Adaly “Guillermo” Najarro

Community and music have played an instrumental role in Adaly “Guillermo” Najarro’s life, spirituality, and work. “I was always drawn to music. Now, I’ve been playing violin for 18 years,” shared Guillermo. In high school, his freshman and sophomore music director, Candance Wiebener, saw the potential in him. Guillermo spoke of her saying, “It was thanks to her that I got in line. I was kind of a delinquent. She was the one that really saw the potential in me, and she pushed me. She was hard on me, and I saw her and said, ‘I want to do that. I want to empower students, and show them their potential.’” Before Guillermo started his junior year of high school, his director left the school. “My junior year was very hard, because I missed her. Then, I noticed the lack of representation in the music world. I was one of a handful of students of color. It opened my eyes. What other composers are from Spanish speaking countries? I started asking that, and I started listening to them.”

For college, Guillermo attended the University of Iowa where he went in as an “undecided” major. Guillermo reflected, “I was thinking of going into music but I didn’t own a violin. So, I had to borrow a violin from the United Community Center for Youth. My freshman year, I was working with a professor who knew Mrs. Weibener. One day, I got a call from my violin professor that Mrs. Weibener wanted to buy me a violin. I was on the verge of tears, because I was her student for only two years. It is a German violin that was made in 1927. People tell me I need to upgrade, and I say, “no, this is the violin that I am going to retire with – I will play it until it breaks or I break! It means so much to me.” He continued in his college career majoring in violin performance and music education. Guillermo shared, “Teaching was always my goal. I dove into my own violin performance, so that I could show the kids I teach now what different pieces are supposed to sound like.”
 
Throughout college and beyond, empowering Latino musicians continued to be a passion of Guillermo’s. He shared, “when I began student teaching, there was a student with a Mexican family, and she said that she had never had a Latino music teacher, and she just thanked me for being myself. I knew from then on that I was doing the right thing. That will always live in my heart. I like being people’s representative for who they are.” Another sign to Guillermo, that he was on the right track, was the day that he interviewed for his teaching job at Muscatine high school. That day fell on St. Oscar Romero’s canonization day. Guillermo commented, “I am a first-gen college student and a first-gen American. Both of my parents are from El Salvador, so St. Oscar Romero holds a special place in my heart.”
 
In his own music performance career, Guillermo got involved in playing in the Church band and in a mariachi band after a conversation with his dad’s friend, Eugenio Solis. Guillermo recalled, “we ran into him at a thrift store in Iowa City. I was messing around with an old guitar, and Eugenio came up to me and mentioned that he played at St. Joseph’s (West Liberty) on Sundays. He asked me to come play with them. That was in 2018, which was my busiest year of college, so I wasn’t sure at the time.”
 
Some time went by, then one Sunday, Guillermo was in West Liberty with his dad, so they decided to go to mass at St. Joseph’s. Guillermo shared, “I saw Eugenio and others playing there. I fell in love with how much participation there was – everyone was singing. It was beautiful, and I loved it. I talked to Eugenio after mass and asked if I could bring my violin and play with him in the choir. It took a while to get going, but then we got it. Now, we have a system down. After I started playing at mass with Eugenio and the band, Eugenio asked me to join a mariachi group with him. That began my love for playing mariachi. I wanted to engulf myself in it, so that I could teach it. That’s due to Eugenio and St. Joseph parish!”

Now, Guillermo is headed into his third year of teaching orchestra at Muscatine High School, where the Latino population is 30%. He has started teaching a mariachi group of his students. They started with just 12 students and now are up to around 30. Guillermo added, “I see myself in those kids, and hopefully they see me in them. I want to do a better job of showing representation. That’s why I do what I do. Mariachi is opening up even more avenues for students.” Now, Guillermo is not only teaching the Muscatine High School mariachi band, but the West Liberty mariachi group as well.

Guillermo’s admiration for and emulation of Mrs. Weibener is apparent in his teaching and relationship with students now, “I always tell my students that I only expect their 100% that day, and I am proud of them for doing that. I always tell them that I’m proud of them, but I also tell them when they need to do something better too. I feel like I now know the feeling of a parent almost. It was thanks to my parents always being fully behind me, no matter what I wanted to do, that got me here, and that’s how I treat my students now.”

Guillermo concluded his sharing with recalling a quote that resonates with his experience of music by Sergei Rachmaninov: “music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”