Mariachi education programs are a common feature in San Antonio area schools thanks to the pioneering efforts of musician and educator Belle San Miguel Ortiz, who died late Wednesday at age 90.
Many of Ortiz’s former students, now professionals, lined up to pay tribute to their mentor and inspiration in a dayslong mariachi vigil at the San Antonio home of Ortiz’s granddaughter, Nicole Stiles.
After Ortiz’s death, members of Mariachi Campanas de America, the group started by Ortiz and her husband, Juan, in 1978 and named for her, played a despedida Thursday morning.
Anthony Medrano, a longtime member of Mariachi Campanas, helped organize the musical vigil.
“We were able to bring five or six full mariachi groups at different times to celebrate her with music at her bedside as she was in hospice care,” Medrano said. “At one time it was 90 to 100 musicians just kind of packed in here, waiting to play 20 minutes for her and talk to her and thank her for everything she meant to them.”
Musicians influenced by Ortiz unable to be present at the home vigil sent video messages. José María De León “Little Joe” Hernández, who credited her with years of support and helping him achieve his first tour to Japan. “A dream come true, and you made it possible. You will always live in my heart, mi amiga,” Hernández said. Others sending tributes included top-tier groups Mariachi Sol de México and Mariachi Los Camperos, Medrano said.
‘A bigger agenda’
Juan Ortiz first met Belle San Miguel at Lanier High School in 1969. They formed a musical friendship in her class, then called Ballet Folklórico, which she taught with dance instructor Dinky Luna. The relationship between Ortiz and San Miguel would later blossom as a romance. The pair recently celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary.
Not only was their meeting a personal destiny, said Ortiz, but the beginnings of a path to establishing mariachi as a respected art form in San Antonio and the U.S.
“It was the beginning of mariachi education in the high schools,” Juan Ortiz said of his late wife’s first Lanier class, which led to a district-wide mariachi group for San Antonio Independent School District that would go on to tour the country and win recognition and awards.
In 1974, Belle Ortiz launched the first college-level mariachi program at San Antonio College. Now decades later, mariachi is taught throughout the city’s elementary schools, high schools and colleges, helping bring to prominence an art form once relegated to cantinas, restaurants and private events.
“I really believe that God crossed Belle’s and my paths to a bigger agenda than what we could ever be aware of” at the time,” said Ortiz.
Commitment to education
Mariachi Extravaganza producer Cynthia Muñoz credited Ortiz with inspiring in her a lifelong love of the art form through a chance to compete onstage in San Antonio’s first mariachi music festival in 1979.
“This had a significant impact on me as a young teenager as I realized that our culture, music and history was way deeper and more beautiful than I ever could have imagined,” Muñoz wrote in a Facebook encomium to her mentor.
Touring with the SAISD group, Muñoz said, “was a beautiful experience back then, because by the time I graduated from high school, I was the most well-traveled person in my family.”
But Muñoz said Ortiz’s influence is not to be measured by her effect on one life, but in the hundreds of thousands of lives her work has touched since, with schools around the region and country adopting mariachi music education programs.
Medrano said the 1979 festival was the first international mariachi conference held in San Antonio, an event that brought Ortiz’s commitment to both entertainment and education outside the school system, with the renowned Mariachi Vargas De Tecalitlán of Mexico teaching master classes to eager students.
“We’re talking generations,” Medrano said of the breadth of Ortiz’s 70 years of influence on the genre and the lives of its musicians and their families. “From her very first teaching jobs, she was changing lives and impacting lives.”
Juan Ortiz said that her influence continues to grow even on the day following her death. A colleague in Denver, Colorado called to say that a new mariachi education program would be starting up at a high school there in the fall.
“We’re given one opportunity to destiny,” Ortiz said. “Belle accepted the challenge, and I accepted the challenge. The seed was planted, and we were blessed to see the fruition of that seed blossoming. Belle’s legacy is now just starting to embark.”
