Alex Alegria - Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Mariachi Festival

 Vancouver is two custom agents and 4,452 kms away from Jalisco’s capitol of Guadalajara. We are a city with stores whose only major connection to Mexico is freezers full of tortillas. Yet we have something more to offer Vancouverites than tacos and burritos.

The 4th Annual Vancouver Mariachi Festival was held in May bringing bands from Mexico, USA and Canada together over the course of 8 days, filling stages throughout Kelowna, Victoria, Nanaimo, Courtenay and Vancouver with their robust and alluring music and traditional Mexican dancers.

Alex Alegria, founder of Vancouver Mariachi Festival and a member of the Vancouver-based mariachi band, Los Dorados, is the head honcho behind this venture.

“The idea started after we did a tour in Mexico,” says Alegria, “then I started to organize the event…[the festival] was really well accepted and after the first one, we just kept growing.”

Alegria says mariachi is becoming more popular, perhaps due to the amount of people that go to Mexico or maybe it’s the music itself, which is attractive enough on its own.

“There is something very unique and mystical about mariachi music,” says Alegria. “It makes this ensemble a great mixture of culture, elegance, history, romance and much more.”

Like many genres of music, the roots of mariachi music are debatable, but it’s origin from Jalisco, Mexico, is vastly accepted.

By the early 1900s, a mariachi group was comprised of about four members whose instrumentation varied to include violins, a vihuela (a guitarlike instrument) and a guitarrón (a bass version of the vihuela). They serve as the background to the velvety belting voices booming from a singer’s soul.

As with the sound, the number of musicians and range of instruments grew over the years with a brass section (primarily the trumpet, by the 1930’s) becoming the quintessential ingredient to what we now know as mariachi music.

“Mariachis celebrate life, death, birth…pretty much everything,” says Mexican born Ana Velazquez, who lives in Vancouver’s West End.

“There is not a Mexican who doesn’t get excited to hear mariachis and every Mexican knows at least one mariachi song by heart,” declares Velazquez.

“Whether you are rich or poor, young or old, mariachi music is embedded in ourselves as Mexicans.”

Vancouver might seem like a strange place to hear mariachi music, compared to Los Angeles, no one bats an eyelash when a mariachi band walks down the street in search of a venue for the evening. There is even a plaza in East Los Angeles where mariachi bands play all day in what is like a daily and never ending audition, allowing bands to practice and get gigs. Competition is high and so is the Mexican population.

As commonplace as Mexicans and their music are in Los Angeles, the same is becoming true for film and television. Even with mariachi bands being a highlight or even part of a joke in films or TV episodes, this kind of thing leads to exposure around the world. Alegria takes this as a positive step towards expanding the Vancouver Mariachi Festival.

“My dream is [that] one day we can bring this amazing festival across Canada and show all our fellow Canadians the beauty, culture and history of Mexico with its music.”

Visit www.losdorados.ca/calendar for showtimes around Vancouver.