This article describes how California's Southwestern College's prized mariachi band captures the soul and the rhythm of Mexico. Four years old, the mariachi program has proved so successful that Mr. Jeff Nevin, who now directs three bands there, persuaded the two-year college in 2005 to set up what was until recently the only American college degree in mariachi performance, history, and culture. (Our Lady of the Lake University, in San Antonio, Texas, now has the second.) Each year, the program graduates a handful of people with a mariachi specialization. The players project pride in a culture that runs deep in the San Diego region. Most of Mr. Nevin's students, like the vast majority of Southwestern's 19,000 enrollees, are first-generation college goers of long Mexican lineage. So he has no difficulty conveying to them the essence of the music, which he loved and learned growing up in Tucson, Arizona. At the core of mariachi is its intense emotionality--"humanity right in the face." Subject matter is elemental: love and passion; heartache and hope; family and a happy home. Yet mariachi is also about fiestas, weddings, and family gatherings--it is a music of the people.