Eugene Rodriguez

Forum sponsored by Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) and California Arts Council, Sacramento, June 7, 2001

Eugene Rodriguez

Eugene Rodriguez is the Founder and Executive Director of Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center. Eugene formed the youth group Los Cenzontles in 1989 under a California Arts Council Artist in Residency, later incorporating the Arts Center in 1994. He received a Master's degree in Classical Guitar performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1987. In 1995 he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Musical Album for Children for his production of "Papa's Dream," a bilingual recording with Los Lobos and Lalo Guerrero. In addition, he has produced nine CDs for Los Cenzontles and one for the Mexican folk group Mono Blanco. Eugene has served on various panels including the Ford Foundation's Arts International and California Arts Council Touring Panel and has lectured at several community colleges, and at campuses of the University of California and the California State University. He also spoke at the conference, 'Mexicanidad', at the Universidad de Anahuac del Sur, Mexico City, Mexico.

Presentation to the Gathering

Eugene: The origins of the group, Los Cenzontles--which by the way means "the Mockingbird" in Nahuatl--began as an artist-in-residency grant through the California Arts Council. I think we're really an Arts Council baby. The Arts Council has been there supporting us all the way around. And this year, I don't know what I would have done without all their support.

For me, it was really about building a family environment to teach young people about traditional music. I grew up in a family where there was music, mariachi music, popular music with my brother. Music always meant sharing, communicating with family, with the different generations. And so, I started the youth group in 1989 in that way. It's enriched their lives and made their experience more full.

At the same time in 1989, I met a really extraordinary group from Veracruz, Mexico, Mono Blanco. What they'd done, they'd not only resurrected music of Veracruz, but they've sought to sow the seeds of its cultural practice. Because what happens to traditional music in Mexico is that it gets divorced from its social context. It goes to the city and it's played in restaurants and it gets faster and becomes more homogenized and it really looses a lot of its relevance. And so what these folks did in Veracruz was they did workshops in instrument making, in zapateado, and verse improvisation in music. And now you have generations of young people who are keeping alive what's called a fandango which is basically a jam session. And when you take care of a cultural context, therefore you ensure also an artistic forging. You have all these groups that have an aesthetic understanding of tradition and where it comes from. And therefore they can keep the tradition but also do all these wonderful fusions and experiments.

So when I saw that model in Veracruz, I took a number of trips there with Mexican-American teenagers. I also took that model for Mexican-Americans here is California because I felt that our interpretation of Mexican folk music had become very rigid and very theatrical, which is fine. Theatrical presentations of folk music's very important, but we should always try to keep in touch with its meaning beyond the superficial. So I took that premise, and invited this fellow to do a three year residency here is California. And again, I tried reinvigorating our interpretation of Mexican folk music by reintroducing the importance of social content and context.

From those different projects I incorporated, Los Cenzontles Mexican Art Center as a non-profit in 1994. And now we have our facility that we lease. We think it's very pretty. It's in an ugly little strip mall, but we have it very pretty inside. And have 250 students a week to come to take traditional dance, arts and crafts. And I try to make it a balance of vernacular music. We got very lucky because of the popularity of violin music, or fiddle music…… It wasn't like pulling teeth so much to get them to play it. But also with that popular vernacular music which has traditional origins it's very rare music. There's a wonderful master artist that we've had the opportunity to work with Julian Gonzalez through ACTA, who is a traditional Mariachi player. Just the two violins, the guitarron, and the vihuela--a very, very special approach and the subtleties of the music. Also Atilano Lopez from Michoacan, teaching our students to sing in Purepecha. So I am trying to balance the traditional music with the vernacular music, and also trying to be very resourceful translating it to young people.

We definitely focus on young people. And that's a little bit of our origins. In regards to our challenges, we have every kind of challenge possible. But one thing that has kept us kind of clear is that we have a real strong vision and that's, I think, what's helping navigate a lot of the challenges.

The success I think, is youth buy-in. Right now, my entire staff is made up of young people, 21 and younger, who began as children in the program. They are from the neighborhood, which is an immigrant, neighborhood with very poor educational opportunities. And they are working there at the Center in every capacity--administrative, musical directors, musicians, recording. So, that is a real important success for me. There's a lot of youth buy-in in the program.

Another success we are working on is a tour. A lot of the folk masters that I referred to earlier--Julian with the mariachi, Atilano with the Purepecha music of Michoacan, Santiago Jimenez from San Antonio, Texas, and the Grupo Mono Blanco of Veracruz--we are going to be launching on a tour this summer of California. Los Cuatro Maestros with these four gentlemen, their group and our youth group together. And I think it is one of the first times we have seen such a traditional gathering of folk artists, of Mexican music presented in a theatrical setting, and I'm very excited about that.

So we're a little organization. We've been very prolific, done a lot of work and I think it's because of a strong vision, and just a lot of youthful energy. And it's given me a lot of gray hair.

In terms of what we have learned from our experience, I think it's really important to nurture young people and to work very hard to develop an environment where they can grow. And that environment includes discipline. It's not just all fun and games. There's a lot of discipline, but there's also fun and games, too. There needs to be an incentive. We've recorded ten CDs in the last ten years as a way to provide incentive in a learning experience. It's important also to really nurture the environment in which they're working at the center. A respectful and stimulating environment.

And we need also to be very flexible and resourceful the way that we manage our business. If we get a visiting artist, often times a traditional artist, they sometimes just come in and they don't have really a plan or they say, "I'll see you in a year". That's all right for them. They just show up on your doorstep. You want to take advantage of working them and you want to have the organizational flexibility to do that.

One of the things I think that is a little bit of a challenge for me now is growing organizationally. I feel that there is an inherent contradiction between an institution and art sometimes. Sometimes when an institution grows, it becomes very inflexible and it's hard to be creative and hard to be flexible and follow your heart. And so that's my situation right now. How we're going to survive that challenge right now, I don't know. But I try to have a strong team to communicate the vision. Not just with words but in the environment and aesthetically.

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Strategies for Sustaining Traditional Arts

Eugene Rodriguez

Presentation to the Gathering