A friend and musical collaborator of Los Lobos, Linda Ronstadt, Taj Mahal, Jackson Browne and others, Eugene Rodriguez’s greatest accomplishment is in the music he makes with young people via Los Cenzontles Academy. 

He writes about it all in his new book, Bird of Four Hundred Voices: A Mexican American Memoir of Music and Belonging. 

Rodriguez was producing Los Lobos’ Papa’s Dream LP when, after a murder rocked his neighborhood, he wrote a corrido for the young victim and recorded it with her friends. As Rodriguez remembered how music had served as a kind of glue as his family came apart, he thought it could also heal a splintered community. 

Los Cenzontles (the Mockingbirds) was thus born. 

“My search for how I fit into the world became my career,” the academy’s founder and executive director writes early on. 

Thirty-five years, scores of albums and movies and countless young lives changed later, Rodriguez tells the group’s story from the perspective of a grateful human being; someone who, while being clear-eyed about prejudice, sees positivity in most things and people he encounters. 

It’s a story that begins in the smog-shrouded Los Angeles of the 1970s and follows Rodriguez through an appearance on “The Gong Show,” where Soupy Sales and Sarah Vaughan were among those who judged his act; to college, the discovery of his life’s mission; and to recording studios and stages around the world with musicians both anonymous and, like the aforementioned, legendary. 

“I believe that seeing everyone as guardians of our society and world – rather than treating some as outsiders or guests – is fundamental to democracy and equality,” Rodriguez writes while acknowledging “white rage is our nation’s true threat.”

Looking to mitigate that through cultural exchange, Rodriguez, his benefactors and young charges have worked to re-invigorate original mariachi – the one without horns – fandango and son jarocho traditions and share them with American, Mexican and Chicano populations. And they mostly succeeded. 

After 224 pages of triumph and struggle, “Bird of Four Hundred Voices” reveals itself to be a book not only about the uplifting power of music but an uplifting story about the good in people – both famous and not – at a time when it’s easy to think such a thing no longer exists.