On Saturday, Sept. 14, Goshen held its fourth annual Hispanic Heritage Festival. The event was created for the purpose of educating our broader community about Hispanic Heritage Month and to enjoy dancing, food and music, but most importantly, to celebrate and embrace these beautiful cultures that make up our community-wide family. 

Not only were there over 80 vendors present but there was something particularly special on the stage. The newly launched Mariachi ECoSistema (ECo) ensemble got the opportunity for the second year in a row to perform various traditional mariachi songs for the entire festival. 

If you somehow haven’t caught wind of this new musical group, Mariachi ECo was started by Hillary Harder in the fall of 2023 as a response to Gilberto Pérez  Jr.’s long-lived desire. Pérez had been dreaming of a mariachi group in the area to represent the growing Hispanic population. He wanted the opportunity for youth to share the rich culture with the broader community through music. 

There are a handful of musicians in the ensemble, from middle and high schoolers to college students and even community members. 

This collaboration across age groups is important to Mariachi ECo because it fosters leadership skills among older musicians and empowers younger players according to the Goshen College Music Center website.

Miguel Pineda Vasquez, a junior music major, was invited

by Harder to sing with Mariachi ECo. After getting to know everyone he said, “I love the dynamic of the group … I feel more in touch with my roots.”

Milo Armstrong, a junior music education major, said, “[it] is nice to be a part of something very meaningful for the large Hispanic community in Goshen … it’s a great way to involve myself and learn about a culture I am not a part of.” 

Armstrong said his friend’s family members were so delighted to see this representation in the community that “they even started playing the actual songs out loud for me to hear as I didn’t know any of them before joining ECo Mariachi.” 

Throughout the past year, Mariachi ECo has seen lots of this kind of engagement from the broader community.

Armstrong helps “to keep the viola section strong,” as there are only a couple instrumentalists to a part at most. 

As a community that has a growing Hispanic population,

there is something to be said about the representation of the mariachi culture for people who can identify with that.

This includes students such as Pineda Vasquez, who says, “I love singing and performing so getting the opportunity to do so while being able to bring my culture into it, just feels like a dream come true.”