Cecilia Ballí on High School Mariachi Bands

Your Fellows project will be a book, Mariachi Dreams, which follows three high schools on the Texas-Mexico border as their school mariachis compete against each other. You wrote about this subject for The New York Times Magazine; why did you decide to expand it into a book?

It took me years to realize there was a rich narrative to tell within the student mariachi world. When I’d seen school mariachis profiled in the news, they tended to be feature stories that highlighted the beauty of youth connecting with their culture. It wasn’t until I became familiar with the Mariachi Extravaganza, an annual contest that is considered the national championship of school mariachis, that I began to learn how hyper-competitive this world was, how much training it took to get there, and how group rivalries sometimes mapped onto hometown rivalries in the students’ home communities. It reminded me of Friday Night Lights.

In the course of writing the magazine story, I realized this was also an opportunity to write in an intimate, more nuanced way about life along the U.S.-Mexico border, a region I’ve focused on throughout my career as a journalist and cultural anthropologist. I could capture its beauty and contradictions, as well as its history and deep sense of place. Plus, following three school teams, each with its own set of unique personalities, provided mounds of material.

You have reported widely on the U.S.-Mexico border. Is there something about Starr County (where the bands compete) that you think speaks to the current political moment?

Every community along the border both reflects the larger dynamics of the border and is wholly unique. The settlement of Starr County dates back to the mid-1700s, before the region was part of Texas or the United States, so it has a long and fascinating history. Today, like other parts of the Texas border, the area is swarmed with state troopers sent by the governor to police the border; I’ve gotten three tickets in the course of writing this book, and counting. Residents are divided on immigration and on which political party they think can best manage the border; Starr County flipped red in the 2024 presidential election for the first time since 1896. And yet, people remain deeply rooted in their Mexican culture—I like to say that it’s the most Mexican county in the nation, since about 97 percent of the population is Hispanic. The towns are starting to benefit from international trade, and wind farms are proliferating with the shift to clean energy. So yes, despite being such a small, isolated rural area, Starr County is in many ways a microcosm of transformations underway in America today.

You have a background in cultural anthropology. Are there academic tools you utilize in your reporting and writing?

Absolutely, my anthropological training deeply shapes how I work as a journalist, though it’s hard to say where one approach ends and the other begins. My biggest tool is ethnography, a method for conducting fieldwork that requires fine-tuned observation of social and cultural realities and deep immersion within communities, not unlike immersive journalism. But as anthropologists, we are asking different questions than journalists are—we’re not just there to capture the facts or a story, but to understand how different people and communities construct and give meaning to their world and how they do this in everyday life using language and culture and social relationships. As a journalist, when you can explore those questions alongside your main narrative, you can create a richer, more immersive story while illuminating bigger issues or aspects of the human experience.

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