Experiencing the Mexican arpa grande (“big harp”) in close quarters, it’s hard to forget. Visually, it stands almost as tall as its player. Its bass thrums from strings anchored in a wide, deep soundbox, pulled with such force that you wonder how they stay attached. From the player’s other hand flow sparkling, high-range melodies.

I heard it decades ago in its ancestral homeland: the hot, agricultural lowlands of the Tepalcatepec River basin in Mexico’s Michoacán state, a region known as El Plan. Later, back home in California, I crossed paths with it again in a rough-and-tumble working-class Mexican bar in Redwood City, not far from the San Francisco airport. It was paired with its regular musical companions: two violins tightly joined in harmony and jarana and vihuela, strummed guitars thrashing out chords with an energy that gave my heart no choice but to beat faster. No one ever accused the conjunto de arpa grande’s (big harp group) music of being understated.

Its roots in Mexico run deep. Before stringed instruments arrived to what is now Mexico five centuries ago, the idea of plucking or bowing a string fixed to a sounding board was virtually unknown. Within a century of Spanish presence, the harp, violin, and guitar reigned supreme among musical instruments in the emerging Mexican panorama of unique regional and local cultures spanning the central heartlands from the Gulf to the Pacific. In the 1800s, urban travelers in rural Mexico chronicled musical groups of harp, guitar, and violin. The music they played was “people’s music”—the soundtracks of parties, dances, and special occasions on ranches and in small towns.

Today, the sights and sounds of the conjunto de arpa grande lend it a signature profile among Mexican music traditions. Over the first century of independence (1810–1910), Mexico’s people gelled into distinctive local and regional cultures, and their musicmaking evolved with them. Then, the mid-twentieth century wrought major changes on roots musics identified with distinctive cultural-geographical regions.

In the ambitious aftermath of the 1910–1920 revolution, the Mexican government launched a nation-building effort to promote the notion of a unified country, using a rich palette of regional music and dance to reinforce this idea. In the process, certain region-specific music and dance traditions were codified and modified into iconic representations of a rich reserve of distinctive cultural archetypes. Capitalizing on the public enthusiasm for Mexican expressions, the mass-media industry (cinema, radio, recordings) seized upon these cultural icons to create products for popular consumption. Mariachi musicians clad in elegant “gentleman cowboy” suits and broad-rimmed hats exemplified the stylized, larger-than-life versions of folk musics rooted in rural life.

But the conjunto de arpa grande was not among these national-level icons. It remained a local, rural music embraced by everyday people in the agricultural hotlands of Michoacán. It stuck with its enduring, ancestral string instruments and modest musician garb, while its neighboring mariachi tradition changed to fancy dress for the silver screen and big-city stages and added brassy trumpets to their sound. The conjunto’s repertoire continued the old-time, rhythmic sones for percussive zapateado dancing, along with the simple songs that for more than a century had been lumped under the term canción mexicana, and later, canción ranchera.

Composers continued to create new valonas, hilarious half-declaimed, half-sung pieces based on ten-line stanza poetry rooted in Renaissance Spain. The people playing and appreciating the music remained unabashedly rural and unpretentious, free of social artifice associated with certain regional musics transitioning to urban centers.

It’s no accident that in the twentieth century, arpa grande groups ended up in California. The San Joaquin Valley’s hot climate and fertile lands aren’t that much different from those of Michoacán, and the need for agricultural workers to cultivate those lands has long been acute. When President Roosevelt launched the bracero guest worker program in 1943, Michoacán, Jalisco, and Guanajuato states in Mexico were the main source of those workers. The eight-plus decades of immigration since then has brought a continuous flow of michoacano laborers, families, and musicians to California and to other parts of the rural interior West, among them the four members of Los Originarios del Plan.

The group’s name proclaims the origins of its four members, though they are now based in the San Joaquin Valley, north of Fresno, California. All passed through the oldest “conservatory of music” in human history: apprenticeships with others in their families and tight-knit communities.

Rafael Farías Valencia acquired his nickname “Caña” from his home La Cañita ranch in Coalcomán, Michoacán, where he learned violin as a youngster. Fellow fiddler Fernando “Perico” Amezcua Sandoval started at age six and began playing in professional settings as a youth in Tepalcatepec. Vihuela player Elías Francisco “Pancho” Cárdenas Licea recalls how in Coalcomán, at the age of seven, he learned on a guitar that was “bigger than I was.” The leader and youngest member, Leonel “La Chona” Mendoza Acevedo, recounts how when he was a child in the San Joaquin Valley, his taskmaster father instilled a mastery of the music through hours-long practice sessions each day.

Today, their style of music is both deeply traditional and hugely in demand. A millennial, Mendoza Acevedo brings robust social media presence to the group; his posts on Facebook and YouTube have attracted tens of millions of views, taking the group and its music far and wide across the United States and Mexico. Others among his generation are their most enthusiastic clients, boosting his optimism for the future of his centuries-old tradition.

“I guess this music is not going to die after all,” he says. “That motivates me a lot to keep on going.”

Los Originarios del Plan’s latest album, ¡Puritito Michoacán!, was released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in October 2025.

Daniel Sheehy is director and curator emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the co-producer and liner notes writer for ¡Puritito Michoacán!

This project received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino.