Under a soaring canopy of old pecan trees, Anthony Medrano gave the signal, igniting the mariachi ensemble to perform a searing rendition of a song that many recognize by its first few notes.
Violins led the way, though their warm tones were quickly echoed by the brassy hum from a set of trumpets, the steady plunk of guitarróns, and crisp guitar strums. It was June 2022, and an audience of mourners had gathered in Uvalde’s town square. Medrano, a longtime violinist, had traveled there from San Antonio with nearly fifty fellow mariachis who had answered the call to console the shattered community with music after the shooting at Robb Elementary that ended the lives of nineteen students and two teachers. “Amor Eterno,” a heartbreaking ballad and perhaps the most famous song by Mexican icon Juan Gabriel, would undoubtedly be on their short set list. The song was becoming a common tribute alongside memorials of white crosses and masses of flowers that appear when this kind of tragedy visits predominantly Latino communities.
An opening melody filled the air, flitting back and forth in what Medrano describes as little waves of grief that usher you into the song’s despair. “It’s like putting your hand in water and splashing it on your face instead of jumping in the pool,” he said in a phone interview in June when I caught him between rehearsals for an annual mariachi festival he directs at the Hollywood Bowl. “It preps you and gets you there. I think that’s the beauty of this arrangement. It leads you. It’s a prayer.”
In mismatched traditional suits and oversized silk bow ties, the mariachis traveled to Uvalde with an offering, a dirge for the town that was forced onto the unending road of grief. Even though they don’t typically play together, they were so accustomed to performing the song (often at gravesites in the moments just before a casket is lowered into the ground) that they comfortably pulled off an emotional rendition. Mariachis are cultural consolers, but the ease with which the musicians—along with the crowd gathered around an expanding memorial that smelled of melted candle wax and fresh flowers—fell into the tune was a reflection of the nearly universal touchstone for mourning that “Amor Eterno” has become for Mexican Americans in Texas and throughout the country.
That musical kinship was immortalized earlier this year when the Library of Congress inducted “Amor Eterno” into its National Recording Registry, one of 25 recordings deemed “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time” based on their cultural or historical significance. Juan Gabriel’s anthem was selected alongside the sounds of Blondie’s “Parallel Lines,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” and the Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces.”
Written as a tribute to his late mother, Juan Gabriel’s song describes his desperation for a reprieve from the heartache and lonely darkness brought on by her absence. While even the best translation of “Amor Eterno”—eternal love—would hardly do its words justice, the chorus ebbs and flows between deep sorrow over wanting to look into her eyes and the melancholic hope that they’ll be reunited one day so that their love can continue. It’s the sort of song one feels deep in the chest. Its sadness dances on the skin of the arms as its somber tones roll over the body in those waves Medrano described as an opening from which grief can flow.
The bolero ranchero, a slow ballad played in the traditional style of mariachi, was initially popularized by Spanish singer Rocío Dúrcal, who released her recording, produced by Juan Gabriel, in 1984. In Mexico and the United States, innumerable versions would be played at funerals and Mother’s Day celebrations for years to come. But it would become indelibly attached to Juan Gabriel in 1990 after a legendary performance at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, in Mexico City. Accompanied by both a mariachi and an orchestra, he begins singing in almost a whimper but quickly lifts his voice so that the ache of the song rings through the historic music hall. It’s a cathartic performance in which it sounds like his voice could crack at any moment. The live recording of that rendition, with the crowd taking over the chorus halfway through, was the version of the song enshrined in the National Recording Registry.
The current elevation of “Amor Eterno” is the result of an effort that began in earnest in 2019, when it served as the backing track for another predominantly Latino city’s grief following tragedy.
A day after the August 3, 2019, mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, a young mariachi ensemble played the song at Ponder Park, blocks from the site where 23 people died in the deadliest attack on the Latino community in modern U.S. history. A crowd of thousands had assembled for a vigil on a dusty brown baseball diamond and the nearby football field. Some of those gathered sang along, often through tears, as the flashlights from their phones created a halo over the mourners. Other renditions were more spontaneous. At the edge of the Walmart parking lot, which would eventually grow into a memorial lined by handwritten signs, flowers and other tributes, a woman was captured shakily singing the song to no one in particular as the music rang out from her phone.
In the aftermath of the shooting, “Amor Eterno” emerged as a recognizable bicultural symbol for the mourning border city, a place where the space between Mexican and American is as indistinguishable as its boundary with Ciudad Juárez when seen from a distance. Juan Gabriel’s ties to the area—he grew up just across the border garnering him the nickname “el Divo de Juárez”—seemed to only intensify the connection as Latinos tried to make sense of an attack that law enforcement quickly labeled domestic terrorism.
Like many others, San Antonio congressman Joaquin Castro questioned how the white gunman behind the attack, who had traveled ten hours from a Dallas suburb, developed enough hatred to so violently spite an entire community. He recalled the words in a racist manifesto in which the gunman described the attack as a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” His words echoed national and state Republican officials who had employed similar language to describe the state of the border. Castro knew there wasn’t a “singular culprit” behind the gunman’s hate, but he reasoned it was at least partially the result of Latinos being “largely left out of the American narrative.”
“It really struck me that culturally, Latinos exist in a kind of black hole in the U.S. because people don’t know about our contributions in culture, art, government, business—major fields in this country—and don’t know about our contributions to the development and prosperity of the United States,” Castro said during a phone conversation in June. “That void gets filled with stereotypes, historical stereotypes from mass media, and those stereotypes get further twisted by politicians who use them for their own political gain. I set about after that in a small way to try to fill in that void.”
The lack of Latino representation in media was crystallized for him during an interaction in 2020 with the CEO of a major publishing company who was unable, at Castro’s prompting, to name three Latinos or Latinas who had significantly influenced U.S. history. That same year, Castro, as chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, commissioned a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Latino employment in media industries. It found that Hispanics made up just 12 percent of those working in the media industry in the U.S., compared with 18 percent of workers in the rest of the workforce. The study included reports submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that indicated that service-worker positions within media companies, such as food and cleaning services, had the highest share of Hispanic workers, at 22 percent, while senior management had the lowest, at 4 percent.
To elevate Latinos’ contributions to American culture, Castro turned to the National Recording Registry and the National Film Registry, nominating the work of Latinos for recognition based on hundreds of submissions received from the public. Nearly five years from the onset of El Paso’s mourning—and two years after the Uvalde tragedy—“Amor Eterno” journeyed from the impromptu memorials for the dead into the recording registry’s prestige. Selected from the list of 35 potential entries submitted by Castro last year, it’s one of just 650 titles that make up the collection that’s meant to preserve America’s audio heritage.
As of 2023, fewer than 5 percent of titles in the registry were by Latino artists, according to Castro’s office, though interest in widening the selections seems to be growing. The Library of Congress received a record 2,899 nominations from the public for this year’s round of inductees.
The registry goes beyond singles or albums—among this year’s inductees was the 369th Infantry Band’s recording of “Clarinet Marmalade,” played by the all-Black ensemble after returning from World War I—so Castro is now eyeing other types of recordings to elevate, such as speeches by Latinos. His office typically aligns its call to the public for recommendations with National Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins in September. Individuals can also submit their own nominations to the Library of Congress.
For Medrano, it’s emotional to see a song he’s played countless times to comfort hurting families be canonized. “You spread that out and that’s our country, and I say ‘our country’ as an American,” Medrano said. “To have a song [in the Library of Congress] that is such a cultural symbol of us in our most vulnerable time. It’s a statement.”
Most mariachis approach a performance of “Amor Eterno” carefully to avoid being overcome with their own grief, Medrano explained, even though that’s often what allows them to connect with their audiences. The ballad’s anguish has a way of imprinting itself so that you carry some renditions with you, Medrano added. It’s why he stopped playing funerals for a long while after the death of a beloved nephew, knowing he would hear and feel the song.
On the anniversary of the shooting at Robb Elementary, Medrano returned to Uvalde with a smaller group of mariachis to serenade the city once again. This time, there were no spontaneous tributes or visiting mourners in the town square. Unlike last time, the audience included some of the slain children’s family members, who during their first visit were navigating the fragile space that immediately follows tragedy. Without a female lead vocalist on hand, which is typical for performances of “Amor Eterno,” an instrumental rendition connected just the same. The audience filled in the sorrowful lyrics.
By then the streets of Uvalde had been converted into an open-air gallery with murals dedicated to the dead, each one a monumental portrait of their lives. Irma Garcia, one of the two teachers killed while protecting her students, was memorialized alongside her husband, Joe Garcia, who died suddenly two days after the shooting. His family blamed a broken heart. The high school sweethearts were depicted inside of a niche box, emblazoned with vibrantly colored flowers, like those used for altars. The words “Amor Eterno” were painted in cursive along the bottom edge of the frame between pairs of marigolds.
Medrano would go on to spend much more time in Uvalde than he could have imagined on that first visit. “All we planned to do was go there and play songs, and play ‘Amor Eterno,’ because that’s what we do,” he said. Then his wife, political consultant Laura Barberena, signed on to help Kimberly Mata-Rubio in her campaign to become Uvalde’s mayor. The candidate’s ten-year-old daughter, Lexi, was among the children killed in the massacre.
Medrano and Barberena relocated to Uvalde, allowing him to see up close how far the coil of tragedy can stretch and how desperately healing was needed. One song alone could never offer enough, but “Amor Eterno” bound the mariachi to survivors. Music was an opening that allowed him to get to know the parents he had first traveled there to console. Their sadness remains with Medrano, who holds survivors’ stories and wears bracelets given to him with the names of the children. “It’s kind of like the song,” he said. “I’m kind of connected with them in this eternal love and loss forever.”
