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Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. By Daniel Sheehy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 110, foreword, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, map, photographs, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index, CD recording. $34.95 cloth, $19.95 paper)
The present volume, Mariachi Music in America, packed with information in a brief, affordable format complete with compact disc, is part of Oxford's Global Music Series. The ethnomusicologists Patricia Shehan Campbell and Bonnie C. Wade co-edited the Series to help music educators teach how people around the world make music that is meaningful to their lives. There are fourteen books in the Global Music Series, comprising two framing books, Thinking Musically, by Wade, and Teaching Music Globally, by Campbell, and twelve monographs that focus deeply on the music of a particular country or geographic region. Sheehy's Mariachi Music in America, well illustrated with photographs, is one of the most successful of the twelve because of its sharp focus on a particular musical genre (mariachi) in a specific cultural environment (Mexican American). Mariachi lovers, world-music students from high school through college age, children studying mariachi in their schools, a new generation of professional mariachis who learned mariachi in America through their schools, and mariachi musicians in general will all benefit from Mariachi Music in America. Perhaps its only limitation is the lack of a Spanish-language version.
In every state and every large city of Mexico, mariachi musicians...