Echoes of Tradition: A Memoir of Music, Culture, & Wisdom / A Reflection on Nonprofit Partnership
A Review of Bird of Four Hundred Voices
Frances Phillips
Author: Eugene Rodriguez
Heyday Books (Berkeley, August 2024) 210 pages
Cover art courtesy of Heyday Books.
This memoir by Eugene Rodriguez, founder of Los Cenzontles Mexican Art Center (Los Cenzontles), offers nuanced information about traditional Mexican arts, wisdom for nonprofit managers, and feedback for funders embedded in a personal story.
Rodriguez grew up in a Mexican American family in Glendale, California, a middle-class, majority White and conservative community. His grandparents had immigrated from Mexico. He was surrounded by the voices and musicianship of family members and encouraged by his parents to be creative. Family life appears to have been joyful until his parents divorced when he was a young teenager.
He began guitar lessons at age eight, moved on to classical guitar, and continued studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He met his future wife and creative partner Marie-Astrid Do when living in Santa Cruz. While Rodriguez got to work with an important mentor, in the structure of a conservatory, he expressed conflicted emotions, “I continued to play increasingly demanding repertory but never had time to develop a nuanced relationship with the music. The process was joyless, and the only exhilaration I felt was a mix of fear and relief.”
After graduation, among other gigs, he was an artist-in-residence at a cultural center in San Francisco’s East Bay. There he was invited to create a Mexican music and dance group with a folklorico dance teacher. To learn more musical styles, he scoured used record stores for old recordings and found inspiration, noting, “…scratchy folk music felt like an invitation to be part of a tradition without barriers.” The search for authentic, regionally specific roots music and the desire to break through barriers continue to guide his work.
Soon Rodriguez was part of exchanges with master artists and companies from Mexico, beginning with a tour by the son jarocho group Mono Blanco and a trip with students to the Vera Cruz jungle. Over time, he has worked with masters of other traditions and taken his students to pueblos and small towns to learn and perform “far from gatekeepers, authenticity brokers, and culture merchants.” In one of my favorite chapters, he digs into early Mariachi music from the ranches of Jalisco.
Rodriguez bristles at the term “multiculturalism,” which tends to homogenize art forms. This, and perhaps the growing visibility of his work, led to a bitter split with the cultural center where he’d been working. He was accused of being inauthentic because he was not born in Mexico. Striking out, he and the artists and students he had been working with, formed Los Cenzontles as an independent nonprofit in San Pablo, California – a distressed community that is home to many immigrants from Mexico. Rodriguez writes of the value in this setting of honoring unadorned, rural culture that “comes from the humility, creativity, and perseverance of hardworking people who managed to make music and art in the face of the abuse and humiliation heaped upon them for centuries. It is this resilience that is the true gift and power of our intangible heritage.”
Los Cenzontles, whose name translates from the Nahuatl as “The Mockingbirds” or “Bird of Four Hundred Voices,” is a music academy, performing group, production studio, and community space. Its musicians have toured widely, it has produced numerous recordings and films, and it has provided a home-like learning environment to its loyal students. Music and dance are learned alongside jewelry- and costume-making, and other crafts.
Early in their story, Los Cenzontles created a Grammy-nominated children’s recording with Los Lobos, and Dave Hidalgo has remained a friend and collaborator. An introduction to Linda Ronstadt in 1993 helped pay for a trip to Pajapan in southern Veracruz. Other creative partners have included: Jackson Brown, The Chieftains, Ry Cooder, and Taj Mahal, along with prominent film and media artists.
On many counts, this book is a success story, but the life and work have not been easy. The memoir incorporates passionate, articulate commentary on immigration policy, racism, and assumptions about drug use and gang involvement by Mexican youth that sometimes warp community leaders’ perspectives on Los Cenzontles’ work.
Having worked for a foundation, I know how focus, rigor, and being “strategic” are valued. Rodriguez is candid in his critique of funders’ jargon and ever-changing trends. A multi-faceted, culturally astute organization run with intuitive brilliance can fall outside of initiatives. Narrow guidelines and project funding do not recognize programs that are fully integrated with one another. He writes, “No financial opportunity is worth sacrificing the integrity of our methods.” He also voices skepticism about foundations’ power to influence one another. When Los Cenzontles, Linda Ronstadt, and Dave Hidalgo performed at Grantmakers in the Arts’ 2011 conference in San Francisco, they drew a long, standing ovation but no new funding.
Los Cenzontles’ performing at the GIA Annual Conference in San Francisco in 2011.
One grant to improve Los Cenzontles’ sustainability provided a consultant who proposed that Rodriguez become a paid advisor to other organizations. He would have had wisdom to share: hire artists and people from the community you serve, teach in an all-encompassing cultural context, and trust in the beauty and resiliency embedded in traditional arts. However, consulting would have pulled him away from his relationships with the music and musicians, the students and their families. He walked away from the opportunity – a gutsy thing to do given that a foundation supplied the consultant.
Not all of Los Cenzontles’s experiences with funders have been sour. Rodriguez writes of the day Melanie Beene, then at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, sat for two hours, observing the organization’s work, which led to meaningful Hewlett funding; and the time Roberta Uno, then at the Ford Foundation, pulled Los Cenzontles’ proposal out of a rejection pile to take a second look. His message for grantmakers might be, “Judge it for what it is and in all of its complexity.”
I have known the author of this memoir for many years. I have been director of his fiscal sponsor, funded his work, and even read an early version of this memoir. In spite of all that I knew, I found honesty and provocative, fresh ideas in this memoir. I recommend it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugene Rodriguez is founder and executive director of Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, a nonprofit based in San Pablo, California. He formed Los Cenzontles in 1989. Rodriguez has produced over thirty albums and numerous films for Los Cenzontles, and he has collaborated with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Los Lobos, Lalo Guerrero, Ry Cooder, the Chieftains, and Taj Mahal. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. He is also the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including from the California Arts Council and United States Artists. He lives in Richmond, California.
Frances Phillips is retired program director for the Arts and The Creative Work Fund at the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Before her philanthropy work, she was executive director of Intersection for the Arts. A poet, she is the author of three small press books. She was an instructor of grantwriting in the technical and professional Writing Program and Creative Writing classes at San Francisco State University, and the long-time co-editor of the GIA Reader.
