San Diego’s underground music scene is finally becoming more mainstream.
But this is 2015, not the 1990s, and so times have changed.
Jeff Nevin, 46, has been part of the scene since the beginning. The virtuoso trumpeter has been playing the genre since he was a teenager in Tucson, Ariz. He began developing an in-school mariachi program in 1997, San Diego’s first, at Chula Vista High School.
“We went from zero schools in 1996 to close to 20 schools about five or six years later. Now they’re in most of the high schools in Sweetwater, I think, and in Tijuana.” He is now talking to other middle and high schools around San Diego County to get their own mariachi programs.
“We give college scholarships to the mariachi students when they graduate. So having mariachi schools is a benefit to the kids to be able to perform, and to the community to have the music.”
A year after starting the program at Chula Vista High, Nevin started working on Southwestern College’s mariachi curriculum in 1998, just after earning his Ph.D. in music theory and composition from UC San Diego. Mariachi was officially approved as a degree program in 2004. For the first time in the country, and perhaps the world, students could earn an associate’s degree in mariachi music.
Now mariachi degree programs are popping up in schools all over the United States and Mexico.
“There are a couple of universities in Mexico that have programs that are sort of patterned after ours, and there’s one or two in Texas, and there are other schools that are working on it. So it really is kind of a model that a lot of schools around the country and down in Mexico have used.”
Today Nevin directs Southwestern College’s Mariachi Garibaldi in a program that attracts students from all over the world. The band also travels all over – it just returned from Vancouver, Canada, where they were playing at schools and giving classes to young musicians.
“We went to Brazil six months ago, we’ve been to China, we’ve been to Russia, we’ve been to France a couple of times, so the program at the college is really, really strong,” Nevin said.
While Nevin plays gigs and works around the county his full-time job is the director of mariachi at Southwestern College, where students can earn a two-year music degree with a specialization in mariachi. He’s also been the president of the Mariachi Scholarship Foundation for the past two years, which is helping coordinate next month’s MariachiFest in National City.
