[Music]. [Mariachis]

[Archive of Photographic and Promotional Material for Mid-20th-Century Mariachi Musicians in Mexico and California]

[Various places in California, New York & Mexico: ca. 1950s-1960s]. Sixty items total, including fifty-five photograps and five posters. Generally light wear. Very good. Item #2410

An attractive archive of visual materials, including posters, broadsides, original photographs, and real photo postcards, that promote leading mariachi singers and musicians of the mid-20th century, including Salvador López, La Prieta Linda, José Alfredo Jiménez, Lucero Aguilar, Miguel Angel Montes, Francisco Avitia, Ignacio Jaime, Jorge de Crespo, and Alfredo “El Mayoral” Gonzalez. Notably, many of the larger pieces feature singer and actress Irma Dorantes (b.1934), one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. The widow of legendary Mexican ranchero singer and actor Pedro Infante, Dorantes enjoyed a string of hit songs in the 1950s and ‘60s, including her recording of “Recuerdos de Ipacarai” with El Mariachi Mexico de Pepe Villa.

“Mariachi music has origins deep in Mexican history. The sound of its string instruments and its oldest rhythms are rooted in Mexico’s colonial times (1519-1810); people from Spain and African slaves and their descendants mingled with hundreds of American Indian cultures to create a new Mexican culture marked by many regions, each with its own signature musical tradition. The music that was called ‘mariachi’ as early as the 1850s emerged from the ranches and small towns of western Mexico, particularly in the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, Colima, and Aguacalientes. When big-city radio stations, movies studios, and record companies took mariachi music to new audiences throughout and abroad in the 1930s, mariachi music was transformed into one of Latin America’s favorite musics. By the 1950s, its standard sound of two trumpets, three or more violins, vihuela (small guitar), and guitarrón (big bass guitar) was set. Since then, its repertoire of fast-paced songs, expressive canciones rancheras (‘country’ songs), polkas, syncopated huapangos, romantic boleros, and more has been heard throughout the Americas and around the world” (Smithsonian Folkways).

The present collection includes:

1) An original photograph (6 ½” x 7”) of José Alfredo Jiménez in performance. Jiménez (1926-73) was by far the most important, prolific, and popular composer of música ranchero in Mexico during the 20th century. His extraordinary repertoire of more than 1,000 songs encapsulated the sentiment, ideals, and concerns of the common man in a folksy yet poetic way.

2) Six black-and-white photographs (7” x 5”) of various musicians. Four are identified with holographic annotations on the verso, while another is accompanied by a typed press caption indicating that the image captures Las Hermanas Huerta performing “Cantando Bajo el Recuerdo”.

3) Forty-one black-and-white real photo postcards (3 ½” x 5 3/8”) of various musicians, all identified in the negative or on the verso. The photographs of Alfredo “El Mayoral” Gonzalez and La Prieta Linda are autographed.

4) Six press photographs (8” x 10”) of both solo performers and bands, including two images of Lorenzo Elisea y Sus Piratas and a shot of singer Amalia “La Tariácuri” Mendoza (1923-2001) on stage.

5) Original photograph (13 ¾” x 11”) on Irma Dorantes on horseback during a performance in New York. The undated image is signed by photographer F. Camacho on the recto. Dorantes was known for her equestrian shows and in 1964, she and her horses Gatillo de Oro and Justiciero headlined a residency at the Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles.

6) Lobby card (16 3/8” x 12 ½”) for “La Banda del Fantasma Negro” (1964), the Jaime Salvador film starring Irma Dorantes and Alvaro Zermeño.

7) Black-and-white poster (18 ¾” x 13 ¾”) of Irma Dorantes, reproducing a portrait of the singer by Mexican photographer Carlos Ysunza Nieto.

8) Large poster (17 ½” x 22 ½”) promoting a benefit performance of “Feria de la Cancion” featuring Irma Dorantes, Cuarteto Ruffino, and Trio Hermanos Martinez-Gil. Circa 1961, no place noted. Printed in blue on yellow cardstock, with a later horizontal crease.

9) Large poster (14” x 22”) for an August 22, 1964 performance by Irma Dorantes at the Rainbow Ballroom in San Jose, California, with opening acts by comic Rudy Frudy and Mariachi San Miguel. Printed by Woolever Press in Los Angeles on white cardstock with a rainbow gradient.

10) Oblong broadside (ca. 1958, 18 ¾” x 13 ¾”) advertising a coronation ball headlined by bandleader Paco Armenta and “el sensacional” Conjunto Tropical Santaneros” at Salon del Cllub de Leones in Calpulalpan, a municipality in Tlaxcala in southeastern Mexico. Printed in color on a thin sheet of white stock, with some loss to the upper corners.

Most of the material is unrecorded, with no listings in OCLC or elsewhere. In addition to highlighting many leading Mexican musicians of postwar era, this archive captures the fashion and aesthetics of mariachi at a formative moment in its evolution.

Price: $1,750.00