Belen Escobedo
Panfilo’s Güera: Fiddler of San Antonio, Texas
by Dan Margolies
It’s not only hard to describe Belen Escobedo’s gardens, it’s hard even to comprehend what you are seeing. Flowers, trees, vegetables, vines, and who-knows-exactly-what of local and Texas native plants grow everywhere, in, over, and through things in two yards. Plants assert themselves alongside terraces, awnings, containers of all descriptions, bird baths, signs, statuary, old rusted things, compelling little tableaux of children’s toys, collectibles, antiques. It’s the stuff of the universe. All told, Belen’s garden kingdoms are the kind of super abundant spaces of life and love that are just as equally unplanned as they are clearly not accidental. You couldn’t reproduce them if you tried. Magical, really.
Belen’s gardens are like the woman and her music. Grounded but ineffable, happily connecting worlds and utterly singular in their vision and impact. Belen Escobedo goes her own way with her music and does it for its own sake and nothing else.
Belen is a master of the largely disappeared fiddle music of the Texas-Mexican borderlands. She has a truly exhaustive knowledge of the tunes and songs of Texas and Mexico and a clear sense for how they should be played and expressed in a band setting. But that only captures some of the achievements in her adventurous life. Though trained as a classical violinist as a child, Belen went to work out of necessity as a professional mariachi. She started gigging as a young teenager at a time when it was still a novel and quite transgressive thing for women to do. She had the virtuosic chops and the strong will essential to thrive in the male-dominated and quite tough life of a South Texas mariachi musician. But she also never lost sight of her desire to play all of the music she loved as soon as she could find other musicians who could keep up and get the sound she demands.
Belen was born and raised on the South Side of San Antonio, Texas and still lives there-- Tejano & Proud, as her bumper sticker says. The South Side is an evocative and unique area in the city. It’s a part of town not for the faint of heart. This was especially true back in the era Belen was coming up, when the South Side merged into ranchland. Tejanos from the South Side embrace the uniqueness of the area and stress their differences from the legendary conjunto world of the West Side. People learned how to comport themselves in that environment, and how to survive. Older San Antonio musicians still sometimes refer to their ability to keep up by saying “I can defend myself.” The South Side yielded tough people who don’t take any nonsense. Belen is one of them.
The South Side is as musically rich as the whole city, and growing up Belen absorbed the music that accompanied the local rhythms of life in Texas. Her father Emilio Escobedo was a truck driver who loved truck driving music. Belen spent many nights riding with him, keeping him awake on his routes, listening to Norteño and classic Texas country music on the radio. “Diesel, sweat, and beer is how my father smelled,” she says—an evocation of girlhood that could easily become a country song.
Along with that, Belen listened to the classic Norteño being played on the radio at home. “I listened to Los Alegres de Terán all the time!” she recalls. Los Alegres was the most influential and well-loved accordion and bajo sexto duo, playing magnificent songs with tight harmonies. They were so popular in the borderlands that legend held that all the village dogs of Northern Mexico could sing their songs. Musicians of a certain age can remember when their music played constantly in the cantinas throughout the city. Belen plays and sings many of their songs to this day.
Belen likewise absorbed the fiddle traditions of the region, which came to her almost as a birthright. El Ciego Melquíades (Melquíades Rodríguez), the famous blind fiddler brought to modern ears by an Arhoolie Records reissue, actually played at her parent’s wedding. Later, as a performer, Belen met him when she was working as a fiddler for vaudeville type shows between movies at the Alameda theatre downtown. Incredibly, in one of those confluences that seems to happen regularly in San Antonio, the same night she also met the dancer Resortes and the comic Cantiflas!
Like so many Tejanos in South Texas, Belen’s family comes across the region with Mexican, European, and indigenous background. ‘I’m a legit mestizo!” she says with a laugh. Ending up with fair skin and quite blonde hair, Belen was given the nickname güera, which means blondie. It is an affectionate term, and both her family and friends still use it, along with about a half dozen other nicknames as in the custom of the region. Belen’s beloved maternal grandfather was named Panfilo Padilla, and it is in honor of him and his love and support of her music that Belen has adopted the name he called her for her first CD (on Spring Fed Records) and for her band: Panfilo’s Güera.
Wanting to play music as a young kid, Belen was at first stymied by an inability to afford music lessons. She brought fliers home to her mother advertising lessons but was told “you keep asking me for things that I can’t give you.” Belen was told she was being selfish for trying to pursue music. But soon she was astonished to learn in fourth grade that the school would give free lessons and even provide an instrument. After some begging, Belen got her mother to agree. “Changed my whole life,” she says. “The teachers saw how involved I was with it and that anything they taught me, bam-- it went in!” She had to turn in her instrument at the end of every school year until she graduated from high school, when her violin teacher bought her an instrument. “I still have that instrument. I still play it.”
Belen developed her musical sensibility caught between the two worlds of formal musical education and the music of South Side San Antonio. “I was playing in the school band and orchestra. Learning formalities, of music, technique, all of that stuff in school. But at home, it was all [radio station] KCOR, Alegres de Terán. Doing chores, you just always had a radio on. I was doing the washing, heard music. I didn’t know I was going to be a musician. And that was when Vicente Fernandez first came up. So I heard a lot of mariachi too. I was always listening. In school I was learning all the formal stuff. It was the best of both worlds!” Soon the other kids at school realized she could play all the music they really wanted to learn and she taught them. She even taught Adolph Hofner’s daughter (a drummer) how to play “Maria Elena” on the violin.
Belen did not go out and play with other people for some time. She lived in a very traditional home. “I was not allowed to speak to anybody. I wasn’t allowed to go play music wherever I wanted.” On Sundays, she played at Church, for the mass. “That’s when I learned the whole mass protocol,” she says, which has been useful since today she still plays for masses and funerals regularly. Julio Casas, a very popular mariachi singer at the time, came up to her at the church and invited her to play with mariachis. This launched the first phase of her career as a mariachi, which continues to this day. “Mariachi I learned on the streets,” she says. “My teachers were men from Mexico.”
Belen played professional mariachi music in to save money for her education. After finishing college at St Mary’s University and getting an M.A. from Texas A&M-Kingsville paid for with mariachi earnings, she began a career teaching orchestra and band in the San Antonio Independent School District. She retired after more than thirty years of inspiring students, many of whom she maintains contact with to this day. Belen also proudly did a stint in the Texas State Guard as a band leader, playing French horn (another difficult instrument she mastered on the side in high school). After deploying for emergency assistance following the devastation of Houston by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Belen completed her service and now focuses entirely on playing her own music as she pleases.
Belen is both abashed that she chose the rough life of a mariachi and proud of her ability to excel in that difficult world. Part of her wishes she had fulfilled her promise and dreams, and those of her teacher Gilbert Fieros, to become a classical performer. She had the skill to do it, but the realities of growing up where and when she did meant that Belen immediately chose instead to became a working musician playing gigs. She actually had been offered a full ride to the University of Texas at Austin to study French horn and another full scholarship to go to Mexico to join Mariachi Vargas De Tecalitlán as a violinist. But her mother, steeped in old understanding of a woman’s proper and subordinate role, denied her these opportunities.
Mariachis are ubiquitous in San Antonio, and the work is extremely hard. Belen had to master the enormous and quite complex mariachi repertoire and to be able to play any song in any key at any moment in four part harmonies with other violinists. “Mexico has a lot of different regions with different rhythms. If you we were playing ballet folklorico, we had to learn all the music from the regions. If the group did not have a marimba or harp player, I had to play those lines on the fiddle. That was hard. Now everybody has marimbas and arpas, trying to be authentic. But then they didn’t always have it. You gave the line to the fiddle player. Closest thing to playing the lead line. You’d better know your stuff. And no way to get off beat because of the dancers!” Mistakes were not accepted by the other players, and there were no second chances. “Better not make mistakes, or you’d lose your job,” she recalls. ‘And I needed my job!”
Belen also had to constantly attend to an unequal set of rules for her as a woman. In the band setting, Belen was not allowed to speak to customers or to look at them as she played. She could not smile. “I was taught not to smile growing up and in the band as well.” She learned to develop the ability of looking off in the distance while playing to avoid any kind of problem or reprimand. Playing in restaurants and being paid by the song is familiar and it is a big part of a mariachi’s regular gig. But working mariachis in Texas play absolutely anywhere depending on who hires for the gig. The groups were not cheap to hire, and they played for some interesting events. Belen played for dove, quail, and skeet shoots, for ranch fiestas, and at dance halls such as the Farmer’s Daughter or the Gold Stallion Dance Hall. She has played for events that might be best described as “underworld.” Mariachis traveled armed with knives and guns as a lot of the venues were rough places. Once, as a young woman playing at one of these dicier gigs at a restaurant, Belen was put in a peculiar position because she was the only woman present and was presumed to be unthreatening. Two tough guys made a wager for a large satchel of cash and left it entrusted to her. Terrified, she remained awake at the venue for the entire night, cash in hand, guarded by her band mates until the wager was settled and she could hand off the winnings to the victor.
Belen also worked as violinist with Mariachi Aguila for the Sal y Pimiento show, for radio broadcasts, and for promotional tours travelling across Texas. She toured with artists such as Lorenzo Monteclaro, Amalia Mendoza, Antonio Aguilar, Lucha Villa, Chayo, and others. During this time, Belen also recorded very widely with mariachis for the most important studies in San Antonio such as Salome Gutierrez (D.L.B. Records), José Morante (Norteño and Sombrero Records), Joey International, and Toby Torres (C.R.S.). She recorded with so many bands that a full accounting is not really possible. As a hired gun she was not given credit on the recordings.
Belen began to play regularly with people in the conjunto world after she fiddled for a play on the life of Lydia Mendoza at the Guadalupe Theatre, along with Chucho Perales, Jesse Borrega, and Ray Symczyk and others. Chucho and Ray took her to an Easter Sunday party at Rudy Lopez’s ranch, which is where she had the chance to play some music that she really loved. At the party, Belen met Ramon “Rabbit” Sanchez, a legendary and irrepressible bajo sexto player from Corpus Christi who is very well known for his progressive sensibility combined with old school sound and technique. In Rabbit, Belen had finally found a musician capable of following the complicated and uncommon tunes she wanted to play conjunto style. “I just jammed with Rabbit. God put us together. I was not looking for anything.” This was the moment she began more regularly to play old borderlands tunes, classic rancheras, and to unwittingly help return the conjunto tradition back toward its roots in fiddle-bajo sexto music. “It was always fun to play with conjuntos,” she said. “You don’t have to play all these specific things, have to play certain songs with mariachi. When I play the conjunto stuff with a bajista, it is alot of fun. Just fun. It still is.”
Before accordions become dominant in conjunto music, the fiddle was the most common instrument. A very large number of older conjunto accordionists and other musicians still active today recall a time when their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers played fiddles for dances and other social events. Rabbit’s father was a violinist, for example, so was bajista Toby Torres’s father, accordionist Lala Garza’s father, and so on down the line. The accordion gradually took over, and the style has been all but lost and forgotten. There were great players like Santiago Morales (called “El Ranchero”) and the accompaniment was the 12 string bajo sexto and the contrabajo (upright bass). Very little borderland fiddle music recorded on 78 has been re-released except for El Ciego Melquíades and a handful of other performer’s tracks.
Belen easily played all the old timey conjunto music. “Chucho and Valerio Longoria, they really took me under their wing. They kept asking me if I could play this or that. And I’d say, yeah! And they grew very melancholy listening. Somebody in their family, either grandfather or father played this stuff, it brought memories back. It confused me a bit. To me it was like breathing, I ate slept and lived this music. It reminded them of somebody. They would say ‘how do you know this stuff?’ I don’t know, I just do!”” Chucho and Valerio were very involved in the Conjunto Heritage Taller in San Antonio, and Belen was invited to play with them and Rabbit, “We’d have blast playing. There other heavies around like Henry Zimmerle. Some people loved the fiddle. Some people would want accordion. It’s an acquired taste.”
Many of the polkas and huapangos played in the old days are still popular today. There are also less common older pieces like redovas, mazurkas, schottisches, waltzes, paso dobles, tangos, danzónes, and others. Belen plays all of this stuff, and knows the full repertoire of these older musicians. She doesn’t seem to have a limit to her knowledge when it comes to Mexican and Texas music. Asked if she knows a specific tune, she replies with actual modesty, “who doesn’t?”
The players in the old days were almost all men; women musicians were exceedingly rare and are still uncommon in conjunto (though becoming more common as bandleaders in Norteño nowadays). Belen is highly unusual for not only playing conjunto on the fiddle, but doing so as a bandleader. She has a very clear vision for her music and sound and tells sidemen she plays with exactly what she wants to hear. Today she performs as the head of her own mariachi only for events she feels moved to play, and she is unquestionably the band leader. Most of her musical energy is directed to her band with Rabbit and with her husband Ramon Gutierrez, called Belen y Tocayo. (Tocayo means two people with the same name) or, when Rabbit is not available to play, to Panfilo’s Güera.
Belen met Ramon right when he began playing mariachi music after a long career in conjunto singing and playing bass, and about a decade later they were married. Ramon possesses a voice of such power and passion that it is not possible in writing to relay the pleasure of hearing him sing. Like Belen, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of mariachi, conjunto, and Norteño music and he loves to play all the time. Belen did not sing before playing with Ramon, but unsurprising their voices blend together perfectly. Ramon is a multi-instrumental, playing all the conjunto and mariachi string instruments including bajo sexto, bass, guitarron, guitarra de golpe, vihuela, and guitar. With Panfilo’s Güera, Ramon plays the tololoche, a style of Mexican bass more similar to the contra bajos of the old recordings and old string bands. Ramon is widely considered the best old school bassist in San Antonio and has played and recorded with all manner of conjunto legends including Flaco Jimenez and a whos-who of conjunto greats in San Antonio. Ramon has been playing conjunto professionally since the early 1970s, when he recorded with Los Pajaritos, after being signed to Falcon Records by no less than Los Alegres de Terán. Ramon then led a succession of his own conjuntos in San Antonio over the years before as well as constant gigging as a sideman with other groups most days a week.
Along with Ramon, Panfilo’s Güera features Virginio Castillo, a master traditional bajista from San Antonio who has been playing for more than half a century. Virginio was born in Mexico and moved in 1950 to the South Side of San Antonio at the age of ten. He did farm work in the cabbage and cauliflower field pictured on the front cover of the Panfilo’s Güera CD, and lived off in the distance just beyond those fields. Virginio, who still lives on the South Side, played and recorded with a number of conjuntos throughout his life while also driving a truck and doing a wide variety of other work. When not performing with Belen, Virginio Castillo y Sus Trovadores continues to play for dancers at cantinas and VFWs throughout San Antonio.
In addition to regular appearances throughout San Antonio, Belen has recently become highly sought after on the festival circuit. Belen y Tocayo performed as a featured artist at the Festival of Texas Fiddling in Burton, Texas in 2015 and Panfilo’s Güera was featured at the Festival in Blanco, Texas in 2017. With conjunto accordion legend Lorenzo Martinez, Belen played at the Austin String Band Festival in 2017, and a painting of the two playing is currently being used for the poster for the 2018 AFTM festival. Lorenzo regularly performs with Panfilo’s Güera, although he is not on this recording. In July, 2018, Belen will be featured at the prestigious Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington.
In December, 2017, Belen was awarded the Master Texas Fiddler Award at the Festival of Texas Fiddling in recognition of her significance as a one of the only people (and only woman) maintaining the rich traditions of Texas-Mexican fiddling. Characteristically, when this Master Texas Fiddler Award was announced to the festival crowd, Belen was overwhelmed with emotion and almost frozen in place for a beat. It was a moving and powerful moment for all in attendance, and a testament to her character and humility. Belen Escobedo has led a life of focus and hard work, constantly reminded from many quarters that there was a diminished or constrained role just waiting for her to follow. Instead Belen has chosen to carve her own path and to revere traditions at the same time she is paving new musical paths forward.