Lanier High names music building for a mariachi legend
Paying tribute to a mariachi legend, a San Antonio high school has named its music building after the late Belle Ortiz, a teacher and performer who brought mariachi instruction into schools across Texas and the U.S.
Board members and other officials of the San Antonio Independent School District gathered Thursday evening at Lanier High School on the West Side for a dedication ceremony for the Belle Ortiz Music Building.
The SAISD board approved the renaming in October.
Ortiz, who died in July at 90, and her Grammy-winning husband, Juan Ortiz, were both champions and practitioners of mariachi.
“Belle Ortiz, in particular, helped bring the gospel of mariachi to the city’s public schools, then to local colleges, and influenced the growth of mariachi education throughout Texas and beyond,” Express-news columnist Elaine Ayala wrote last year.
In July, Ortiz spent her final days in a tiny bedroom in her granddaughter’s Northwest Side home, receiving musical tributes from San Antonio’s mariachis and video messages from musicians across the country.
In 1970, Ortiz established the nation’s first high school ballet folklorico program at Lanier, followed by the first high school mariachi program at Jefferson High on the West Side. Ortiz later became director of SAISD’S cultural arts program
In 1974, she started the city’s first college-level mariachi program at San Antonio College.
Ortiz grew up on the West Side, where her parents ran a neighborhood icehouse and where she, as a toddler, performed “pretend piano” in front of an open oven door, Ayala wrote in her column.
She had started music lessons at age 4, and by 12 she was playing the piano with professional orchestras.
She majored in performance and music education at what’s now Our Lady of the Lake University, studying on a scholarship from the League of United Latin American Citizens. She began her teaching career at Edgewood ISD, where she taught kindergarten. Then she was an elementary school music teacher at Northside ISD before moving to SAISD.
In 1978, she and her husband founded the ensemble now known as Mariachi Campanas de América. After performing initially under a different name, the group was rebranded in Belle’s honor — campanas is Spanish for bells — at the suggestion of the late José “Pepe” Martinez Sr., a leader of the famed Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán.
“Mariachi used to be considered, even by Latinos who looked down on it, as cantina music,” Ortiz said in a 2012 interview with the Expressnews. “Now look at it.”