Mariachi Divas Entertain Local Crowds

By Emma Gallegos

When Mariachi Divas’ founder Cindy Shea was growing up in Hacienda Heights, all she ever wanted to do was play the trumpet.

After years in Miami playing with legendary performers Celia Cruz and Joan Sebastian under the tutelage of legendary trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, she returned to Southern California to helm an all-female mariachi group that’s going nine years strong.

The Divas, who will be performing tonight in Baldwin Park, began as a humble five-piece band on the Mexican restaurant circuit. But now they have become a high-profile group with a hectic schedule playing for crowds all the Southwest and even prominent politicians. The group’s fourth album “Canciones de Amor” is on a short list for a Latin Grammy.

All of this surprises Shea least of all.

Shea comes from an Irish- and Italian-American background and admits she never expected to play mariachi music when she was learning trumpet as a youngster. But studying trumpet led her to jazz which led her to Sandoval in Miami where Latin and jazz rhythms converge.

When she returned to Los Angeles, forming a mariachi band was a way of coming full circle and tying together everything she had learned musically.

But having traversed so many different genres, she felt constrained by adhering to the strict notion of a mariachi tradition.

“I missed other elements — salsa, cumbia, classical, jazz — and I thought, ‘Why can’t we blend it?’”

Initially, the Divas faced some resistance to mixing genres as a mariachi group from traditionalists.

“There’s no such thing as ‘traditional,’” Shea said. “We’re in a new generation.”

Indeed, it was a new generation. The Divas started in 1999 just as Latin Pop was exploding on the Top 40 charts, and crossover fare like Marc Antony, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez were fusing traditionally Latin genres for an American pop sensibility.

It helped, too, that she drew on band members from all over the map — which she calls a hazard of living in Los Angeles.

“It happened naturally,” Shea said. “The point is it doesn’t matter where we’re from.”

And yet, in a way, it does.

In interviews, Shea brings up her Irish-Italian American background, her blonde hair and her blue eyes and the blonde hair and blue eyes of other group members.

At performances, it’s not uncommon for Divas to share their backgrounds: Yuma, Ariz., Bogota, Columbia and even the Mexican province of Jalisco where mariachi got started. She’s had Divas with Samoan, Tongan, Japanese, Swiss, Cuban and Argentinian backgrounds – - to name a few.

In one sense, the Divas are all about the music. She said it all comes down to pleasing the fans from junior to grandma and everyone in between. It’s all about inviting the best musicians to play, no matter their background or how steeped they are in the mariachi tradition.

In spite of it being all about the music — or maybe because they radically rebuke the notion of looking and sounding like other groups on the mariachi scene — the Mariachi Divas is, at its heart, a cultural project.

Shea lists as inspiration not bands whose music sounds like the music they produce, but groups who are — or were — involved in similar projects on the local scene, such as all-girl groups like the Go-Go’s or the Bangles or Ozomatli, the genre-busting, multiethnic Los Angeles-based band.

Politicians at least seem to have taken notice of the cultural project — their diverse backgrounds and the Mexican roots of their music are the ultimate Californian symbol. The Divas have played at the inaugurations of both Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. During the Democratic primary, they played at a Hillary Clinton rally at Cal State Los Angeles.

Now that her group has wowed crowds all over the country and even has a standing weekly gig at Disneyland, the Divas’ next goal is to impress the critics.

Until now, they have mostly performed old standards, reworked for their group that now numbers between 25 and 30 members. But now they’ve hired a musical director who is at work penning original songs for the Divas.

“My dream is my Grammy,” Shea said. “But everything happens with time.”

For now, Shea said she is at work trying to keep all the different goals of the group in balance. She wants to keep the music dynamic, the band members happy and she wants to ensure that crowds are dancing in their seats and in the aisles to their new songs, their cumbia medleys and old standards like “Cielito Lindo” and that old crowd-pleaser “Besame Mucho.”

The Mariachi Divas will be playing at 7 p.m., Aug. 21, at Lakes Entertainment Center, 1200 Lakes Drive in West Covina.

emma.gallegos@sgvn.com

(626) 962-8811 ext. 2705

(c) 2008 San Gabriel Valley Tribune. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.