Producer/Director Daniel Buckley will be giving a lecture at the University of Arizona Library Special Collections division in the UA Main Library on September 22.

The talk will center around what Buckley expected to uncover as he interviewed folks for the Mariachi Miracle film and book project, and the unexpected twists those interviews revealed. The interviews reveal the chronology and evolutionary sparks along the way in the birth of America’s mariachi and folklorico dance movement, but also tell great stories of Tucson’s evolution from days of segregation to a time when the city’s cultural diversity is celebrated.

Buckley will share with the audience some of his research into Tucson’s earliest mariachi and folklorico days, as well as observations from 35 years of writing about, photographing and filming Tucson’s mariachi culture. In addition he’ll speak about how that research has transformed his own life and led him down unexpected paths, practically from the moment he arrived in Tucson in August of 1971.

Daniel Buckley is a journalist/documentary maker/composer who spent 22 years with the Tucson Citizen newspaper, first as a music critic and culture writer, and later as the online division’s first Multimedia Manager.

During his time with newspapers and beyond Buckley covered mariachi and folklorico cultural expressions more than any other writer in America.

 

In 2013 he was honored for that work by being inducted into the Mariachi Hall of Fame of the Tucson International Mariachi Conference. A year later he would be named Artist of the Year at the 2014 Arizona Governor’s Arts Awards.

In 2010 Buckley and partners Julie Gallego and Ralph Gonzalez created the Cine Plaza at the Fox series, which included documentaries on downtown Tucson, the city’s barrios, urban renewal and the landmark El Casino Ballroom.

In addition Buckley created films for the Arizona Historical Society on the Arizona Centennial’s “100 Years, 100 Quilts” exhibition as well as the history of Yuma, Arizona.

Since late 2012 Buckley has been working on The Mariachi Miracle, which chronicles how very fiber of the city of Tucson has been transformed by its youth mariachi and folklorico movement on economic, social, political, educational and artistic fronts.

“The one thing you can count on is that people will go off topic when you interview them,” Buckley says. “But when four or five people start telling you the same off topic story, you realize you’re the one who is off-topic. They’re telling you what you really need to know.

Now I shut the heck up and let them tell me anything they want and put the puzzle parts together later.”

Those off-topic excursions have often helped bring historical, cultural and social context and sometimes revealed unexpected consequences of the youth mariachi movement.

More than a lecture, the September 22 event is meant to be an invitation to the public to add its feedback to the story. Filming for the Mariachi Miracle, begun in November of 2012, will wrap at the end of October, 2016, with the expectation that a finished film will be produced by April, 2017.

The lecture is free and open to the public.