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The 3rd annual Voz de la Paloma competition at the Palo Alto Performing Arts Center aimed to showcase girls and women at various points in their mariachi careers, while honoring the life of ranchera singer Beatriz Llamas.
28 women and girls competed in Voz de la Paloma on Saturday, spanning five different divisions: middle school, high school, college, adult amateurs, and adult professionals. They wore colorful outfits like bright pink charro suits and black gowns embellished with roses as they sang mariachi classics to an enthusiastic audience.
12-year-old Noelani Vasquez, a competitor in the middle school division, closed her eyes and swayed with the music as she sang.
She said she was grateful for the opportunity to perform. “I really like singing when I can just let myself go and express myself," Vasquez said. "And I really like doing it through mariachi.”
Voz de la Paloma means voice of the dove. It’s a competition to honor Beatríz Llamas, a ranchera singer from Aguascalientes, Mexico. She was known as La Paloma de La Norte - the dove of the north.
Llamas began her career at age 13 by entering a music contest in San Antonio. Her decades-long career was marked with successes; she performed at Madison Square Garden in 1967 and was a National Endowment of the Arts fellow in 2019.
She died in 2023 at the age of 87. Her son John Lopez is the director of the Mariachi program at Palo Alto College and a retired music professor. After her death, Lopez wanted to honor her life and legacy through this competition.
“These kinds of opportunities are the exact opportunities that my mom was trying to create for herself and the colleagues around her, the people around her," she said.
For Lopez, this is a showcase of talent and a labor of love, for a woman and her music that was larger than life.
“If she were in a room, you would know where she is," she said. "She was that person. She stuck out either with her voice or her laugh or her look, and it's nothing that she did on purpose. It's just the magnetism of the person she was."
Voz de Paloma was first held in 2023 through the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center with about 10 contestants. It’s now grown to need an auditorium for its audience size of roughly 300 people.
Esparanza’s Executive Director Graceila Sanchez said these events are crucial to getting more women involved in mariachi music.
“In the musical world, it's still a man's world," Sanchez said. "So how do we shift that? Part of it is kind of giving space and recognition to the women and the girls, and that's what this project is, especially in mariachi, ranchera, conjunto music."
By the end of the competition, Noelani Vasquez placed third in the middle school division.
The winner of the women’s professional division is Hazel Rose Suarez.
Suarez, dressed in a bright green charro suit, said that mariachi needs more prominent women’s voices.
“When it comes to women singing mariachi, it's way more powerful and way more impactful when it comes from a woman, because … there's no anger like a woman scorned," she said. "And the majority of this mariachi music is like, we're telling them, we got it, we're here, and we ain't going nowhere.”
The competition ended with students from Palo Alto’s mariachi program and all contestants paying tribute to the city that they love by playing “Mi San Antonio Querido” — an alternate version of the song “Mexico Lindo y Querido.”
