¡Música del Corazón! 
Viajes del Violín 
13th Annual John Donald Robb, Jr.
Memorial Concert
Saturday 7 November 2026
2pm Cuentos y Encuentros
3pm Música
FREE ADMISSION
a non-ticketed family-friendly community event
first come, first served general seating
South Broadway Cultural Center
1025 Broadway Blvd SE
Albuquerque, NM 87102
(505) 848-1320 | directions
SBBC website
bandsintown.com
Video: "El Tecolote" from the documentary "Fruit of the Desert" recorded live @La Cocina Restaurant, Española, NM. 1st single from "Hot Carne Seca" released 5/26/26 on Jalopy Records order here. Producers Tabitha McDonald & Sonya Burke; Director Arman Cole; Directors of Photography Matt Wilson & Allen Hrynick; Mixer/Recordist Caine Deegan.

2pm Cuentos y Encuentros
Lucy Salazar, Tíos Míos, Dr. Lorenzo Trujillo, Jordan Wax, James Leger, Felipe Ruibal

3pm Música
Act I Act II 
Artistic Director
lisa nevada

Co-Curators
Dr. Carmella Scorcia Pacheco + Robert L. Lucero, Jr. 

Honorary Advisors
Dr. Enrique Lamadrid + Dr. Robert Tillotson

Educational Outreach
Dr. Rosalía Pacheco

Ofrenda
Dr. Enrique Lamadrid + Emilio Méndez Rizo 

Co-Curator Statement
Picture© Smithsonian Institution
This year’s ¡Música del Corazón!, Viajes del Violín, explores the many journeys this instrument has taken into and through New Mexico. Following last year’s focus on the accordion, we continue our celebration of instruments that carry the histories, emotions, and expressive life of this region. 

The violin has traveled across time and space. From the past to the present and from the rural to the urban; the violin has traversed borders, languages, traditions, and generations. In New Mexico, it is heard in dance and devotion, in community and concert life, in formal repertoire and vernacular practice. Its presence tells a story not only of musical beauty, but of migration, exchange, adaptation, and continuity. 

This program invites listeners to hear the violin as both traveler and witness. In its voice we encounter memory and movement, intimacy and virtuosity, sorrow and celebration. The violin becomes a meeting place where diverse histories converge and where tradition remains alive. 

As co-curators, we offer Viajes del Violín as a reflection on the richness of New Mexico’s musical landscape and on the artists who continue to carry these journeys forward. In every performance, the violin reminds us that music is never still: it moves with people, with place, and with the heart. 
~ Dr. Carmella Scorcia Pacheco 
~ Robert L. Lucero, Jr.
Sponsors
SOUTH BROADWAY CULTURAL CENTER
Veronica Dallas, Manager, Angela R. Mendez, Events Supervisor

UNM COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS
Harris D. Smith, Dean, Brianne Santos, Jaime Tillotson

UNM DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC
Dr. Michael Hix, Dept. Chair, Dr. Ana Alonso Minutti, Margaret "Liz" Rincon, Bonita Standard

JOHN DONALD ROBB MUSICAL TRUST

Board of Directors
Mark Emmons, Ed.D., Peter Gilbert, Ph.D., Nancy Harbert, Michael Hix, D.M., Rev. Jan F. Hosea, Robert Lucero, Jr., Robbin MacVittie, Valerie Martinez, lisa nevada, Karola Obermüller, Ph.D., Rosalía Pachco, Ph.D., Ellen Robb, Suzanne Schadl, Ph.D., Art Sheinberg, Harris D. Smith, Shelly Smith, Robert Tillotson, Ph.D., Jeff Todd, Marc Woodward, CPA

Staff
Emilio Méndez Rizo, Thomas Goodrich
College of Fine Arts
Department of Music
Robb Trust
Adryan Baca Trio

coming soon

Lorenzo Martinez Trio

coming soon

Robb Award Honoree

announced August 2026

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Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region's cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries.  Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared--thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.

The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation.  In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities.  Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.

The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.
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Jordan Wax (violin, piano- and three-row accordions, mandolin, guitar, vocals) grew up in Missouri and was traditionally trained by master Ozark fiddler Fred Stoneking and Central Missouri dance fiddler John White.  He worked as bandleader and accordionist for a Yiddish dance band before his work with Missouri and New Mexican fiddle styles inspired him to travel to Mexico for a 6-month immersion in Mexican huapango fiddling, where he studied with Rolando "El Quecho" Hernandez of Trio Chicontepec, Casimiro Granillo of Trio Chicamole, and a variety of local fiddlers in the Huasteca region of San Luis Potosí.  His studies of traditional New Mexico dance music have been guided and inspired in the past years by Tomas Maes (mandolinist of Santa Fe, NM) and Antonia Apodaca (late accordionist and guitarist of Rociada, NM). In 2018 he travelled to Morelia, Michoacan for a few weeks of intensive study with master son calentano violinist Serafin Ibarra Cortez and P'urepecha elder and composer Tata Pedro Dimas. He serves the Manitos Community Memory Project as a Community Archivist digitizing and archiving New Mexico music-related documents, sound recordings, and oral histories.
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Tanya Nuñez (upright bass, guitar, vocals)  was born in southern New Mexico. Growing up in a musical family, no celebration was complete without music and dance: rancheras, polkas, valses and cumbias.  She has worked as a bassist in a variety of traditions from classical, tango, Persian and Arabic, to country, rock and funk/soul. Though she plays many styles, the beautiful and diverse music of the Southwest US and Mexico holds a special place in her heart and she is honored to study and share it.
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Santiago Romero (guitar, vihuela, vocals) grew up in the village of Agua Fria, New Mexico, on land where his family has lived for many generations.  He began learning the guitar at the age of 6 from older musicians in his community and began working as a mariachi in Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez in his early twenties.  He has performed and served as creative director in a variety of ensembles, taught as part of several educational initiatives and in 2005 was appointed by Governor Bill Richardson as the first New Mexico state representative of Mariachi music.  In addition to his work with Lone Piñon he has served for 13 years as the director of Mariachi Sonidos del Monte, one of New Mexico’s premiere Mariachi ensembles.  
Guest Curators
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Carmella Scorcia Pacheco is a post-doctoral fellow with the University of New Mexico’s Hispanic Southwest Studies program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is a certified accordion technician with the New Mexico Folk Arts program where she learned to rebuild and tune accordions under master craftsman, Tony Tomei. She has since received her Ph.D. in Spanish with a concentration in Border Studies from the University of Arizona in 2023. Her research and teaching interests include expressive culture of New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest borderlands while utilizing the folkloric record to recover feminine-voiced narratives of 19th and early 20th century New Mexico. Her work has been featured in The New Mexico Historical Review, The Journal of the Southwest, Borderlore Online Journal, The New Mexico Poetry Anthology, Intersecciones Hispánicas (UNM), and the Smithsonian Folklife Magazine.
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Robert Lucero is a native of northern New Mexico. He began playing music as soon as he could stand and reach the keys on the old upright player piano in his parents’ home. Coming from a musical family where he played and sang ranchera music on guitar, trumpet, keyboards, acordeón, and vocals with primos y primas, he also trained in classical piano and symphonic band trumpet.  Robert first began playing mariachi in high school with Mariachi Española, directed by his late father, Robert “Bobby” Lucero.

After leaving New Mexico for college, he founded, in the fall of 1994, and directed, until the spring of 1998, el Mariachi Cardenal de Stanford, which continues to perform to this day. He was instrumental in establishing the mariachi ensemble class in the Music Department at Stanford. After a year of graduate school at Stanford, he was appointed adjunct faculty in the Stanford Music Department, where he was the lead instructor of the mariachi ensemble class for five years. During this time, Robert taught mariachi in public schools and at the Mexican Heritage Corporation Plaza in San Jose, CA. Robert has also been honored to teach armonía and trumpet at Mariachi Spectacular de Albuquerque, and other mariachi conferences and festivals in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas.

During and after his time at Stanford, he performed mariachi music professionally in and around San Jose, CA, including with Mariachi Santa Cecilia, Mariachi Azteca, and other ensembles. He also performed and recorded other musical genres, such as son jarocho, son Cubano, cumbia, vallenato, son huasteco, and Chican@ music, with various ensembles throughout California and beyond.

Returning to New Mexico in 2005, Robert began law school at the University of New Mexico, during and after which he performed with Mariachi Tapatío, Mariachi Tepeyac, and Mariachi Tenampa.

In the fall semester 2019, Robert re-initiated the mariachi ensemble class at UNM, with the essential support of visionary leadership at the UNM College of Fine Arts and Department of Music, as well as the invaluable contributions of his fellow instructors. He continues to instruct the UNM Music Department mariachi ensemble class.

In addition to his music career, Robert maintains a law practice centering on real estate, land use, and estate planning. He remains active in community service with several boards and organizations such as the UNM John Donald Robb Musical Trust, the State Bar of New Mexico Committee on Diversity in the Legal Profession, the UNM School of Law Alumni/ae Association (Past President), and the United Way of Central New Mexico Hispano Philanthropic Society.  He has taught as an adjunct faculty member at the UNM School of Law, and he is a frequent presenter at continuing legal education classes.
Artistic Director
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lisa nevada's choreographies, performance, and teaching are an homage to the generosity & wisdom of our earth mother. Dedicating her life to dance, lisa has created land-based choreographies and teaching methodologies on the Mesas, in the Bosque, within the Mountains, and amidst the Volcanoes in her homelands of New México where she spent most of her life. lisa landed in Brooklyn in 2019 where she thrives as a dance and teaching artist. In Lenapehoking (NYC) and beyond, she facilitates movement experiences and performs dances that engage people in the observation of ecosystems and our human interactions to ignite kinship with mama earth, centered on gratitude. lisa is fortunate to be one of the inaugural Artists-in-Residence at the Beaver Institute (US) and teach with The Taylor School of The Paul Taylor Dance Foundation (NYC). She is a participant of MAQAHATINE, a Montréal-based gathering space for First Nations and Indigenous artists and a member of Radical Evolution’s Street Theatre Crew. 
Honorary Advisor
PictureEnrique Lamadrid photo by Sage Vogel
Enrique Lamadrid, PhD {Embudo / ABQ} is Professor Emeritus, Distinguished Professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico. His research interests include ethnopoetics, folklore and music, Chicano literature, contemporary Mexican poetry, and literary translation. His field work centers in NM, but ranges as well into Mexico, Spain, the Andes and the Caribbean. His research on the Indo- Hispanic traditions of New Mexico charts the influence of indigenous cultures on the Spanish language and imagination. His literary writings explore the borderlands between cultures, their natural environments, and between popular traditions and literary expression. In 2006 and 2008 he organized an international research team working on the spiritual traditions of the Camino Real, with special focus on Durango, the role of penitential brotherhoods, and the Mexico experiences of Padre Antonio José Martínez. In 2009 and 2010 he organized expeditions to Aguascalientes, Mexico and Jinotepe, Nicaragua to document popular festivals on Santiago, the patron saint of Spain most associated with conquest and resistance to conquest.

​Author of numerous books and articles, Enrique Lamadrid’s collaboration with renowned photographer Miguel Gandert is legendary. In 2009 they were jointly awarded the Gilberto Espinosa Prize by the New Mexico Historical Society for their work on the intangible cultural heritage of the Camino Real, “Hermanitos Comanchitos”: Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption (UNM Press 2003), won the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2004, the oldest and most important in the nation for folklore and ethnography. Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland (Museum of NM 2000), a previous collaboration with Gandert won the prestigious Southwest Book Award in 2001. In 2005, Hermanitos Comanchitos also won the Southwest book award. The same year he was awarded the Américo Paredes Prize by the American Folklore Society in 2005 to recognize his community based cultural work. Lamadrid is a scholar of the corrido ballad tradition of Greater Mexico and has several key articles on the subject, as well as a book co-authored with Jack Loeffler, La Música de los Viejitos: Hispano Folk Music of the Río Grande del Norte (UNM Press). He has produced a notable series of CDs.

In the museum world, he led the design team and was co-curator of the permanent exhibit at the International Camino Real Heritage Center south of Socorro, NM. He was also a member of the curatorial team of the Smithsonian “El Río” exhibit on bio-regionalism and traditional culture in the Río Grande/Bravo basin. Lamadrid was sole curator of “Nuevo México, ¿Hasta Cuándo?: Four Centuries of Hispanic Ballady”, a component of the renown Smithsonian exhibit “Corridos sin Fronteras / Ballads without Borders: A New World Ballad Tradition.”

Lamadrid is also an acequia activist and scholar of traditional water management. He and his students are preparing documentation for a UNESCO nomination for the Acequia cultures and systems of New Mexico and northern Mexico for world heritage status in the category of intangible cultural heritage. He is mayordomo of five sub-laterals of the Gallegos Lateral in Albuquerque’s north valley, a district of 90 parciantes known as Acequia los Alamos de los Gallegos. His recent children’s book is titled Juan the Bear and the Water of Life: La Acequia de Juan del Oso, and combines the history of the acequias in the beautiful Mora valley with the famous Juan del Oso cycle of traditional cuentos.
Educational Outreach

Each year ¡Música del Corazón! delivers 'eduformaces' lasting approximately 30 to 120 minutes. Events feature artists performing in the annual November ¡Música del Corazón! concert, plus invited specialists of northern New Mexico Spanish cultural history, dance, and music.

2026 Educational Outreach Events

to be announced
Production

South Broadway Cultural Center
  • Veronica Dallas ~ SBCC Manager
  • Manuel Garcia ~ Library Manager
  • Angela R. Mendez ~ Events Supervisor

John Donald Robb Musical Trust

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