Students from across the Rio Grande Valley Valley perform Christmas songs with their tubas during the Tuba Christmas performance in 2008 at McAllen High School.
Gabe Hernandez | The Monitor
The city of McAllen joined 30 other cities across the state to be designated as a Music Friendly Community by the Texas Music Office.
McAllen earned the statewide designation in a signal that the city hopes to foster and grow the local music industry.
“A music friendly community means that we invite music and musicians to be a part of our community,” said Laura Robles, the coordinator for cultural arts and incubator. “Specifically, raising our own musicians that we have here in our city to become well known or to gain more popularity, per se.”
The McAllen Creative Arts Incubator under the McAllen Chamber of Commerce spearheaded the application for the Music Friendly designation in June, according to Robles. It required holding a community workshop, establishing a liaison with the Texas Music Office, and creating a directory of local musicians that is then registered with the TMO’s industry directory.
They also had to demonstrate partnerships with music related nonprofit organizations, collaborate with music education programs, and create an advisory board made up of local “music community industry stakeholders,” according to the criteria listed on the TMO website.
The advisory board, or committee, will be tasked with deciding what resources they’ll prioritize for local musicians.
“The committee would be the ones discussing what project,” Robles said. “They would come up with the projects of what is important to the musicians so it’s important that it is musicians and it is just people who want to see music grow here in the Valley.”
Patrick Garcia, a local promoter who has booked musical acts to perform in the Valley over the last 12 to 15 years, said he’s remaining positive about what the designation could accomplish.
“Anything that is going to provide more visibility in terms of the region with the rest of the state and spotlight it and give it more attention, I’m going to support,” said Garcia, who attended one of the meetings the incubator held in the lead up to the designation.
Ideally, he said he would like to see full-time working musicians have access to affordable healthcare through programs similar to the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, or HAAM.
HAAM provides access to affordable health care to low-income, working musicians there.
He added local artists and musicians needed practice spaces and hopes that’s something the city could provide.
“When you consider the economic factors of being a musician in the region, it’s extraordinarily difficult and one of the things that I think really impacts — and is probably the number one factor in artists or musicians not maintaining consistency or not touring or simply not even being able to manifest — is accessibility to not only practice spaces but recording programs, instruments, etc.,” Garcia said.
A friend of Garcia’s and a local musician Andres Sanchez, who attended a couple of meetings held by the incubator, expressed similar hopes for what the committee could provide, also pointing to the programs like HAAM and the need for rehearsal space.
“I think it’s definitely a door that’s opening and so I want to be optimistic about it and see where it can go,” Sanchez said of the designation. “There’s so many facilities or places like properties that the city has that they can convert into rehearsal space or something like that.”
Ultimately, he wants to remain positive about what could come from the designation, though he pointed out that it’s one thing for an entity to hand the city a plaque but it doesn’t actually translate to giving back to the music industry.
Still, he acknowledged the designation was a pretty high-profile event.
“They’re going to be registered with the Texas Music Office now as a Music Friendly city,” he said. “I think that it’s definitely a standard that the city can rise to.”
