This All-Women Mariachi Group From Sacramento Is Redefining the Genre

Music has always been the center of Dinorah Klingler’s world.

Her childhood home in Mexico City was filled with the sounds of her parents singing along to their favorite songs, like “El Andariego” by Alvaro Carrillo. “My parents harmonized very well,” she remembers. “That’s how I grew up. … listening [to] those two beautiful voices.”

“El Andariego” was also the first song she learned to play on guitar at 9 years old, and she performed it at her elementary school graduation. She remembers feeling incredibly happy when she was singing on stage.

“I couldn’t believe the applause and the acceptance of the people,” she said. “In that very moment I said to myself: ‘This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.’”

And she did.

In the decade that followed, Klingler launched a successful musical career in Mexico, starting her own bands and playing at hotels and festivals. When she moved to California in her 20s, she expected to pick up where she left off. But it wasn’t that easy.

“In Mexico, [I had a] very, very prosperous career,” she said. “When I came here, I was expecting the same thing, to find musicians and to form my own band. And it was so difficult.”

She finally got her musical break while eating dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles where a mariachi band was playing. Her husband convinced the band to let her sing a few songs. The band leader was so impressed by her voice, he asked her to join the female mariachi band he directed in Los Angeles, Mariachi Las Adelitas.

“I [was like], ‘What? What are you talking about?’” Klingler recalled asking him. She had been around mariachi music her entire life, and even sung in some mariachi groups, but she had never seen an all-women mariachi band. She remembered one mariachi band she watched growing up that had a female guitarist.

“She played fantastically. … but guys would make fun of her,” Klingler said. “It’s just a male-dominated genre of music.”

Little did she realize she would soon become one of the women helping break down gender barriers in mariachi.

Mariachi and masculinity

The origins of mariachi music date back to the 1850s, and the genre has mainly revolved around male musicians.

“One thing we know for sure,” said Dr. Leonor Xóchitl Pérez, “is that this music has been a male-dominated art form.”

Dr. Pérez is executive director for the Mariachi Women’s Foundation in Los Angeles and has spent three decades researching women in mariachi. Her essay “Transgressing the Taboo: A Chicana’s Voice in the Mariachi World” was published in the 2002 book, Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change and she researched and curated the traveling museum exhibit, The Trailblazing Women of Mariachi Music.

“Over time, [mariachi] music was clearly identified with men,” said Dr. Pérez. “Women have participated throughout history, but their voice and their presence has been erased … or forgotten.”

She cited several factors that have contributed to the exclusion of women in the genre.

Mariachi music was traditionally performed at bars, parties, and festivals; these were all places women were not allowed to frequent in the 1800s. Traditional mariachi songs — even more recent ones —  are written from a male perspective.

In the popular mariachi song “El Rey,” Mexican superstar Vicente Fernandez sang about a life of freedom, doing what he wants with or without money, because even without a throne, he’s still the king.

Tales of traveling, seducing beautiful women, and fighting for your country are performed by mariachis with a swagger traditionally associated with masculinity.

“You watch a mariachi, they’re not hunched over and looking shy,” said Dr. Pérez. “They have their instruments high. Their backs are straight. They’re playing assertively and playing … with their arms digging into their violin, or strumming their guitar with a lot of strength.”

Even the traditional outfits mariachi musicians wear symbolize masculinity. The charro suits, still worn today, are based on what wealthy, horse-riding, property-owning male ranchers wore around the time of the Mexican Revolution.

The first women of mariachi

Mariachi may have been a man’s world, but that didn’t stop women from making their mark. The first recorded female mariachi musician was Rosa Quirino, and she was an absolute force of nature. She was only 13 when she joined an all-male mariachi group in La Escondida, Nayarit in Mexico in 1903, and she later went on to direct her own band.

“Being a musician and a mariachi musician at that time was unique enough,” said Dr. Pérez. “But having a woman lead a group is even a greater challenge.”

Other trailblazers followed, and the first all-female mariachi band, Adela y Su Mariachi de Muchachas (also called Las Adelitas) was founded in Mexico City in 1948.

Life wasn’t easy for these first women of mariachi. Family lore has it that Quirino carried a gun with her at all times to keep her male bandmates in line.

Women mariachis often faced discrimination, whether it was audience members harassing them during performances, or being forced to quit when they became mothers.

Despite these challenges there’s a reason why women have been — and continue to be — drawn to this genre.

“A lot of the women that I have spoken to have spoken about the freedoms that they find in performing this music,” said Dr. Pérez. “Sometimes that’s economic, sometimes it’s expression, sometimes it’s identity. But the important thing is that they’re gaining something that they’re not allowed to have or that they have not achieved in everyday life.”

‘It’s about feelings’

Dr. Pérez identifies the 1960s Chicano Movement as a watershed moment for women in mariachi. “It was a return to our roots,” she said, “which included rediscovering mariachi.”

Colleges around the country started teaching mariachi in new ethnomusicology departments. Before this, the tradition was mostly passed from father to son by ear. Now that it was being taught in schools, that opened the door for more women and girls to participate.

That’s how Dr. Pérez learned to play mariachi in 1973, when she was a middle schooler in East Los Angeles. She still remembers hearing the sound of the guitarrón for the first time: “That deep sound just resonated in my heart and in my body,” she recalled. “I had a visceral response to that, and it was just absolutely beautiful.”

She was quickly drawn to the freedom she felt playing mariachi violin. It was very different from what she was used to.

“At home, I was told to be quiet, to be calm, to be in control of my behavior, to be demure,” she said. “But in mariachi … my teacher was telling me to let out a yell when I felt the emotion.”

Dinorah Klingler loves this about mariachi music too. “It’s about feelings … you have to put your heart in it,” she said. She’d gotten her first taste of playing in an all-female mariachi band with Mariachi Las Adelitas, and she knew she could take the genre further. But her plans were sidelined during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not being able to play live music in front of an audience really bothered her. So she decided to set up a microphone and speakers on her front lawn, and play for her neighbors weekly. One of them recorded her performance and it got picked up by the CBS News program “Good Day Sacramento.”

As she gained attention for her alfresco performances, she decided it was the right time for her to take the next step. She posted on her Facebook page calling for female musicians with experience in mariachi to hit her up, because she was forming an all-female mariachi band in Sacramento. She was stunned by how many responses she got.

“It was fast. And I was completely blown away,” she said. She auditioned about a dozen women, and that was the start of Mariachi Bonitas.

To Be a Woman

Today, there are 11 women musicians in Mariachi Bonitas. They sing and play guitar, trumpet, violin, as well as the traditional Mexican instruments, vihuela and guitarrón.

The group is open to all women — not just those from Latinx backgrounds.

“As long as you are a good person, and a person with discipline and passion for music, you’re welcome in my band,” added Klingler. They perform at events all around northern California including the Mariachi Festival de Sacramento, which she founded in 2014. They’ve even appeared on the Kelly Clarkson Show — twice.

“People, especially women, are happy for us,” said Klinger. “We have to have representative, capable musicians in every genre of music, you know? We want to let them know that we can sing love songs, that we can also serenade our men, that we can also serenade our mothers. We can do it.”

As much as people are embracing Mariachi Bonitas and the inclusion of women in mariachi, Klingler says there are some people who won’t book them because they want a “traditional” mariachi band instead — one with men. But she also sees that old mindset changing.

Something that sets Mariachi Bonitas apart from other female mariachi groups is that they’re writing and composing their own music.

Klingler wrote six of the songs on their album, Por Ser Mujer, which means “To Be a Woman.” She says she wrote the title track specifically to tell women, “We can do it. You can do it. You are amazing, you are great, and you have to believe in yourself.”

It’s a message that Klingler has been telling herself for decades.