College of Southern Nevada’s Mariachi Plata vocalists Precious Carrasco and Yasmine Duenes pose for a portrait, Friday Dec. 18, 2020.
Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020 | 2 a.m.
The best of the brightest young mariachis in the United States come from the College of Southern Nevada.
In only its second year, the school’s Mariachi Plata ensemble placed two vocalists in the top three at the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza, the de facto national championships staged this month for student mariachis from elementary school through college. Yasmine Duenes was first and Precious Carrasco took third.
Mariachi is a traditionally Mexican genre that fuses opera with folk music. Its solo singers must tap into their dramatic side for compositions that are technically demanding and full of belting and crescendo. The songs are big. So are the bands. Everyone is a dual instrumentalist and singer, and they work together.
Yasmine Duenes, vocalist in College of Southern Nevada's Mariachi Plata, poses for a portrait, Friday Dec. 18, 2020.
Precious Carrasco, vocalist in College of Southern Nevada's Mariachi Plata, poses for a portrait, Friday Dec. 18, 2020.
Normally, full bands would travel to San Antonio, Texas, for the annual competitions in group performance and solo vocalist categories. The group category was sidelined this year — there was no way to make it work during the COVID-19 pandemic because lagging internet speeds would make distanced individual performances over video conferencing hard to stitch together, and if done in person, the signature forceful singing and trumpet blasts risk spreading the virus. But solo singers could perform to backing tracks on video.
CSN has offered mariachi since 2003, mostly as an open-enrollment course. Fine arts department chair Bob Bonora said the college launched it in response to the Clark County School District’s burgeoning mariachi program, but the college’s class didn’t meet the minimum enrollment every semester and CSN was in danger of axing the program.
Bonora brought on Fernando and Lupe Gonzales, the husband-and-wife teaching team from Del Sol Academy for the Performing Arts, to bring it back from the brink.
The duo had already grown CCSD’s program from five schools to 21, so they had the connections to gather an elite, audition-only competition squad for the college to complement the open ensemble.
It took immediately. Last year, the full band placed third in the group competition and two singers, Carrasco and José Mejía, finished second and first, respectively, in the vocalist category.
Carrasco started singing as a sixth-grade mariachi at J.D. Smith Middle School. She is studying music at CSN with the goal of continuing to UNLV to become a music teacher. She’s already an instructional aide at Bailey Middle.
Her classmate Duenes has similar aspirations, and helps with the mariachi class at Fremont Middle. Both young women also play violin, one of the main mariachi instruments along with the trumpet, the bass-toned guitarrón and the higher-pitched five-string vihuela guitar.
Carrasco looks up most to her mother, also a singer, who exhorts to Carrasco, “I wanna feel it.”
“If you ask her to sing and you’re at a restaurant, she’ll sing right there,” Carrasco said. “She’ll perform for you.”
The competition judges felt Carrasco’s interpretation of “¿Qué Creías?,” a Selena song that has become a mariachi standard.
Duenes took first with “Puñalada Trapera,” but it was only through cajoling and on top of a sore throat. She didn’t think she was good enough to get past the hundreds of people who auditioned. Lupe Gonzales said Duenes has no idea what a powerhouse she is.
“I wanted her to believe in herself,” Gonzales said, piping in for the shy Duenes. “The world deserves to hear her voice.”
“Yasmine’s classic interpretation of ‘Puñalada Trapera’ blew judges away and gave them the feel of listening to Amalia Mendoza,” contest organizers wrote in a post recapping the contest.
The Gonzaleses are used to bringing up young artists. Thousands of talented local musicians would stop singing and playing after graduating from high school. The Gonzaleses keep them playing and connect them to their culture.
Achievements like these should also be a boost for their peers.
“With everything that’s going on, we need something like this,” Lupe Gonzales said. “These girls are inspiring to other kiddos.”
Fernando Gonzalez said Texas is the leading incubator for scholastic and collegiate mariachi, but Vegas is closing the gap.
“They’ve been dominating the academic mariachi world for a long time but now the Las Vegas schools are starting to come up,” he said. “We have a bigger program here than they do, so it’s only a matter of time (before) we start to compete with them, and we are now.”
