Students practice as part of mariachi band lessons at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Milwaukee. (Submitted photo)
Teachers inside a South Side Milwaukee Catholic school occasionally will have to compete with the sound of students strumming a dozen guitars down the hall, for a happy reason.
That cacophony of joyful sound — and the meaningful purpose it serves, the creation of a school mariachi band — comes from a $10,000 GIFTS grant to Our Lady Queen of Peace, part of the Seton Catholic Schools system.
“We’re going to have our own mariachi band playing in our churches, not only in our own parish but in many other churches thanks to this initiative,” said Fr. Javier Bustos, the pastor of Our Lady Queen of Peace and Blessed Sacrament parishes in Milwaukee.
“Parents are responding so well to this initiative. Many of them have come to me after Mass — ‘Father, this is like home’ — and that’s the idea. They feel at home.”
In turn, their parishioners have raised money to purchase mariachi instruments for their sister parish in Mexico.
GIFTS (Grant Initiatives for Today’s Students) grants, funded through the annual Archbishop’s Catholic Schools Dinner, support projects involving Catholic identity, development and marketing and educational innovation. Grants also can be awarded as seed money for new projects.
The genesis of the GIFTS grant came from the recognition of the regional Mexican homeland of many of the members of the parish. Fr. Bustos, whose ancestral background is Venezuelan, has made it part of his ministry to make efforts to understand Mexican culture, especially the culture of Jalisco, since many of his parishioners have roots in that region.
“One of the things I enjoy is to visit the villages of my parishioners. When you do that, you get to know the culture much better,” said Fr. Bustos. “Our twin parish is the Sacred Heart Parish in Atotonilco el Bajo (a small town in the region of) Jalisco, Mexico. When I went there, I realized that it is in the culture, the tradition, in the mind and heart of many of my parishioners to send their kids to school where they not only learn their faith and their education and science, but they also learn their culture.”
Fr. Bustos said that many schools in that region have a mariachi band, so he asked Principal Michael Derrick for the chance to do the same for a parish with many families from that region.
“We need to have a mariachi band in our school,” Fr. Bustos said. “Not only during the school year, but all year round. We need to find the money.”
The $10,000 GIFTS grant has been allocated to empowering students with guitars, violins, the guitarrón (a six-string acoustic bass guitar), and the teaching they need to play as a mariachi band at Mass and other parish and school events.
The grant not only benefits each student with a positive activity proven to improve brain development, it also offers the gift of the sound of their parishioners’ culture to a parish so vibrant that more than 1,000 people attend Ash Wednesday Mass.
“Mariachi music is definitely a music dedicated to Mary originally, the music of the people singing to the Mother of God,” said Fr. Bustos.
“When you sing, when you’re engaged in any type of genre in music, you’re expressing an emotion. Those who play and sing in a mariachi band, they sing with every fiber of their being. They sing with passion. It’s definitely a very emotional type of music, so their emotions are really expressed — whether it’s joy, whether it’s anger, whether it’s love; but their emotions are clearly expressed in the mariachi band music. That’s why every time you hear mariachi music, you are moved.”
While Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish is receiving the gift of music from the Jalisco ancestral homeland of many of its parishioners, it has also sent back a surprising gift of its own to its sister parish, Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (Sacred Heart of Jesus) in Atotonilco, that will empower them to offer the same thing to the Catholic faithful.
“We with the parish want to help to do the same in a parish in Jalisco that cannot purchase instruments because they are very expensive, so we did exactly the same,” said Fr. Bustos.
“We did fundraising and were able to purchase the instruments for the parish of Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. We purchased all the instruments. They currently have a school forming a mariachi band for children.”
He says the donation to their sister parish not only meets the parish’s love of mariachi but serves as an alternative to the negatives youth face there.
“This wonderful pastor — his name is Salvador — is keeping these children away from drugs and gang activities, so we created it,” Fr. Bustos added. “Thanks to God and the help of many people, we created a mariachi band here and we’re very proud of it, but we decided to do the same in Mexico.”
