Villalobos Brothers & Marek Bennett share life experiences

On Tuesday, May 24 our culminating events for our The Most Costly Journey took place in the library, classrooms and outdoors. The day began with The Villalobos Brothers visiting Maestra Megyesi's middle school Spanish class. The Villalobos Brothers told the students about their own journey from Mexico to the United States, how they studied music and the arts as kids and how those experiences shaped their careers as professional musicians today. Students asked them a lot of questions in Spanish about their instruments, their style of music and their favorite foods.

The next workshop middle school art students participated in was with Marek Bennett, cartoonist and one of the editors of The Most Costly Journey. Marek explained his process and taught the students in Ms. Jimerson and Ms. Piana's classes how to make their own comic books.

The main event was the concert by the Villalobos Brothers outside in the bowl behind the school. The brothers' exquisite musicianship, high-powered fiddling and moving vocals got the crowd clapping, dancing and singing along. In between songs, they engaged with the audience and shared that "This is the coolest high school auditorium we've ever played." The band also shared that they feel a strong connection to Vermont because of the similarities with their home state, Vera Cruz in Mexico.

After they finished performing, they opened it up to questions. Ruth Stallard, eighth grader, asked what their favorite thing about Vermont is and one of the brothers responded, "the people." Mimi Konda-Olmstead, ninth grader, asked where they get their inspiration from and one of the brothers said, "Travel. You should do it. You get fresh ideas and your imagination is reawakened." A number of Senora Bristow's fifth grade Hartford elementary Spanish students had the opportunity to ask the band questions and one student asked about their favorite musical collaborations. One of the brothers shared that he did a recent collaboration with Bruce Springsteen on a song called "Stones." One of the other brothers said the Chieftains and a third brother said his favorite collaboration was with "elder musicians from Mexico."

Their joy of performing and educating was evident throughout the concert. Hannah Gubbins, junior, described their music as “upbeat” and appreciated that “they taught us about what they were singing about.” After the concert concluded there were more classroom visits to Mr. Trudeau's high school band class and another cartooning workshop with students in Mrs. Hagge's high school English class.

Thanks so much to BarnArts, Pentangle and the Vermont Humanities Council for making this concert and programming possible. Thank you to the Villalobos Brothers and Marek Bennett for visiting our school. Thank you to everyone at WUHSMS who helped with this event. And, thank you to all of the teachers who incorporated The Most Costly Journey into their classes and to all of the students who read the book and participated in the Vermont Reads program.