A Note on Grief: Jessie Vallejo Awarded for Documenting Pandemic’s Toll on Mariachi Musicians
For Music Professor Jessie Vallejo, the pandemic isn’t simply a memory.
It still surfaces when she thinks of the lives lost and the goodbyes said at funerals and aniversarios luctuosos, or death anniversaries, she played alongside fellow mariachi musicians for people who had succumbed to COVID-19.
During the height of the pandemic, Vallejo began researching its impact on the mariachi community. What began as an attempt to document those experiences eventually became an award-winning journal article, earning Vallejo the “Best Article” award for 2025 from the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance.
But the article almost didn’t happen. Given the sad circumstances, it certainly wasn’t part of her initial plan.
“When the pandemic started, there were a lot of calls made to people in a lot of fields, including ethnomusicology, to document the pandemic’s impacts,” Vallejo said. “I was trying to deal with moving into a house and felt conflicted about taking something tragic and making it into an article.”
Vallejo recalls that she was in Mexico when she got an email from campus that there wouldn’t be classes the following week. The news of the pandemic reminded her of some of her research on a cholera epidemic in Ecuador during the1990s, and she felt that COVID-19 would be long lasting.
As the pandemic unfolded, she saw its toll firsthand.
In the article, Vallejo recounts one day performing with a mariachi group at Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Whittier. The cemetery was so crowded that, as the musicians made their way to their scheduled performance, a trail of people followed them, asking if they would play a song or two for their loved ones.
Between funerals, Vallejo often sat in her car and cried.
“Throughout the pandemic, I was performing at different events, and there would be photos of people lost,” she said. “You could really tell how many people were being affected. I ended up being encouraged by folks to make sure I wrote something about it and my experience.”
That encouragement to share her experiences and document the pain, grief and struggles she witnessed as part of a tightknit community of artists became her article, “Mariachi Musicians and Collective Grief during the COVID Pandemic in Southern California.”
Published in 2025 in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, a peer-reviewed academic journal covering ethnomusicology, musicology and folk dance, the article explores the experiences of mariachi musicians during the pandemic while placing their stories within the broader context of the Latino community in Southern California.
The prize subcommittee praised Vallejo’s portrayal of the community’s grief and resilience. It also highlighted the broader issues explored in the article, including the lack of protections for essential workers and the effects of environmental racism on health outcomes.
“As both a scholar and a performer with the community, Vallejo has created an intense and sincere narration of the devasting impacts of COVID on Latinx communities and the Mariachi community in Southern California,” the judges wrote.
Vallejo said she was thrilled to both be published in a journal she read regularly and to receive recognition for her research.
“People can nominate an article from any journal for this prize, so it is a really broad pool,” she said. “To be nominated is really special, and to win it, I will treasure this more than if I were ever nominated for a Grammy because it represents so many years of work and advocacy.”
Vallejo, who said others nominated her article, wrote the piece in sections she presented at conferences over a couple of years. The writing was followed by a long editing process completed in late 2024 before publishing a few months later.
“I never thought I would win a prize like this,” Vallejo said. “Writing was something that was a challenge for me before graduate school. Now, I am teaching writing intensives in my classes. I tell students that finding your voice on your instruments and in words is important.”