Linda Ronstadt, who comes from a German-Mexican family, has a long history with Mexican music. In 1988 she appeared on Broadway, below, performing “Canciones de Mi Padre.”

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

SAN FRANCISCO - Even now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario.
“I would flirt with him,” she recalls wryly, her beckoning eyes and heartshaped lips still echoing the days when she was decreed “Rock’s Venus” by Rolling Stone magazine. “One night I heard music and ran to the window. I peeked through the curtain, and there was Mario with two taxis full of mariachis serenading me with firecrackers.”
To Ms. Ronstadt, whose roots are deeply embedded in Mexican soil, it was the ultimate seduction. “These are big-voiced songs, filled with the exuberance of nature, the fertility of the earth, love and romance,” she says of mariachi music, the focus of much of her artistic passion since she left rock behind in the early ‘80s.
Ms. Ronstadt’s later career has included pop standards with Nelson Riddle, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway, country music , French Cajun and, with “Canciones de Mi Padre,” mariachi - which reconnected her to her Tucson, Arizona, childhood as the granddaughter of a German-Mexican mining engineer and rancher whose mariachi band serenaded the populace from a now-defunct bandstand in the city’s central plaza.
Now she is transforming herself again, this time as the consulting artistic and educational director of the Mexican Heritage Plaza’s 17th Annual San Jose Mariachi and Latin Music Festival in late September in San Jose, California.
The event is one of dozens of mariachi festivals and conferences that have flourished around the United States since the San Antonio International Mariachi Conference was founded in 1979. Most notably they have become an attraction for young Mexican-American musicians , who come for workshops with celebrity masters like Nati Cano and Randy and Steve Carrillo of Mariachi Cobre. For young mariachis it is the equivalent of studying guitar with Keith Richards and vocals with Mick Jagger.
“There’s a totally different energy exchanged,” Ms. Ronstadt says of the mariachi scene, which draws entire families. “There’s not some drunk yelling out ‘Heat Wave’ when you were singing ‘Heart Like a Wheel,’” one of her bestknown songs.
Mariachi emerged in the northwestern Mexican state of Jalisco in the late 19th century, sung by musicians who traveled from village to village for saints days and fiestas. During the Mexican revolution mariachi soldiers played corridas to Pancho Villa and other heroes; afterward the rousing melodies incorporating indigenous rhythms became a patriotic symbol of Mexican nationhood.
Despite its prominence, including in movies and radio broadcasts of the 1930s, the genre was viewed as slightly disreputable. It was in America that the image began to change. Almost 30 years ago the San Antonio conference, spawned by the Chicano civil rights movement, helped legitimize the musicians as marquee performers and inspire inclusion of mariachi in national music education. Today about 500 public schools offer mariachi classes .
Ms. Ronstadt used her stardom to raise the profile of Mexican music. “Canciones de Mi Padre,” released in 1987 and her first album of traditional mariachi music, became the biggest selling non-English album in United States history at the time, with sales of more than two million copies.
“She put us on center stage,” said Mr. Cano, 75, who recently performed with the mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman and the Mexico City Philharmonic in Los Angeles. “After Linda mariachis became popular in concert halls, not just at the cantinas and the pinata parties.”
Through the music of her father and grandfather, Ms. Ronstadt seemed finally to inhabit herself.
“There’s a lot of homesickness in Mexican music, a profound yearning because of the need to migrate, which is why I relate to it so much,” Ms. Ronstadt said, sitting on her sofa sipping tea, her drug of choice. “I left home when I was 17, and it was quite a wrench. I was homesick my whole life.”