A Mariachi Call to Gather

The first thing we heard was the trumpets. Two of them, bright and brassy, floating out through the camp just as the first free swim period was winding down, and for a few seconds nobody could quite tell what was happening. As the girls followed the sound, now clearly coming from the dining hall, they were excited and surprised to see four musicians standing on the porch, dressed head to toe in the ornate charro suits you picture when you imagine mariachi, dark jackets with rows of silver buttons down the sleeves and wide bow ties in a deep, fitting red. Two of them played trumpets. A third sang and also played an enormous round-backed bass guitar called a guitarrón, and the fourth strummed a vihuela, a small five-stringed cousin of the guitar. A real mariachi band, Mariachi International, had come to Rockbrook! We’ve done this only once before, years ago, and today the surprise turned out to be every bit as fun as we’d hoped. That sound of trumpets across the hill was a call to gather, and gather we did.

The reason we were all streaming toward the dining hall in the first place was already waiting inside, and it was worth every step. This was tamale day, and around here, tamale day is a big deal. Once each summer, and only once, Rick and his friends in the kitchen set aside several days to make authentic corn tamales completely from scratch. It takes time, care, and plenty of willing hands. They roast and shred the chicken, soak the dried corn husks until they soften, cook down a deep red Guajillo chili sauce, and mix the masa, a paste of finely ground corn, lime, oil, and stock, until it is just right. Then, one by one and entirely by hand, each tamale is spread and filled (some with cheese and some with chicken) and folded into its husk pocket before being layered into enormous pots and steamed. When you need a thousand of them to feed the whole camp, you begin to understand why it takes three days. Part of the fun of eating them is the unwrapping, peeling back the warm husk to find the savory middle, a small first for the many girls who had never tasted a true tamale before.

Then the band came inside, and lunch turned into something uniquely fun and festive. The girls were up out of their seats within minutes, clapping along and inventing dance moves, counselors spinning them in circles, and before long the entire dining hall had fallen into the goofy, synchronized joy of the Macarena, a few hundred hands turning and hips swiveling more or less together, grins as wide as they could go. The band played their classics, like “La Cucaracha,” and then they surprised us with a mariachi rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and a version of “Rocky Top” that had us singing along. You could see the delight on everyone’s faces as we danced and clapped to every song.

After lunch, one of our counselors found me to say that she’d been a camper here the last time a mariachi band came to Rockbrook. She still remembers that day, all these years later, one of the bright fixed points from her childhood. It’s not every day you enjoy a lunch of warm, fresh tamales with a mariachi band! I suspect some of the girls dancing this afternoon will remember today just the same, a trumpet floating up the hill and a whole camp eager to join the fun of a mariachi lunch.