Friday, February 20, 2026 · Tucson
Old Soul
“This playlist is home. This is my childhood, my family, my life. This playlist has different varieties of genres ranging from funk to oldies to Chicano rock. That was my upbringing, The upbringing of a Chicano.” — Arnold Montiel IV
The steel doors of the first floor classrooms at Tucson High Magnet School could not contain the chaos of joyful noises behind them. In the orchestra room, tubas boomed. Pianos plinked in the piano room. In the mariachi room, mariachis buzzed their mouthpieces and plucked and strummed strings and practiced their gritos (the spontaneous shouts that are part of a mariachi performance) .
At the beginning of the spring semester, a Pistor Middle School student visited the mariachi room to audition for a place in one of the school’s mariachi groups when he attends in the fall. He looked around the room. There were a lot of people ahead of him. He didn’t know any of them. While he waited his turn, his fingers quietly hopscotched along the frets on his acoustic guitar’s fingerboard, and he strummed as quietly as he could. When the time came, he’d have to shine. At that moment, though, he seemed to want to be invisible.
Nearby, Arnold Montiel IV felt a connection with the Pistor student because he’d been there himself a few years before, nervously waiting his turn with strangers and family watching.
“He came with his mom and his dad, like I did when I first came. You know, we came through these doors, and it was me, my mom, and my dad waiting for me to audition,” Montiel said.
The 16-year-old Tucson High junior is keen to make connections. He sees them in the grind it is to juggle studies and music for himself and classmates. Connections are in the history and culture of the borderlands and the music he performs as a vihuela player in his school’s mariachi group, Mariachi Rayos del Sol. They’re even in his Chicano heritage and the music he enjoys listening to when he’s not performing.
Because Montiel identified with the Pistor student’s obvious anxiety, he made smalltalk to help him feel less nervous. He asked questions with obvious answers until the fellow student opened up.
“I just went, ‘Hey, man, are you here for the mariachi auditions?’” Montiel said. “‘Yeah, I am,’ and then we just started talking, and right off the bat, I felt a connection. And then he got to the point where he was very comfortable, where he started asking me, ‘so, like, what should I expect in there, man?’”
All current and prospective musicians in the school’s mariachi groups must audition each year to determine their level for the upcoming academic year.
“No spot is guaranteed,” Montiel said.
Montiel shared with the Pistor student that he still gets nervous at auditions, but that he’s learned to put it in perspective. “The whole point is for the director to just see your skill. So it’s not to see how good you are or how bad you are,” he said. “So go out there, put out your best product, and then just go on from there.”
The patterns Montiel picks up on have added insight to his journey as a musician. Vihuela wasn’t his first choice — it wasn’t even his second. In grade school, he wanted to play piano, but the guitar was more accessible, and people around him assured him that if he could learn the guitar, he’d be able to pick up the piano later. So, guitar it was.
“By learning guitar, it brought me into this whole new world, mariachi, because, yes, I learned guitar under the mariachi class, but it was never my goal to perform mariachi,” he said.
The director of the middle school mariachi group told Montiel he was doing “an amazing job” and had him fitted for his traje de charro (the traditional Mexican cowboy suit modern mariachis wear). Later, when he advanced to high school, he accepted the challenge to play vihuela, which, along with the guitarron, violin, trumpet and voice make up the minimum required instrumentation of a mariachi group.
Montiel’s musical trajectory has brought him back to the piano, which he has been learning recently. He also enjoys turning others on to the music as a DJ. His preferred set consists of funk, old school hits, and Chicano rock.
Montiel’s father and namesake, Arnold Montiel III, isn’t surprised by any of it. The older Montiel performs Latin percussion and also DJs.
“The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree when it comes to art. All because growing up, it’s just been around him, and it just latched onto him like a symbiote,” he said. Montiel III said he himself was like a sponge growing up, “just listening to everything that everybody was listening to around me, started building my own sound.”
He thinks his son has done the same.
“He’s an old soul in a 16-year-old body, you know, and when he listens to his music, he’s listening to the 70s. He’s listening to the 80s. I catch him listening to Steely Dan and stuff like that. And I’m like, what do you know about that? But he just has an ear,” the musician’s father said.
Arnold Montiel IV’s playlist
“This playlist is home. This is my childhood, my family, my life. This playlist has different varieties of genres, ranging from funk to oldies to Chicano rock. That was my upbringing, the upbringing of a Chicano,” Montiel IV said.
He hopes that some of these songs will be discoveries that give people a different perspective on music. He feels many of the songs are beautiful for the simple reason that they express emotions unguardedly, something he feels is rare in music these days. Other songs on the playlist? Well, they make people want to get up and dance.
“Either way, the songs on there mean a lot to me and take me home, so hopefully the feeling I get when I hear these songs can hopefully be reciprocated with everyone else.”