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Source: The Santa Fe New MexicanNov.迷你倉 15--The Boyle Heights district on the east side of Los Angeles is not a fashionable neighborhood, but it is the place to go if you are looking for mariachi music. The hub of the city's mariachi culture is an unglamorous pedestrian plot that bears the name Mariachi Plaza. Gazing at it from across the street is a solitary four-story building of Victorian solidity, whimsically adorned by a corner cupola and turret. Carved into the structure's stone name plates are the words "Cummings Block 1889," but everybody in Boyle Heights knows it as the Hotel Mariachi.The University of New Mexico Press has just issued Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles, a handsome book of essays and photography created jointly by three people who live and work in New Mexico: historian and preservationist Catherine L. Kurland (who resides in Santa Fe), folklorist Enrique R. Lamadrid (who chairs the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico), and photographer Miguel A. Gandert (who teaches in UNM's Department of Communication and Journalism). The fountainhead of the project was Kurland, who grew up in Los Angeles. She stumbled across the Hotel Mariachi in 2003, entirely by chance, and realized it was the very building that loomed large in her family's history. The once-impressive hotel was built by her great-grandfather, a Croatian immigrant named George Gerscovich, who had assumed the surname Cummings when he sailed to California to try his luck in the Gold Rush of 1849. He prospered selling foodstuffs to miners and then settled in Los Angeles, where he married Sacramenta L鏕ez, a member of one of the city's founding families. He and his wife built the Cummings Hotel in 1889, but their timing did not prove propitious. The Panic of 1893 led to an economic depression in the United States, and by the end of 1894 the Cummings Hotel was surrendered to the bank that held the mortgage.The building stumbled along through the 20th century, but by 2003, when Kurland fortuitously happened on it, it had reached a state of desperate disrepair. A decade later, thanks to Kurland's spearheading efforts and the support of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), the Hotel Mariachi has been restored to structural health, has been placed under landmark protection, and faces a secure future as the anchor of an essential subculture of its predominantly Latino neighborhood. Pasatiempo spoke with Kurland to learn about the book and the community it documents.Pasatiempo: In the book's introduction, Evangeline Ordaz-Molina of the ELACC writes that when her group purchased the Hotel Mariachi, in 2006, it was "literally a slum. ... Four to six men shared small hotel rooms that lacked bathrooms or kitchens. Common bathrooms, one to a floor, were sloppily constructed without permits. This was a building that no one should have purchased." And yet ...?Catherine L. Kurland: It's true. For almost half a century, mariachis could share a little room there for a shoestring, and it was quite a scene. One of them would get a call, and they'd all come racing down the stairs and pile into a van to head off to appear at a wedding or a quincea鎑ra or some other function. But the building was in terrible shape. Evangeline is not really a preservationist; ELACC is really an affordable-housing group, and I was concerned that they might not be so keen to support the building's nomination for historical status. But she grew up in that neighborhood and appreciated how deep its cultural importance was. They raised $24 million in less than five years to save and renovate this building. They did also add a wing of apartments, which answered to their affordable-housing mission.Pasa: Prior to moving to Santa Fe, you and a partner ran the Kurland-Zabar Gallery in New York City, a respected gallery for works of the English Arts and Crafts period. What brought you from there to Santa Fe and to the field of historic preservation?Kurland: I've always been interested in preservation, and I have always regarded objects not only in terms of design but also in historical context. At the gallery, we worked a lot with museums; knowing that an object would be preserved was as important as selling it. At a certain point my partner and I closed the gallery and moved on to work with garden design of that same period. I was living on Long Island with my husband, John Serkin, and we moved to Santa Fe really on a whim. Just then I learned that the University of New Mexico was founding a program in historic preservation and regionalism. I enrolled two weeks after we arrived here in 2004. One of my last courses was a tutorial with Miguel Gandert. We would just go out into the field and document what we saw. I became a real admirer of his work. He is a great documentary photographer, in part because he understands culture in a deep way.When I got involved with the Hotel Mariachi, I realized this building might go down any day. Through the UNM program, I had gotten acquainted with preservationists. I knew a自存倉out the National Trust for Historic Preservation and other preservation groups, and so I had some idea of how to proceed. I dragged Miguel out to document the place in photographs. I thought it would be a once-and-done thing, but he was so moved by the whole atmosphere -- not just the mariachis playing their music. Every crevice of that community revolved around organizing the lives of the mariachis: the tailor who sews their outfits, the shoemaker who makes their boots, the music school where they teach. It was a combination of the place and the music that drew him to take this on as a project.Pasa: His photographs come across as extremely honest. The book presents nearly a hundred of them in high quality, and they capture the life of this mariachi community, mostly prior to the hotel's renovation, in a natural, unposed way.Kurland: For most part, Miguel photographs in black and white using real film, and he develops his photographs in a darkroom. He's an old-fashioned guy in that way, but you see the richness of the result.Pasa: And your third collaborator, Enrique Lamadrid -- how did he get involved?Kurland: Miguel brought him in because of his expertise as an ethnomusicologist. Much of what Enrique presents in his essay on mariachi music in this book is new information, growing out of our original experience visiting the Fiesta de Santa Cecilia at Mariachi Plaza. Both Enrique and Miguel view this as a vibrant center of Mexican culture. This is arguably the leading mariachi center north of the border.Pasa: The musicians' costumes seem to be a big part of the scene. Lamadrid writes in his essay, "Mariachi dresses the peasant musician in the costume of wealth and authority." But I gather the elegant uniforms we associate with mariachis, ornamented with decorative braid and buttons, were not always the norm.Kurland: That's right. Originally, they wore sandals and what looked like white pajamas, but when they started to take on a more urban culture this look wasn't going to do it. Not until the 1930s did they start to dress in the black charro costumes we know today, but there were historical roots for the new style. Black had connotations of royalty; Emperor Maximilian was famous for wearing black during the French domination of Mexico in the 19th century, and the decorations of silver buttons reference all the silver people were stealing during chaotic times in Mexican history. These suits don't come cheap, by the way. They are all custom-made, and now they use a wider variety of colors beyond black.Pasa: Lamadrid also says of the mariachi look that "it exults in masculine energy that women also have appropriated." Do women have much of a role in mariachi culture?Kurland: Quite a bit, and this seems to be something that was largely born in Los Angeles. The only statue that stands on Mariachi Plaza is of a woman, Lucha Reyes. She was an acclaimed mariachi from the first half of the 20th century, and she spent part of her career in Los Angeles, where she is credited with breaking the gender barrier. Today there are some all-female mariachi groups, although groups tend to be all-male or all-female rather than mixed.Pasa: There are really three strands to your book: a discussion of mariachi culture as it plays out in this neighborhood, the photographic documentation of this world, and your family history and how it exemplifies the social history of Southern California. Were culturally mixed families such as yours common in early California?Kurland: Now we know that social mixture of that sort was not unusual, but that fact was not at all well known until quite recently. The multiracial origins of Los Angeles only came to light at the time of the city's bicentennial, in 1981, when there was a flurry of historical research. I grew up with this Spanish-heritage fantasy, loving the fact that some of my ancestors were espa隳les; but nobody knew much about the family's other racial backgrounds, how the L鏕ez line intersected with other lines. That's part of the California story.Pasa: What if the Hotel Mariachi had not been saved?Kurland: The most likely scenario is that the building would have been razed and the site would now look like every other corner in Los Angeles with some modern building. Or a slightly better case might have been that they wouldn't have torn it down but used it as a shell in which to construct modern condos. If it hadn't been saved, that neighborhood would be completely different, and so would mariachi culture. It would have just disappeared, and we came perilously close to that. But now it remains a special place."Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles" was published by the University of New Mexico Press in October. A booksigning is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Dec. 4 at the University of New Mexico Bookstore (2301 Central Ave. NE, Alburquerque). Call 505-277-5451 to confirm.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) Visit The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) at .santafenewmexican.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉