Sharing Music Across the U.S.-Mexico Border’s Metal Fence

A locked security zone resembling a prison is not the most obvious location for a musical gathering. But on Saturday, as they have every year since 2008, musicians assembled on either side of the border between the United States and Mexico, carrying traditional Mexican string instruments and dance shoes with clickety-clack wooden heels. Through the thick metal weave of the fence, the grids so tight that a pinkie could barely squeeze through, they struggled to make out the faces of their friends and musical colleagues who were gathered and facing them on the Tijuana side.

On Saturday, some 60 musicians traveled to the heavily patrolled enforcement zone oddly named Friendship Park for an annual musical event known as the Fandango Fronterizo. A heady mix of joyful fiesta and sober political statement, the Fandango is a gritty affirmation of son jarocho — a centuries-old string music tradition from rural Veracruz, a southern Mexican state along the Gulf of Mexico, that has strong Spanish, African and indigenous roots.

The fandango at the border did not start out as an overtly political act. But through the years, as the national debate over immigration has become ever more divisive and as violence in Mexico has continued, the event’s symbolism has deepened and grown more bittersweet. The fandango itself is a communal custom involving musicians gathered in a circle, from which son jarocho grew.

The idea for the event came from Jorge Castillo, a lanky 57-year-old librarian and musician with a salt-and-pepper beard who was born in El Paso and grew up in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. Mr. Castillo bought his first jarana, a stringed instrument, in 2007 and started attending fandangos in San Diego. Like many here, he quickly grew frustrated by the fact that many of his fellow musicians who lacked papers were unable to cross the border. Volunteering for a beach cleanup one day near the border site, Mr. Castillo had a revelation: “When I saw the fence, and the people on the other side, I thought, ‘Wow, this is the perfect place for a fandango.’”

When the event had its debut, “We didn’t know how we would feel,” Mr. Castillo recalled. “It was very powerful. The only thing that can cross besides the birds and the winds is the music.”

Since then, the fence has become increasingly militarized: Holes once big enough to accommodate Mexican popsicles or mangoes on a stick have been shrunk. As the wall becomes taller and thicker, “it has become a challenge to keep both sides in sync,” said Adrian Florido, a longtime organizer. “To see friends through the fence, you have to close an eye and peep.”

Organizing a two-nation event in a highly politicized, federally controlled space is not for the faint of heart. (Last year the Fandango was almost canceled because of concerns about contraband being smuggled in instrument cases.) Planning takes six months, often via Skype. To reach the bleak steel entry wall — at the southernmost corner of the continental United States — musicians lugged instruments a mile and a half from a parking lot, astride tire ruts of United States Border Patrol vehicles in the sands of Imperial Beach along the Pacific Ocean. Their ranks included those who could legally cross the border and those who could not. “The Fandango is a way to transform something very painful to immigrants into a space that heals,” said Carolina Martinez, a 34-year-old musician from Medellín, Colombia, whose parents still reside in her home city.

The custom weaves together music, poetic verse and foot percussion — petticoated dancers in swoopy skirts elaborately stomping out rhythms on a wooden platform. Popularized in the United States by Ritchie Valens’s hit interpretation of “La Bamba,” son jarocho evolved from the fandango and has become a spirited fixture on both sides of the border.

In solidarity with their border compadres, musicians participated in simultaneous fandangos in far-flung locations like New York, Zurich, Montreal, Mexico City and Tenosique, Tabasco, on Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.

By design, fandangos are communal and are not the place for prima donnas. In Mexico, they are held to honor patron saints and are staples at birthday parties, weddings and funerals. Eduardo Garcia, a professor and son jarocho teacher in San Diego, has compared the warm feeling of kinship of fandangos to a campfire in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s a practice that instills conviviencia, or being present with each other,” said Martha E. Gonzalez, an assistant professor at Scripps College and lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning Chicano rock group Quetzel, which she founded with her partner, Quetzal Flores, in Los Angeles. “The fandango calls a community into being.”

The call begins with “El Siquisiri,” a welcome song. On the Tijuana side, a city park next to a bullring, three master musicians who were invited guests appeared as flickers of light and color through the fence: Adriana Cao Romero, a harpist and dentist from Mexico City; Alddo Flores, from Veracruz, playing a carved gourd he strums with a bicycle spoke; and Felix Machucho, a 68-year-old farmer and wizened master of verse from rural Veracruz who had flown in an airplane for the first time to be there.

At a typical fandango, musicians encircle the tarima, or dance platform, the ritual’s spiritual heart. (The border version had two tarimas on either side of the fence.) Son jarocho musicians play a variety of guitarlike instruments: the eight-stringed jarana, which is strummed, and the more difficult four-string requinto, which carries the melody and is plucked with a long and somewhat lethal-looking pick carved from a bull’s horn. Once passé, the genre has had a resurgence over the past few decades. It has inspired a trans-border clutch of gifted artists like Tacho Utrera from Consolapan, Veracruz, revered for his elegant ebony and cedar requintos. On Saturday he kicked off the opening son.

At a music workshop in Tijuana last week, young beginners trained with elders in sombreros like Mr. Machucho, who comes from an august lineage and considers his knack for improvising verses “an inheritance,” he said. From the rooftop of a cultural center, multigenerational rhythms reverberated late into the night.

For many, especially those whose immigration status divides them from loved ones, fandangos serve as “a form of social glue,” said Elisabeth Le Guin, a music and musicology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. At the Fandango, musicians “make a community across borders through beauty,” she said.

The festive atmosphere and music — women with silk flowers in their hair; a multitasking male bass player cradling an infant; a dancer in San Diego swaying in unison with her soul sister in Tijuana — is in stark contrast to what is arguably the country’s most surreal public space. Access is restricted by United States Customs and Border Protection to a four-hour window on Saturdays and Sundays.

In an opening welcome that felt like a blessing, Mr. Castillo spoke of “the border that divides that ends up uniting.”

There would be five sons in three hours, including “Señor Presidente,” about corruption in Mexico, and the rousing “La Bamba,” played at a speedy clip with only 10 minutes to spare. The event concluded with the 90 or so musicians, from both sides of the fence, counting in unison from one to 43, a solemn reminder of the chilling disappearance of 43 college students in the state of Guerrero, just south of Mexico City, in 2014.

Jubilant melodies from the Tijuana side wafted through the air, a defiant coda as the steel gates on the United States snapped shut.

To Panquetzani, a Mexican herbalist from Long Beach who has studied the jarana with elders in Veracruz, juxtapositions like these make the Fandango Fronterizo so hauntingly compelling. “There’s beauty and there’s sadness — and that’s what son jarocho is all about,” she said.