The bilingual second grader has been performing since he was four years and 236 days old, a mark that earned him recognition as the world’s youngest mariachi by Guinness World Records. – Photos: Mateo Lopez/Instagram
Mateo Lopez tugged at the collar of his shirt and wrenched his neck, as if to free his voice. Then, as violins slashed behind him and guitars rippled before him in a rehearsal room at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, he belted out La Noche y Tu, concluding with a flourish that prompted shouts of “Eso! Eso!” (Right on!)
Like many mariachi musicians, Mateo treasures his Mexican heritage and loves singing songs about romance, a mother’s love, pleas for forgiveness and life and death in the countryside. But because Mateo is only seven, he also likes throwing baseballs or seeing how fast he can run from one end of a hallway to the other.
The bilingual second grader has been performing since he was four years and 236 days old, a mark that earned him recognition as the world’s youngest mariachi by Guinness World Records.
Mateo’s star took off after a video went viral of him singing at a Mexican restaurant in late 2018. He’s since appeared on Mexico’s version of America’s Got Talent and NBC’s Little Big Shots, had a split-second cameo in a Super Bowl ad for Peacock’s Bel-Air and has two singles on Apple Music.
“I want to be the best mariachi in the world,” he says about his ambitions. But also, he wants to own a pizza joint, “because then I can have it every day for lunch.”
Mateo’s star took off after a video went viral of him singing at a Mexican restaurant in late 2018.
In him, some see a future star, citing not just his abilities but the aura and confidence of a veteran artist. Mateo, who is charming and jaunty with short, dark hair parted to one side, can perform more than two dozen mariachi tunes without missing a beat, backs himself on guitar on four of them and is dabbling with the harp – even if he can’t yet tie his shoe.
“It’s not just his God-given talents but his charisma,” said Sylvia Hernandez, a youth talent agent with Kreativ Artists in Los Angeles. “He’s got a big career ahead of him.”
Gino Rivera, founder of Mariachi Azteca de America, the San Antonio-based ensemble with whom Mateo often practices, calls him “a one-in-a-million” talent who absorbs instruction and criticism with maturity.
For Albert Lopez, his father, the picture is more complex. In Mateo, he sees not only his son but also his father, Leocadio Lopez, a Mexican immigrant who died before Mateo was born and whose love for mariachi music Albert Lopez didn’t – couldn’t – appreciate until it was too late.
Not being musicians themselves, Lopez, 44, and wife Janelle, 42, can’t explain Mateo’s gift, or the passion that sometimes makes their son sing in his sleep. He idolised his older sister as she learned violin, they said, and spent hours with his grandmother as she listened to mariachi music while making tortillas in the kitchen.
Still, sometimes it all seems like a seed planted by his grandfather, Leocadio Lopez.
“I don’t think he’s really wrapped his head around what he’s doing,” Albert Lopez said. “He’s just doing it because he likes it.”
‘He just started singing’
Ask Mauro Calvo and he’ll tell you about the day it all began. As then-manager of one of San Antonio’s largest event venues, he’d hosted galas and major special events – but then one afternoon in December 2018 he welcomed into his office a man seeking a site for his daughter’s quinceañera.
That man – Lopez – introduced his four-year-old son, Mateo.
“He came to me and shook my hand,” Calvo said. “He wasn’t off somewhere playing with his Hot Wheels. He was just a tiny boy, but he carried himself well.”
He and Lopez started chatting and Calvo noted that Mateo was humming a mariachi tune to himself – Linda Ronstadt’s version of Por Un Amor.
Lopez chuckled and said that yes, Mateo liked to entertain people. “Sing something for Mr Calvo,” he told him.
Mateo didn’t pause or protest. “He just started singing,” said Calvo, who thought to himself: The kid knows the words. And his beat and pitch are right on.
With a technician setting up in the venue ballroom for an evening gig, Calvo asked Lopez if Mateo might want to try singing with a microphone. The three went over and Calvo set the youngster atop a table and asked what song they should play. Mateo named a title and waited, as assured as a veteran performer.
This must be some kind of prank, Calvo recalls thinking – but then Mateo sang the song, and Calvo remembers him walking back and forth across the table, nonchalantly stepping to its edge, singing right into their eyes.
“Afterward, the guy playing the music was like, ‘Who is this kid?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ Mateo blew my mind. He was singing like there was 10,000 people there.
“I asked his dad, ‘Have you seen him do this?’ He said, ‘Not like that.’ I told him, ‘You got something there.’”
The next weekend, at Calvo’s suggestion, Mateo’s parents dressed him in a traje de charro – the traditional suit worn by mariachis – that his grandmother had given him and took him to the San Antonio River Walk, where he sang for a curious crowd. At the time it seemed cute – but nothing more.
Not until a few weeks later, in January 2019, did things change. The family, marking Janelle Lopez’s birthday, was looking for late dinner after a monster truck show at the Alamodome. They headed to Mi Tierra, a colourful landmark restaurant that features mariachis.
After they’d been seated, Mateo told his dad he wanted to sing for his mom, and Lopez beckoned the band and asked them to play Por Un Amor. As he captured the occasion with his phone, the four-year-old stood on a chair and sang his heart out, his zeal nearly toppling him off the seat.
“Everybody was floored,” Lopez said. “That’s the video that started everything.”
Mateo and his sister were among a delegation of 50 San Antonio mariachis who traveled to Uvalde, Texas, to offer comfort to a community grieving the 21 lives lost in last month’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Photos: Mateo Lopez/Instagram
Growing fame – and a growing frame
A photo gallery above Mateo’s bed is an ode to how life has unfolded since that viral video, recalling his appearances on “Mexico Tiene Talento,” on which he performed in April 2019, and “Little Big Shots,” where Mateo, then five, astonished the audience and host Melissa McCarthy in February 2020 with a self-assured strut around the stage.
As Mateo’s fame has grown, his parents try to keep him humble, teaching him to shake the hand of everyone he meets and to send handwritten notes to those who have helped him with his craft.
HIs father also tries to instill in him a sense of community obligation, reminding him before his Italy show that he not only represented himself and his family but his country and culture.
More recently, Mateo and his sister were among a delegation of 50 San Antonio mariachis who traveled to Uvalde, Texas, to offer comfort to a community grieving the 21 lives lost in last month’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Lopez aims to nurture Mateo’s talent as long as he wants to pursue it.
Mateo isn’t the youngest musical performer to be recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records; that title belongs to an Indian boy who in 2009 played tabla, or hand drums, on an Indian radio station at age three years and five days. His isn’t the only mariachi-related record, either.
Still, those who’ve worked with Mateo rave about his potential, and Mateo himself says there is much more to learn: more songs, more guitar rhythms, more gritos – the howls that punctuate a mariachi performance.
“He’s probably my most gifted student,” said David Gonzalez, who conducts Mateo’s guitar lessons at the Music Institute of San Antonio. “He’s a sponge.”
Hernandez, the talent agent, has seen cases where parents want the dream more than the kids, for whom their child’s stardom represents a meal ticket. That’s not the case with Mateo, she said.
“His parents are not typical Hollywood parents,” she said. “They’re humble and hardworking. They’re not the parents chasing the dream; they’re just advocating for his good.”
Sensing something special in Mateo, Hernandez in February introduced him to Nick Cooper, a vocal coach in Burbank, California, who’s helped train some of music’s biggest stars, including Kesha, Beyonce and Nicki Minaj.
Cooper said his job is to quickly gauge whether somebody has “it,” that special presence that can make someone a star.
“It’s rare that you get an opportunity to meet young kids who are as poised and prepared as Mateo,” he said. “I was just blown away.”
What distinguishes Mateo, he said, is that “he’s not just chasing what’s popular. What separates the good from the exceptional is that when the lights go on, the gift will just prove it all, and I think that happens with him. He just turns into the butterfly. Others go back into the cocoon.”
Whatever happens with Mateo’s career, his father said, will depend on Mateo.
“Anything he wants, any tools he needs, I’m going to make sure he has them until he decides he doesn’t want them anymore,” said Lopez.
While his own father tried to pass on his passion, Lopez wasn’t ready; it’s a memory that still makes him emotional. That his children have embraced that passion, he said, helps fill the emptiness he felt when his father died. Three of Leocadio’s weathered sombreros now hang in Mateo’s room.
“For me,” Lopez said, “it’s like a redemption.” – USA Today/Tribune News Serivice
