Grammar video

Dressed all in black, his thick hair gelled back, Zárate, who was 40, paced the room, listening intently. “Stop!” he said as the students tore through a huapango called “A la Luz de los Cocuyos.” There were problems.

“Those trills, they need to come out a lot stronger than that. Careful at the beginning — ta ta ta ta ta — I want to hear all the notes together at the same volume. I don’t want to hear ta ta TA ta TA ta TA. Very defined. OK? From the top!”

They began again, playing the same songs over and over. Zárate bounded among them, singing along to their instrument parts. When he ran out of ways to explain something in English, he did it in Spanish, which all of his students understood. “If you want to be competitive, especially in this part of the Valley, you have to be super detailed,” he told me. “That’s what gives mariachi music the style, all those little details we were going through. That’s the beauty of mariachi.”