We're celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with conversations featuring Hispanic and Latino changemakers, innovators and creators.
Today's episode is about music - specifically, mariachi. The style is rooted in Mexico's history, dating back to colonial times, and started to grow in the United States around the 1930s, when people began hearing it on radio stations and in films.
These days, it's showing up more often in Colorado schools' music programs, alongside the usual jazz, orchestra, or symphonic band options for students. That provides the opportunity for more culturally relevant programming to serve increasingly diverse student populations, says Ben San Martin Kellogg.
"Even though mariachi is an older type of music, I feel a lot of the musicians who play mariachi are able to connect to their heritage," Kellogg says. "I hear a lot that 'Oh, these are the songs my grandpa used to sing' or 'We used to hear this on the radio.' So I think culturally, it gives a connection for a lot of kids who are of Mexican heritage."
Kellogg isn't from Mexico himself – he's of European and Peruvian ancestry – and he didn't grow up listening to or playing mariachi. But he fell in love with the style when he was brought in to play trumpet in a mariachi ensemble while a student at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He's now a music educator at Edgewater Elementary, where he guides students in learning several styles of music, including mariachi.
In today's episode, he shares why it's so important to train more educators to teach different genres of music, and what we should pay attention to when we listen to mariachi.
You can hear Ben perform with his ensemble for a Hispanic Heritage event on October 14 at Luki Breweryin Arvada. And he was featured in this 2017 KUNC story about the MSU mariachi program he went through.
Colorado has an all-state youth mariachi ensemble, Mariachi Estelares de Colorado. And the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley has a new Bachelor of Arts in Latinx Music degree program that launched this year.
