The Sound of Belonging: The Mariachi of St. Anne School

Sister Teresa Lynch, CSJ, remembers a mother hearing the school’s mariachi perform a song she once shared with her grandmother in Mexico. While her grandmother had passed away, the song was still there, carrying her memory with it.

“It brought tears to her eyes,” Sister Teresa says. “You never know what’s going to trigger those memories.”

That is part of what the mariachi has come to mean at St. Anne School in Santa Ana, California. Songs that might otherwise grow quieter with each generation are being sung again, not as relics, but as something living.

They connect parents and grandparents to the places and people that formed them, while giving children something equally important: the sense that this music, this culture, this inheritance is theirs to carry forward.

For years, Sister Teresa has been part of Notre Dame’s Latino Engagement Institute, first as a participant and later as a mentor to other Catholic school leaders. The experience has invited educators to think beyond simply enrolling Latino students or welcoming Latino families.

It asks a deeper question: What does it look like to build a school in which the culture, faith, traditions, and gifts of those families genuinely shape the life of the community?

At St. Anne, that question became deeply personal.

Nearly all of the school’s students are Latino, many from Mexican and Mexican American families. They come carrying a rich inheritance of music, language, devotion, celebration, story, and memory.

The question is not whether those things matter. The question is whether a school recognizes that they already belong there.

For Sister Teresa, culture is not an accessory to a child’s education.

Mariachi became one expression of that conviction. But what has taken root at St. Anne reaches beyond learning instruments or performing on a stage.

Children sing songs their parents and grandparents know by heart. Families hear music connected to weddings, quinceañeras, funerals, faith, and childhoods spent in Mexico.

Older students teach younger students. Parents care for children who are not their own. Students who may not always see themselves as exceptional in other parts of school discover gifts that command a room.

Sister Teresa has watched that recognition change the way they carry themselves.

That is a different kind of achievement.

It may not fit neatly into a spreadsheet or appear on a standardized test. It is visible in a child who stands a little taller, in a parent who feels the school understands something essential about her family, in a grandparent who hears a familiar melody and realizes that what was handed down to one generation is being entrusted to another.

“There is so much value that you cannot see on paper,” Sister Teresa says. “You cannot see it in data. You can see it in the faces of the children.”

That way of seeing has long been central to Sister Teresa’s involvement with the Latino Engagement Institute. As both a participant and a mentor, she has spent years alongside Catholic school leaders considering what it means to truly know the communities they serve, to recognize the gifts already present there, and to create space for those gifts to flourish.

At St. Anne, those ideas have taken on a distinctly local life.

Sister Teresa would never describe the formation of the mariachi as a strategy. Instead, it was born out of the quiet act of noticing, of humbly honoring the voices of the community that are already there.

She talks about children, parents, and grandparents. About the songs families know. About the pride on students’ faces. About a community that has become more deeply connected because something once largely confined to homes, celebrations, and memories now has a prominent place in the life of the school.