Jose Caballero had hoped to take an automotive class his sophomore year.
The McKay High School student was disappointed when he got his schedule for the fall and found he’d been assigned to Música de Mexico instead.
Caballero had never played an instrument and had no particular connection to mariachi, he said. But he gave it a try, picking up a guitar and learning to play under the direction of teacher Cindy Flores. He performed his first concert in December as part of a McKay mariachi ensemble at Salem Center.
“I was sweating so much,” he said of his nerves before the show.
But he repeated one phrase when asked about the show and the class.
“I’m doing pretty good,” he said.
It’s a typical story for Flores’ 100 McKay students, many of whom had no prior experience before joining the first-year teacher’s program.
“Everybody that I started off with is beginners,” she said.
Despite that, the first-year teacher has ambitious plans for her students. She’s putting on a mariachi festival at McKay on Saturday, Feb. 7, running all day from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
“We have literally every single (school) mariachi in the state of Oregon coming to this festival,” Flores said. That means an elementary school program from Corvallis, middle and high school ensembles, and Portland State University’s mariachi.
Students will perform and get feedback from expert musicians visiting from Las Vegas.
Flores is the first music teacher in the Salem-Keizer School District dedicated full-time to mariachi and other Mexican music traditions. Her work is split across three schools in northeast Salem, with mornings at McKay and afternoons at Waldo and Stephens middle schools. She teaches about 40 middle school students.
Her role is part of an effort in recent years to expand mariachi offerings across the district, according to Stephen Lytle, Salem-Keizer’s coordinator for music and drama. It’s prompted in part by the demographics of the district, where Latino students now make up about half of the student body, and are a significant majority at many schools.
Several other schools offer mariachi as a class or club, including Houck and Claggett Creek middle schools. But those courses are taught by choir, orchestra or band teachers who also juggle other ensembles.
Lytle compared the growth of mariachi to jazz band, which was uncommon in schools 60 years ago. Now, he said, it’s a well-established field that’s routinely part of school music curricula alongside concert band, choir and orchestra.
Flores didn’t expect to be leading a Mexican music program. She started playing violin as a fourth grader at Hallman Elementary School and continued in school orchestra programs until she graduated from McKay in 2018. At Portland State University, she studied to become a music teacher and expected she’d teach orchestra.
But she also studied mariachi.
She later worked with Youth Music Project, a West Linn nonprofit, to put on a mariachi summer camp, training students with no experience over a week to become a functioning band.
When the McKay job opened up, she was interested in coming back to her alma mater to build a new program.
Flores said she was used to the orchestra world, which typically attracts high-achieving students who are motivated to show up to school and get good grades. Her classes are more mixed and include some students who struggle with motivation and absenteeism. Ahead of the December performance, she sat down with some.
“I told them that, you know, ‘I want you to perform in the December concert, but I need to know, are you going to show up to school?’ And it was just after that conversation that consistently I have those students showing up to my class,” she said.
Her beginning students typically play guitar, while trumpet and violin players in her class often have musical experience through band or orchestra. Some of her students study Mexican popular music, which is more advanced, but a majority are working on mariachi.
Flores said McKay’s program had been in limbo before she started teaching. The school offered mariachi classes, but there was no performance schedule or program growth, where students move from beginning to more advanced ensembles.
She’s working to build that.
“This isn’t just … you’re going to do this class for one year and then call it quits. No, you’re going to do this until you graduate. And each year you’re going to have multiple performances,” she said. “We’re going to show up for our community.”
Contact Managing Editor Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers education, economic development and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade and is a past president of Oregon’s Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Outside of work, you can often find her gardening or with her nose buried in a book.
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