Cindy Shea was 8 when she was asked what instrument she’d like to learn to play as part of her Hacienda Heights elementary school’s music program. She chose the trumpet, much to the chagrin of the boys in the class. “You can’t play trumpet: You’re a girl!” they cried.
Their words and similar epithets over the years fueled Shea’s desire to play that shiny brass instrument. She was no prodigy, didn’t know the first thing about notes and chords and her family didn’t value a musical education, so she had some hard work ahead.
Over the next 23 years, dogged determination, constant practice, university music courses and experience in bands playing weddings, nightclubs and concerts, landed her where she is today: The 31-year-old leader of a popular all-female band, the Mariachi Divas.
It’s an untraditional multi-cultural group, with a total of 20 core members of Cuban, Japanese, Swiss, Argentinean, Colombian, Panamanian, Puerto Rican, Samoan, Anglo and Mexican descent.
Shea, of Irish and Italian descent, said audiences who’ve never heard of her or her mariachi pop band usually snicker, wondering if the blue-eyed blonde can play Mexican mariachi music.
An earful of her trumpet solo in “El Niño Perdido” usually converts the naysayers. “Si tiene corazon” (Spanish for “she has heart”), a 70-year-old man from Guadalajara, Mexico was overheard saying at a recent Mariachi Divas concert in Orange County.
Though mariachi music is their foundation, the Divas’ sound incorporates jazz, salsa, cumbia, boleros
and tangos, among other beats. One of their most requested tunes is their jammin’ “Cumbia Medley-Guadalajara,” which opens with “El Mariachi Loco,” includes a danceable “La Cucaracha” and concludes with the mariachi staple “Guadalajara.”
“We’re very versatile,” Shea said. “We want to open people’s minds with our music. There are lots of people who think we shouldn’t mess with mariachi music, that we shouldn’t break the ‘rules.’ But, I think, there are no boundaries with music.”
Human harmony is at the core of her musical and life journey, she said.
“Music is a way of uniting our cultures,” Shea said. “It’s important for unity to bring our cultures together. We should all be fusing together. That’s America, after all. That’s the world.”
She is a single mother, bringing up her four-year-old son Alexandro in Burbank, and she wants him to learn that music is like life: there are crescendos and allegros along with deceptive cadences, falsettos and dissonance, but the finales are scored with the notes you write yourself.
