Garibaldi Plaza has held a special place in Mexican culture as a kind of day-labor center for mariachi musicians. Hundreds roam the Mexico City square in their elaborate charro suits, waiting for customers to hire them for a wedding, a baptism or just a serenade.

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Franciscan priest Hector Ventura believes that God likes mariachi music, which might explain why the good father invited an all-female mariachi group to play at the noon Mass at the 300-year-old Basilica de Zapopan on the edge of Guadalajara.

"It is music that comes from the heart," Ventura said, nodding toward the balcony where the musicians stood. "It is music that makes us Mexican. It is a gift from God."

But whether it's as popular with the people is another story. Sunday's performance at the basilica was part of the annual Guadalajara International Mariachi Festival, a 17-year-old event that has shrunk in both size and scope in recent years.

Just hours after Ventura gave mariachi his blessing, the festival drew to a close in the huge plaza that spills out in front of the church. A year ago that concert featured 549 musicians; on Sunday, just three groups played. And though organizers estimated the closing event's crowd at 5,000, that estimate was clearly generous since the square was only half full.

The decline in mariachi's popularity here is significant given Guadalajara's importance to the genre, which was born in the nearby town of Cocula well over 100 years ago. It's as if audiences in Nashville had suddenly stopped listening to country music.

The mariachi was originally inspired in part by Spanish theatrical orchestras, which included violins, the harp and guitars. Over time, mariachi music incorporated trumpets and accordions. Strolling mariachis also adopted a distinctive style of dress, the traje de charro, a heavily ornamented Mexican cowboy suit consisting of a waist-length riding jacket, leather pants and cowboy boots. But mariachis didn't really earn their place in Mexican history and folklore until the mid-1930s, after Silvestre Vargas moved his mariachi group from Jalisco to Mexico City, where it was invited to play at the inauguration of populist President Lazaro Cardenas.

Urban audiences quickly took to the sad peasant songs of country life, unrequited love and relationships lost and mariachi music became as much an emblem of Mexico as the sombrero. The sombrero has since become an outdated cliché, however, and now mariachi is fighting for its place in a crowded Spanish-language musical landscape dominated by youth-oriented genres such as rock en español, banda and norteña.

That chasm may be growing. In a recent poll Mexican youth picked Canadian teenager Justin Bieber as their favorite singer. Not everyone sees this as a crisis, though. In fact, mariachis have been through this before.

"I don't think it will ever die. I just think there are stages," says Victor Valdez of the five-man Mezcla Mexicana, one of more than three dozen groups that took part in the festival, some coming from as far away as Slovakia to perform in parks and shopping centers, restaurants and concert halls in and around Guadalajara.

Valdez's group played Kamilos 333, a family-style Mexican restaurant so traditional it has framed pictures of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata on the walls. But outside of the festival, manager Fermin Camarena says he plays recorded pop music in his restaurant because that's what his customers want.

The growing generation gap was obvious on the final weekend of this year's festival. Although Friday night's gala at the stately Teatro Degollado drew a sellout crowd of more than 1,400, few in the crowd were younger than 40. The next night Latin Grammy winner Pedro Fernández joined the same three mariachi groups for a four-hour concert at the modern Auditorio Telmex, where they played before wide swaths of vacant seats at the same time a crowd of 20,000 turned out for an open-air rock en español show across town.

Celestino Fernández, a University of Arizona professor who has been involved with Tucson's mariachi conference since its founding in 1983, said the problem isn't so much a shrinking audience for mariachi as it is a splintering one. When the Tucson event was launched, it was the only mariachi festival of its kind but its success inspired imitators in more than a dozen other cities, from Las Vegas and Albuquerque to Los Angeles and Houston.

Experts point out that mariachi's following may be growing in ways that can't be measured by CD sales, radio playlists or festival attendance figures. Partly because of the festival movement, mariachi music now has fervent followings in places such as Japan, Belgium, France, Australia and throughout Latin America.

Jesús "Chuy" Guzman has played in many of those countries as musical director for Los Camperos de Nati Cano, a world-renowned mariachi ensemble based in Southern California.

" Conjuntos and banda, that's what's attracting the attention of the young people," says Guzman, whose group is a Guadalajara festival mainstay. "Right now is the time of commercialization. But what is mariachi? Art! And art never dies."
kevin.baxter@latimes.com

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Franciscan priest Hector Ventura believes that God likes mariachi music, which might explain why the good father invited an all-female mariachi group to play at the noon Mass at the 300-year-old Basilica de Zapopan on the edge of Guadalajara. "It is music that comes from the heart," Ventura said, nodding toward the balcony where the musicians stood.