37th Annual MARIACHI USA with fireworks

Your grandmother would have cried at this and you would have pretended not to notice. That is the honest thing about mariachi — it goes straight past whatever defenses you built in your twenties and finds the part of you that still belongs to a family.

Now put it in the Hollywood Bowl. Thousands of people in that shell under an open sky, trumpets coming back off the hillside, violins carrying up into the dark where the sound finally has somewhere to go. Then fireworks, over a crowd that dressed for the occasion and sings along in a language some of them only half speak and all of them somehow know.

It has been happening for decades now — long enough that people sitting in those seats were brought here as children and are now bringing children of their own.

Bring your mother. Bring your father. Bring whoever taught you the words without ever sitting you down to teach you.