An evening at Casa Bariachi

There’s something very bi-polar about mariachi music and, since it’s said to be the soul of Mexico, perhaps its people as well.

One minute a musician is thrusting his chest out and screaming “Ai-i-i-i-i-e-e-e-e,” and the crowd is with him, yelling “Viva yo!” and the next he weeping and bemoaning how he’s lost his heart, his soul, his very will to live. And everyone in the audience shakes their heads and weeps with him in misery.

It’s exhausting.

No place is this more evident that at the Guadalajara’s Casa Bariachi, where I went with friends Saturday night, a sort of Shakey’s-style Mexican restaurant with long wooden tables and barrel chairs where the locals go to celebrate birthdays by guzzling bottles of tequila and Squirt poured directly down their throats by denim-shirted waiters who stand behind the victim—er, celebrant—and hold their tilted chins to the sky while administering the double shot in a maneuver that oddly resembles a doctor jamming a tube down the throat of someone who has had a seizure. All the while, the birthday boy or girl’s friends clap and chant “Vaya, vaya, vaya!”

Not everyone at Casa Bariachi was celebrating a birthday, of course. Sitting next to us at our long bench was a very romantic couple. The young man, in fresh-pressed jeans and a wife-beater shirt, ordered a 6-pack of Squirt, and a bottle of Cazadores, and made his date, who was wearing pink hot pants, one cocktail after another until she decided to put her head on the table and take a little nap.

The warm-up act Saturday was four foklorico dancers and a singer, dressed up in a traje de charro, a sort of dressed-down mariachi outfit, who, I thought, looked and sounded a bit like Enrique Iglesias. To get the crowd into the evening, which isn’t really a problem here, the singer whips around the barn-like room, asking everyone “Cuando se vienen?”

“Guanajato…”

“Zapopan…”

“Chiapas…”

Then he asks for volunteers to come on stage for a dance contest, followed by another game to see if someone can land a grapefruit-sized round chunk of wood with a hole at the top onto a stick it’s tethered to. There are kid-sized versions of this toy, of course, but this is the manly version because the orb of wood is so big and heavy and difficult to position that if you fail, as is inevitable, you’re given a shot to drink (supposedly to help with the hand-eye coordination). And then another. And another.

The games are all great fun (at least everyone there Saturday night seemed to think so), but what everyone is really here for, other than to get completely borracho, or drunk (which explains the name of the restaurant), is to hear the house mariachi band, which has to be the largest group of mariachi players on a small stage you will ever see (the traditional mariachi band has 12 members but in this house of excess, 18 musicians is just barely enough).

There are so many musicians that, while all the games are going on, they must warm up their instruments wherever they can. A violinist stands in front of the women’s restroom tuning up while a guitarist plucks strings in the bar in front of a big plasma screen showing Beau Geste to only him and the bartender. Three trumpeters are at a table outside, blowing their horns towards the traffic, and the viola player stands in front of a glass display case with souvenir Casa Bariachi hats and t-shirts. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I only wish Toulouse Lautrec had been there to record it for posterity.