As a child growing up in Mexico City, Juanita Ulloa started learning ranchera standards listening to patrons joyously joining in with the musicians performing next door at Caballo Bayo, a famous restaurant that’s still a magnet for mariachis.
“I’d sit in my backyard and hear all these people singing,” she recalled, taking a moment to belt out the chorus of the Vicente Fernández hit “Volver, Volver” with her conservatory-trained mezzo-soprano. “I’d hear that music and be so struck at how happy they were, happiness through Mexican song.”
Running upstairs to the piano, she’d start sounding out the melodies, which is how she gradually absorbed “the Mexican ranchera canon,” she said. “It was a very unusual way to learn it. Most musicians grow up in a mariachi family where it’s passed down via the oral tradition.”
Now, thanks to Ulloa, there’s another path into the heart of Mexican music.
Last November, Oxford University Press published “The Mariachi Voice,” an unprecedented study of an artform that’s often misunderstood north of the border. She celebrates the book’s release with a concert on March 20 at Cal State East Bay’s Music Building Recital Hall.
An international performer who has studied Hispanic music in Mexico, Spain and the U.S., Ulloa has taught widely at masterclasses and universities, including Oakland’s Laney College, where she’s been on faculty in recent years.
Part academic treatise and part how-to guide, her book has already been adopted in music programs that teach mariachi singing. Focusing in particular on the oft-neglected female role in mariachi, Ulloa takes a deep dive into the music’s history with analysis of 20 standards in different keys, “filling a significant gap,” she said. “I didn’t intend for it to be so comprehensive, but I realized no one was addressing all these areas.”
She includes interviews with key mariachi artists, and a section for beginners covering everything from “what kind of microphone to use, to make up, dress, and how you move on stage,” she said. “It’s very different than in operatic singing.”
Opera is a touchstone for Ulloa because she’s spent much of her life toggling between art forms. Eventual she found a way to combine her conservatory training with her love of singing rancheras, creating her own hybrid sound she’s dubbed “operachi.”
A multiple winner of the prestigious Festival de la Cancion Latinoamericana, Ulloa possesses a powerful, clear mezzo-soprano, wielded with operatic coloratura. Since mariachi vocalists are typically men, women performing in the genre often sing in a lower register, but Ulloa has developed a dramatic, soaring style marked by rapid melisma.
Another thing that sets her apart is that she composes much of her own material, so instead of singing traditional lyrics about women ruining men’s lives she often explores songs from a woman’s perspective. It’s a repertoire she documented on her 2002 album “Mujeres y Mariachi.”
“In the mariachi tradition, many of the most famous men, such as Jorge Negrete, have been starving opera singers,” Ulloa said. “But among the women, they were singing gut-wrenching, emotionally charged things with incredible passion, but without training. I realized I’m the only female starving opera singer I know.”
Born in New Jersey to an American mother and Panamanian father, Ulloa was raised briefly in Panama and grew up in Mexico City. In her singing career, she’s constantly moved back and forth between the classical world of opera, Andean fusion and various Mexican styles. Now based in Stockton, she’s moving to Jalisco next month and plans to expand her online teaching practice.
Ulloa credits Linda Ronstadt for raising the profile of mariachi women, a gauntlet picked up by the poly-stylistic Lila Downs and the Latin Grammy Award-winning all-women ensemble Flor de Toloache. But the popular image of a mariachi ensemble as an ensemble dressed in black with big sombrero charros persists.
“It’s so much more. It’s a vocal style,” she said, singing a wordless phrase until her voice broke with apparent emotion. “People who don’t speak Spanish will recognize that’s mariachi. It’s the spirit and soul of the Mexican people recognized worldwide.”
At Cal State East Bay, she’s performing in an intimate duo with guitarist Javier de los Santos for one set followed by a program of original songs she introduced to Bay Area audiences in the early 1990s in the Andean-influenced female trio Mariposa (a group that emerged from Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center). Copies of the “The Mariachi Voice” will also be available for purchase.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
JUANITA ULLOA
When: 7 p.m. March 20
Where: Cal State East Bay Music Building Recital Hall, Hayward
Tickets: $29.99; www.eventbrite.com (search for Juanita Ulloa)
