HOUSTON (AP) - It’s the final Mass on Palm Sunday at St. Joseph Catholic Church, and although the rows of hard oak pews already are packed, an insistent throng pushes through the door. Each worshipper receives a palm frond, then genuflects to God before moving into the holy interior that smells faintly of candle wax.
The scene is comfortably familiar, an annual ritual at the 112-year-old church in Houston’s near-downtown Sixth Ward. But then, above the murmured conversations and babies’ cries comes the low voice of the acoustic guitarron, pulsing with authority, and a violin’s shrill response.
Heads turn to face the sound. Mariachi Norteno - for more than half a century a standby at Houston weddings, funerals and coming of age parties - is in the house. The time for the Mariachi Mass has arrived.
Led by 70-year-old Jesse Escareno, a Pasadena-area house framer, and his longtime friend Guadalupe Vasquez, 69, Mariachi Norteno has played this Mass, Sunday after Sunday, for 45 years.
Band members believe the long run at St. Joseph may constitute a record for continuous performance of the Mass in the United States.
“The music,” says Vasquez, a trumpeter who this Sunday has traded his horn for a violin by way of observing Lent, “has to come out of your heart. You put into it whatever you can.”
Once a heavily German parish, then largely Hispanic, St. Joseph is rapidly becoming home to young professionals. Many of the church’s Latino members now live outside the Sixth Ward, and are drawn to the church by its Spanish-language service.
On this day, the congregation lustily sings along with the musicians. But, says parish priest Francis Macatangay, not all worshippers appreciate the folk informality of the Mass.
“Music speaks to the heart,” he tells the Houston Chronicle (https://bit.ly/1eBuBOW), “and thus any discussion of music is always an emotional one.”
Some, he says, “respond to the mariachi music at Mass because of a memory the style evokes or simply because they like the music. Those in charge of providing music for the liturgy, of course, are responsible for much more than this - ensuring the theological, liturgical and catechetical formation of both the faithful and the musicians.”
An outgrowth of Vatican II reforms in the 1960s, Misa Panamericana, the Mariachi Mass, was authored by a Canadian priest and first performed in Mexico. Vatican II reforms also brought translation of Latin liturgy into vernacular languages and an acceptance and celebration of popular arts within the church, says Houston folklorist Pat Jasper, who has studied mariachi traditions.
The reforms resonated with a generation of culturally aware Mexican-American priests, and it was one of them - the Rev. Patrick Flores at St. Joseph - who is credited with bringing the Mass to the U.S. Flores, who later became the Roman Catholic Church’s first Mexican-American bishop, invited Escareno, Vasquez and other members of the group to study the music in Mexico.
“We listened to the music, then got an album,” Vasquez says. “We listened to them and listened to it. That’s how we learned it, little by little.”
Jasper, Houston Arts Alliance’s folklife and traditional arts director, says the Mariachi Mass found popular acceptance in Latino communities throughout the U.S. Escareno, who founded Mariachi Norteno in 1959, was reared in an intensely religious household headed by his grandmother, Jasper says, and in some ways was primed for religious performance.
At the church, Escareno explains his artistry on the guitarron, a six-string bass instrument resembling an oversized guitar that traces its history to 16th-century Spain. “I taught myself to play,” he says, then glances heavenward and adds, “Maybe he helped me.”
The roots of mariachi music, says ethnomusicologist Estavan Azcona, can be traced to central Mexico in the 18th century. Among early reports, he says, are those from Catholic churches in which clerics complain of musicians playing in the streets.
Azcona, music director at Multicultural Education and Counseling Through the Arts and himself a guitarron player, says modern mariachi developed in the 1920s as the iconic music of Mexico. It was about that time that the musicians - most of peasant background - adopted the flamboyant attire of the Mexican horseman.
On Palm Sunday, the musicians of Mariachi Norteno are decked out in black shirts and trousers, the latter adorned with silver-colored metal decorations. The band’s Lenten configuration consists of four violins, guitar, guitarron and vihuela, a six-stringed instrument resembling a lute.
Escareno is the oldest; 21-year-old Cristina Reyes, a violinist and vocalist, the youngest. Two of Vasquez’s sons, Maurice, a violinist, and Robert, on vihuela, also are members.
Outside of the weekly noon Masses at St. Joseph, Maurice Vasquez says, the band most frequently plays at weddings, funerals and quinceaneras, the traditional party marking a Latina’s 15th birthdays.
“They’ve put in their time,” he says of the group. “They played once for Desi Arnaz. But they’ve done everything: restaurants, beer joints, holes in the walls. They played Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights. They worked thousands and thousands of hours. This was their extra money. They worked hard. They just loved the music.”
The Masses, he says, are the band’s way of “giving back” to church members and God.
No longer, though, do they play the Misa Panamericana as written. On Palm Sunday, only about a third of the songs are original, the rest, although religious-themed, were added to freshen the repertoire.
Macatangay notes the use of Mariachi Mass “has declined in our churches in the last couple of decades and it is interesting to note that there are not mariachis playing Mass in Mexico.”
At St. Joseph, he says, reaction of the faithful has been mixed.
“There are those who like it,” he says, “and there are those who do not like it.”
Some, he says, have told him the Mass does not encourage active participation in the liturgy.
“People simply sit and stand and listen to the mariachis without necessarily responding and singing, since the congregation is not really being led in song,” he says. “They become mere spectators rather than active participants in the liturgy.”
For Palm Sunday’s worshippers, the Mass seems anything but merely a vicariously shared performance.
As it ends, church members flock to the musicians to shake hands and exchange greetings. Many seem longtime friends. Then, as the mariachis pack their instruments, Olga Castillo, whose family counts four generations as church members, approaches Escareno with her 2-year-old daughter, Alexandria.
“I just wanted her to meet him,” she says, as the old musician cradles the child for a photo.
Then Escareno smiles.
“People come to see me,” he says. “I’ve known some of them before they were born. I’m truly blessed.”
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Information from: Houston Chronicle, https://www.houstonchronicle.com
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