The academy is in a cluttered, battered basement that also houses a karate school. But on this weeknight, surrounded by exercise equipment and drawings of martial arts fighters, six boys and four girls sat in a semicircle strumming guitars to the waltzy beat of a mariachi song.
The group belongs to the first class of the Mariachi Academy of New York, a one-year pilot project in East Harlem with 40 students, most from the neighborhood, known as the Puerto Rican barrio.
These English-speaking children of immigrants, some immigrants themselves, are injecting new blood into a centuries-old musical tradition from Mexico. They are part of the first stirrings of a mariachi culture in the land of salsa and merengue.
Of course, they have a way to go.
Characterized by acoustic harmonies and widely known lyrics about love and heroism usually played by a handsomely dressed, roving ensemble of men in sombreros, the rancheras and ballads of mariachi music can make the festive sing and the sad drink and weep. But at a music academy string class on a recent night, the studnts just made the teacher, Ram?n Ponce Jr., wince.
''I think we went a little too fast,'' Jasmine Galindo, 9, said apologetically when the group of 9- to 11-year-olds broke into the first chords of ''El Rey,'' a mariachi standard.
Mr. Ponce, artistic director of the academy and a member of a local mariachi group, Mariachi Real de M?xico, founded by his father in the early 1990's, said the school was meant to foster mariachi music in a new generation, particularly the American-born children of Mexican immigrants.
He and his father, who moved to Queens from Puebla 15 years ago, took the idea for the school to the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in Manhattan, which opened it last summer with a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and some foundation money. The Union Settlement Association at Third Avenue and 98th Street donated a classroom.
Most of the students came to the academy without a musical background, but that was almost the point.
''Musically, they lean toward rap so, we don't want the Mexican music to die among them,'' Mr. Ponce said of the students. ''Mexican music represents us in every corner of the world.''
A mariachi school is a novelty on the East Coast but hardly surprising. Nostalgia and a rapidly growing Hispanic population, that is mostly of Mexican descent, is causing interest in the music across the United States, mariachi scholars say. In New York, the Mexican population leapfrogged over others in the 1990's to become the city's third-largest Latino group, after Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, the 2000 census showed.
In California, New Mexico and Texas, mariachi music is a staple at public events. But in New York there are so few mariachi musicians that some groups are trios rather than the typical 12 members. Two years ago, about a dozen mariachi groups in New York and New Jersey came together to lend one another members to handle a growing number of gigs at restaurants, public events and private parties, said Mr. Ponce, who makes his living as a mariachi musician.
There are other signs that the music is gaining a foothold in the city, from the hugely popular concerts of mariachi stars like Vicente Fern?ndez at Madison Square Garden to the radio station WLXE-AM (1380) in New York, which switched from sports and news to Mexican music last year.
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