There were many things that I was supposed to do before the screening of the Mariachi Miracle Sneak Peek but because I was so physically wiped out on the day of the screening, most of them just fell out of my head.

In light of that, let me make up for lost time and do so now, and also share with you the panel discussion that took place following the screening.

Event remarks – pre film

Thanks so much to everyone for being here.

Can you scoot together for a group photo?

I have a boatload of thank yous first.

Thanks to our sponsors –  the David and Luria Lovell Foundation, Los Descendientes, the Tucson International Mariachi Conference, YWCA of Southern Arizona, La Estrella Bakery, KXCI radio, Cinema Tucson, Planet Earth Press, Sol Grant Partners, VIP Printing and Promotions and Lydia Ochoa.  We greatly appreciate all of your help.

Special thanks as well to The Southwestern Foundation, Reuben Carranza and Jim Hoffbrauer, Jim and Loma Griffith, Tina Curtis, Michael Hyatt, TPAC, Cherylene Plewa, and hundreds of folks big and small who helped keep this gigantic project afloat and rolling along. Huge thanks as well to my friends at El Casino Ballroom who gave us the opportunity for fundraisers when we most needed them, and to KXCI for always helping us get the word out. And a shout out as well to my brother John and his wife Betsy who passed away during the holidays last year. They never got to see the end but they sure loved the stories from the journey.

I want to thank Cathy Burch at the Star and Bianca Morales at the Tucsón Sentinel for their wonderful pieces in the press. Grateful that we have both publications and that they sent the A team to get the word out. And I especially want to thank KOLD for sending a crew that spent the day with us, documenting our Sneak Peek event. That was completely above and beyond.

Thanks to the original members of Los Changuitos Feos and their visionary board which created the scholarship program that ignited so much of this in the early years. I also want to express my solidarity with the early members as they are finally addressing the molestation that occurred of some group members at the hands of Father Rourke who founded the group. That topic will not be part of this film, only because the Mariachi Miracle is a film about mariachi and folklorico over nearly sixty years and we’d have lost 20 minutes or more to that. But I applaud them for coming forward to tell their story. It will be handled in the Mariachi Miracle book.

I also want to thank my friend David Valdez who is creating a film about the early days of the Changos and their overcoming of that very dark chapter as well as all Changos has become over its first 58 years. This is a tremendous project. David would you please stand up.

Los Changuitos Feos is the detonator from which the entire mariachi movement starts, not just here in Tucsón but in America.

I also want to acknowledge and introduce you to another mariachi filmmaking friend, Barbara Cogswell, who has been filming intimate interviews and the spectrum of mariachi performance since 1985 for her project Mariachi Memoirs. Barbara, please stand up and thank you.

Some personal thanks. To the late Ralph Gonzalez and Elva Flores who, along with Raul Aguirre, Julie Gallego and Richard Carranza were the folks who did their best to get me up to speed when I was an ignorant music writer and helped turn me into the ignorant filmmaker you see today.

I want to thank Shawn Lynn Humberson who invented a style of transcribing interviews that helped me find exactly what I was looking for when it came time to edit, and who painstakingly did the heavy lifting in the early years of this project. Artificial intelligence in no match for Shawn. 

I want to thank Danny Martin, the artist who designed our four t-shirt  designs, and remind you all that Christmas is just around the corner and a Mariachi Miracle t-shirt makes a lovely gift. And I want to thank our good friends, The Arias Family and the Victoria Arias Scholarship Foundation for all that they do. Mike and Lorena and all of the foundation folks please stand up.

I want to thank all of the 350-plus people who sat down to talk with me and shared so many intimate details of their lives as current and former mariachis and folklorico dancers, parents and family members, teachers and administrations, community leaders and more. This film is your story.

Special thanks to my producer, Eva Romero, who had no idea what a weird trip lay ahead when she signed on to help with this. And I want to thank my buddy David Wing who will help be clean this thing up after I get all the bones in place.

I want to thank my family and friends for putting up with me disappearing for months at a time over the past ten years to work on this, and to let them know that it will prove to be valuable training for my disappearance in the next few months.

I especially need to thank the pros at the Fox Tucson Theatre for being the consummate professionals and just making everything a breeze.

And last but not least, let me thank the participants of our panel discussion today, Raul Aguirre, Patsy Klein, Gilbert Velez, Giselle Aubrey, Jose Luis Baca, Justin Enriquez and Richard Carranza. You are about to have a heap of knowledge and experience laid on you.

And I want to thank all of you for being here today.

A couple of quick questions before we start. How many of you are current or former mariachi or folklorico students? Please stand up. How many teachers and administrators, public or private? How many parents and families of mariachi and folklorico students?  Please stand up. How many board and parents group members? Please stand up.

Thank you all for what you have done. Every one of you has been part of something world changing.

So what will we be seeing here today? Actually you’ll be seeing not a complete film or even a full rough. More like a rough slice. What you will be seeing is a few of the stories that will be featured in the final film, none of them in final form. And what we want here today is your feedback and also your guidance. 

This has been a community project from the get to. This is your story. We want you to be happy with what you see and feel that the most important parts are included.

In some cases you’ll be able to see what we’re missing. For example, we don’t have any footage from the Changuitos Feos’ early days. Someone here knows where that footage might exist, or knows someone who does. The bottom part of the feedback form we’ve handed out to all of you includes my email address. If someone sees something we clearly need, please drop me a note. Not just what I mentioned. Whatever you feel is important.

Unfortunately the slivers we’ll be screening for you today will miss a lot of the story which I promise will be in the final film. There just wasn’t time to do a decent job of presenting, for example, the folklorico side today but it’s just as deep and interesting a lineage as the mariachi, reaching back to the 1940s when there was a woman giving folklorico lessons, on through the Changos-like Big Bang that was the arrival of Pima College folklorico choreographer Angel Hernández, Tucsón High’s 50-year-old Los Tucsonenses folklorico program and the great groups we have today including CDFA, Ballet Folklorico Tapatio, Julie Gallego’s Viva Dancers and Ballet Folklorico San Juan, as well as Ballet Folklorico La Paloma, which has several times represented Tucsón at the Olympic Games and which celebrates 40 years on August 27 at the Berger Center. I promise your story will be told too, and that I will not treat folklorico like an ugly stepchild. 

Also missing in large part is the birth and proliferation of the programs in the schools. I promise this is coming, along with the section on how the experience transforms the lives of parents and families.

But for today we wanted to give you a taste, followed by a short panel discussion with some of the pioneers who helped bring this about, plus Giselle Aubrey who just graduated from Pueblo, and you’ll see why shortly, and the great Raul Aguirre who has not only been the Vin Skully of Mexican American culture in Tucsón but he has personally added his DNA through his kids to just about every mariachi and folklorico group in town and beyond. 

My point is this. Mariachis and folklorico dancers from Tucsón, Arizona did something extraordinary. They sparked and crafted an educational movement like no others that has been opening not just musical but economic doors for decades, generating not just world class musicians, dancers, teachers and administrators but doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, politicians, first responders, military leaders, entrepreneurs of every stripe, community leaders and beyond. And the seed to so much of this was a little group in 1964 called Los Changuitos Feos – the ugly little monkeys.

These things you’re doing, as individuals, families, groups and communities are not small. Their ripple effect grows stronger with time. It changes the world around us at every level.

Through the wisdom of their boards and the hard work of many Tucson’s youth mariachis and folklorico dance groups have become windows to the world from both sides, speaking volumes of us as a city to those in places our young performers travel even as it enlightens our youth with global experiences.

They are going far. The path is now well worn. And it grows wider with each passing year.

Films and books are very different things. A book allows you to elaborate, analyze and connect the dots. But it can’t show you the emotion or let you feel that excitement you feel when you see a young person grow up in front of you. When they sing and dance like you never imagined someone that age could. And then, in a minute, it’s graduation time and you watch this fully formed person step off to write that next chapter and take the whole community another step.

To all of you here today who have become part this I say be proud of who you are and what you’ve done. Be prouder of what you’re going to do in the future, and know that the mariachi miracle is that whenever something is needed to make this movement succeed, to propel our youth toward their dreams, to make our community, country and world a better place, someone like you steps up and gets it done. 

• Daniel Buckley
• Producer / Director
• The Mariachi Miracle