In Defence of Striving
What we can all learn from Texas high school mariachis.
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One of the hardest things to explain about what it’s like to live in Japan has to do with a single word: majime.
It means something like earnest striving, or wholesome seriousness. That’s easy enough to understand. What’s harder to wrap your head around is the role it plays in Japanese society, where a majime attitude is the default setting for social interaction.
I see it through my 14-year-old’s eyes. Growing up in Canada, she had adopted the standard North American teenage girl persona: slightly detached, snarky, above it all. In other words, the exact opposite of majime. When we moved to Japan, she and her brother realized they’d have to flip the script if they wanted to fit in at public school: the kind of simple-minded earnestness that would have gotten them pilloried in a Montreal schoolyard is positively de rigueur in Tokyo.
Studying hard for a difficult test? Majime. Snarking at someone for being a try-hard? Not majime. Paying close attention in class and participating enthusiastically in class projects? Majime. Following all the rules out of an earnest conviction that everyone is better off if everyone follows the rules? Very majime. Giving your best effort at the school sports festival? Majime. Developing a meta narrative about how dorky this all sounds? Not majime at all.
The surprising bit is that my 14-year-old actually kind of likes her new majime self. She’s very aware that it would be bizarre if she behaved this way in Canada, but when everyone is doing it, it’s kind of comforting. Majime creates a safe space for doing your best, and that’s empowering.
For some time, I toyed with the idea of writing a piece about majime as a uniquely Japanese organizing principle for society. I had it all written out in my head, I was about to pitch it. But then I saw, of all things, a Netflix documentary about Texas high schoolers in the incredibly competitive world of high school varsity mariachis in the Rio Grande Valley, and I changed my mind.
2023’s Going Varsity in Mariachi is many things: a compelling sports film, a crash course in Mexican folklore, a love letter to the Rio Grande. But I saw it as something else: a manifesto for American majime.
Until I noticed the title on the screen attached to the back of seat 13C, I had simply not known that competitive varsity mariachi was a thing. But in a superbly executed 105 minutes, directors Sam Osborn and Alejandra Vasquez introduce us to this world and to the people in it.
The mariachis we meet are largely, but not only, Mexican American kids doing the most Mexican thing possible in the most American way imaginable. Along the Rio Grande, the competition circuit between mariachi bands is intense in a way that will be immediately familiar to anyone who ever did anything competitive in a U.S. public high school, with its divisions, its regional and state championships, its long road trips and nerves and excitement.
Mariachi, we learn, is not easy. Everybody has to sing, and everybody has to play either the violin, a brass instrument, or an “armonía” instrument, usually guitar, but always including one “guitarrón”—a giant bass guitar whose particular role in the band is a source of no end of drama in the film. More than that, you have to perform, you have to embody the spirit of mariachi: proud, a little haughty, and very serious about the music.
The biggest eye-opener, for me, was the absolute tsunami of Mexican-American majime the film features. The kids in competitive mariachi are not well off. They face steep costs if they want to access higher education, which many of them do. Music scholarships are central to their strategies for trying to get there.
They are visibly, unashamedly strivers: they earnestly want a better life for themselves, and they’re earnestly working hard to achieve it. They’re teammates, fully aware that they can all succeed collectively only if each and every one of them succeeds individually. So they work hard towards a common goal. They don’t waste time on meta discourses.
Which made me realize that there is nothing, in the end, distinctively Japanese about majime. Kids who want to strive perform at their best when they’re in an environment that’s conducive to striving. And you can create that environment in the Rio Grande Valley just as well as you can in Tokyo.
What’s most interesting about Going Varsity in Mariachi, though, is its politics. As in, it doesn’t have any. The filmmakers are very careful to keep any explicitly political narrative out of the film. Which is canny on their part, because the ideology that the film champions has been so out of fashion for so long, we hardly ever hear about it anymore: multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism was the bright, hopeful vision for racial integration and harmony some of us were into back in the 1990s. Rejecting the old-fashioned assimilation of Melting Pot ideology, multiculturalism promised that cultures could remain vibrant in a new soil, enriching the lives of everyone in the places where they took root. Multiculturalism was to be the open and accepting part of a beautiful act of cultural miscegenation, with groups joyously sharing the best of themselves, adding it to a common stock.
The concept was left for dead long ago. Which is what made it so startling to see the principle so fully articulated in Going Varsity in Mariachi. Two of the girls in the band, Bella Luna and Roxanne Ruiz, enact one of the sweetest and most wholesome lesbian romances I’ve ever seen on screen. Their difference is accepted, not dwelt upon.
And then there are the white kids. The band, obviously, is mostly Mexican American, as are the communities. But there are a few Anglo kids in these mariachi bands. Their Spanish may not be as fluent, but they gotta sing too, everyone has to sing. In the film, you see them welcomed warmly into this group where they are a very small minority, and simply embraced… as long as they play well.
Much of the drama in the film comes from precisely one of these white kids, Drake, paired with that fearsome instrument: el guitarrón. Mariachi bands don’t have conductors, and the bass guitarrón keeps time for the entire ensemble: mess up there, and you mess up everything.
Halfway through the film, Drake breaks one of the key commandments of majime: thou shalt always show up. He misses several practices hanging out with his girlfriend, and has to be kicked out of the band. The crisis moment in the film is a crisis of integration: could it be that white kids just can’t thrive at something this Mexican? Spoiler alert: Drake of course does pull himself back together, rejoins the band, and plays his guitarrón to glory.
It would strike all of the members of the band as ludicrous to suggest that Drake was engaged in some crime of cultural appropriation. He earned the right to wear that costume and be a mariachi by how much work he put into learning the guitarrón. Practicing a huge, unwieldy Mexican instrument is not something normal white 15-year-olds do in Texas, but he was doing it—and that made him one of them.
And that is the lost promise of multiculturalism: that we can bring our cultures together beautifully, but it’ll only work if we do it in a spirit of majime. That skin color really is irrelevant, or at any rate much, much less relevant than the work you do. That all kinds of different people can strive earnestly together. And that, ultimately, the best way to manage our differences is to set up our societies that enable that to happen all the time.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion, the founder of Caracas Chronicles, Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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Lovely article that reminds me how much I miss sincerity in culture which I think is somewhat brought along for the ride in the lovely Japanese expression. As a Gen-X'r I feel partly responsible for ushering in the age of snark and (to some degree justified) cynicism. It wasn't always that way. As a kid the first book I ever asked for was Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Sagan was a guy who really did unabashedly embrace sincerity. I love this little clip of him explaining how some of the ancients figured out the shape and size of the planet
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T0f6u39jlRA
Its just pure and simple admiration and respect for discovery.
I'll be showing my age as someone who was deeply engaged with the 1990s multicultural moment as a high school teacher in a multicultural community (and, amazingly, a US-Japan program for teachers) when I say I loved this post. There is such a deep truth to this, including how fulfilling it is for young people like your daughter and the mariachi competitors to fully engage without ironic disengagement in something they and their community value. Add to that the way these sorts of things bring folks together in a spirit of cross-appreciation rather than fearful anxiety.