This week on Arizona Illustrated, we visit Pueblo High Schools, Mariachi Aslan I don't have any children of my own, but it's funny because I anytime I talk to people, they're like, well, I kind of do have 17 children.

Like a proud father for sure.

A retired sixth grade teacher has his first art show in his nineties.

So I see something that looks like an interesting shape.

That's where it starts.

Regardless.

Of what it is.

A trip down memory lane for a former student at the Dunbar School.

We were very happy children.

I don't think we realized that we got the only books we had.

We choose books when other schools were through with them or Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

It is the first week of August, and that means classrooms and auditoriums like this one here on the University of Arizona.

Campus will soon be filled with students.

In fact, most schools are going back to class either this week or next.

Now, for students at Pueblo High Schools, Mariachi Auslan, returning to class means striking a balance between their academics and their passion for playing music.

The talented group is led by director John Contreras.

They've been recognized internationally, and they won Tucson Weekly's Best Mariachi Band Award last year.

Here is our 2015 story Mariachi Aslan Today is an annual luncheon that the Home EC class puts on kind of as a fundraiser.

Teachers buy a plate and they get to be serenaded by the mariachis by Mariachi Florida Pueblo High School.

It's a nice way to get them to see what we do outside of their classes.

I think they get a better sense of all.

They're out performing like this for a lot of people.

That's really good for them.

You know, they're good that's done.

The of it.

For me, it's seen the people's faces light up or they smile when they see the mariachi come out or when they see someone perform.

That's what I like most about it.

My name is Yasmin Russell.

I'm 16, I'm a sophomore, and I play in Mariachi Islam, the high school this mariachi program is a class, so almost every day, pretty much.

And then we also do 2 hours after school on Mondays and Thursdays.

So it's a lot of practice time that way.

We stay, you know, consistent when you guys start hear that and it starts like that.

But it no, keep it nice and even much better.

Baa, baa, baa!

Bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup.

And then we get the tempo.

Don't waste too much time trying to get the tempo right.

The intro has to be there.

You have to, like, hit people in the face.

With this song.

It's it's a large group.

There's 17 of us.

It's a family.

They they get along, they have their spats as well, just like any family.

But they learn to come together and make something beautiful, which I think is the mariachi music is one of the most beautiful things.

I mean, I hear all of you but I mean, it's really neat because we have seniors.

We have 17, 18 year olds, and we have freshmen, 14, 15 year olds and then everything else in between.

Perfect is like our second father.

We hang out with him 24, seven.

He, he takes care of us.

He's like, he's like one of us too.

He's always there for us, not, not just teaching us in the group.

He's there for us.

Like, if we're having a bad day, we can go and talk to him whenever we need something.

He's he's just an amazing person.

Your mom's a president.

Yeah.

I don't have any children of my own, but it's funny because I any time I talk to people, they're like, Well, I kind of do have 17 children.

In a roundabout way, the song that you guys like a proud father, for sure.

Hey, hey, hey.

Hey, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

It's gone.

All right, so you're taking a breath.

When you should already be playing.

You're like, but no pa pa, pa, pa, pa has to be right on the one, three, four.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

I'm Jerry Young.

I'm a junior, and I play the guitar on.

It's the base of the mariachi really nice sound.

It's got it's got good, you know, a hit to it.

It's got a good, like, thump.

You know, the role of it is just to keep the tempo, the time of the song to the feeling of it.

Let's say you really get into the into the music is, is the way it is played.

It complements all the instruments from the violins, the trumpets to the voila to the guitar to help you feel the piece.

The music is.

The first reason I joined was for my family, for my nana.

And, you know, I just decided to join.

I was like, maybe she'll like it, you know?

And then not only did she like it, I like doing it, too.

I really got into it, you know, it was really good.

You put a nice bass part in there.

I put I know what you did.

You changed it up, hoping that I can probably get into another group after I graduate because, you know, I really like playing.

It's it's excellent feeling I'm Gabriela Miranda.

I'm a senior.

I'm learning right now.

I'm learning the guitar.

I played very well before.

Well, that's the one I'm trying to learn right now.

Oh, I guess loading this stuff it's part of the rhythm section.

Well, it's exactly like, pretty much like the guitar in the we were well, we keep the rhythm together.

OK, much better.

The guys feel the difference.

I decided to join mariachi, and it's like, it's changed the way they think because, like, we perform everywhere, we perform in front of people.

And when I came in, I was like, I'm not singing, I don't sing.

I don't want to go in front of people.

I can't do it.

And one day he just came.

He's like, Here you go.

You're singing this song.

And I was like, Well, I guess I'm not going to say no.

Well, I was scared at first, but once we got used to it, you get more comfortable with it.

And in class, you know, I'm like, shy, but I still get nervous sometimes.

Even though the one, like, the number one thing, too, is responsibility.

It's not just you.

You're not just a superstar.

You're not just the one there's a whole group around you.

It's kind of like the weakest link in the chain kind of thing is if somebody is not pulling their weight, then you know what?

The whole group takes it down.

It's an ensemble.

It's not, you know, hey, it's not just one person.

Well, we're all connected like that.

Like we're connecting together as a group, and we feel like more close so we were all excited.

But we do get into, like, the emotions of the song sometimes.

Like, you could feel the song because you're interpreting it to other people.

And then there's times when you're just like, Oh my gosh, this is, this is magic.

And I tell him, if you have 17 people and each one of you guys is on part you know, and you guys are doing exactly what needs to be done and you guys are grooving together, that is just a special moment.

And you have to like cherish those because they don't happen all the time.

It feels like we've all got this big connection.

You get an adrenaline rush and everyone's just on point everyone, you know, everyone's nailing their parts and it's really it's a really good feeling.

But, you know, the best at it's showing people like a whole different side of the Mexican culture that they normally wouldn't see.

Like, you know, sometimes people think mariachis.

They think, oh, just three fat guys kind of singing in a bar or whatever.

They never think about like maybe someone like me or any of the other people we have in mariachi, they never picture someone like that.

You know, I love it.

It's all I eat, breathe, sleep, which I think it's funny because I used to hate mariachi when I was little.

I think it's kind of funny how that turned out in 2013 MOCA Tucson curators Jocko Weyland and Ann Marie Russell took note of two small paintings at the TMA Biennial done by the artist Robert Barber.

Now, at the time, the retired sixth grade teacher was in his nineties, and he'd only exhibited publicly a few times.

They asked to see his studio, and there they discovered a lifetime of paintings and drawings and sculptures, a little disorganized, but pretty much intact.

This led to Mr. Barber's first ever solo show at MOCA, Tucson.

This Emmy Award winning story was first broadcast in 2015 I think we live in a world where it seems like for many reasons everything is exposed.

And so I think there's an extra pleasure when it turns out that not everything is, you know, at all Evening, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining us in this very, very special occasion.

It's been such an extraordinary privilege to work for actually a great formula for living.

So long ride a bicycle.

I ride a bicycle every morning before I do anything else.

I have favorite.

What do you call those dumpsters that I dig in and each one that's kind of interesting.

This stuff so I see something that looks like an interesting shape.

That's where it starts, regardless of what it is.

My name is Robert Barber.

I'm 92 and a half years old, and I'm an artist.

There were these two small yellow paintings, and I kind of ran over and looked at them because they just the quality of the paint surface and I'm looking carefully and I'm thinking this this is great, this painting is fantastic, and this person really knows how to paint.

I'm like, How do we not know who this is?

And I look and it says, Tucson.

I'm like, this person is in Tucson.

Who are they?

We have to find them.

And then I look at the date that he was born, and I do the math and I'm thinking he's the 1991 years old.

And I turned around to call for Jocko, and at the same moment that I had stopped in my tracks, Jacko also stopped in his tracks and noticed the same thing I've had several shows in Minneapolis back around in the fifties.

That's when I was getting my bachelor and master's degree in painting the University of Minnesota so you were actively getting your work out there and it was being seen, right?

But it would go out and then come back so when Anne-Marie and Jocko came over, I said, Fortunately, I've never sold anything.

So you have plenty of stuff to look at.

Some more car parts.

They're all mixed up.

They're not organized tools, tools or tools.

And I had a relapse and then did some more letters.

I did a whole series of letters on one studio visit.

I was out trimming trees because we had to bring the works out into the yard, into the light, just to see what we were looking at.

So there was a lot of sort of archeology about it.

It was like an archeological dig.

A lot of it was sort of tightly packed in a small studio.

So, you know, I think we left overwhelmed.

Many people wonder how you were able to do so much art, like you had a full time job and a family.

I work fast the good answer like when you were teaching, were you drawing like at the desk in the class?

No, I had the kids drawing the drawing I never stopped doing artwork of one kind or another.

And then I married a girl I met in Art School, and she was the same way.

She just we both all of our married lives kept on doing our artwork.

And she was just as prolific as I was and had more commercial success than I did.

We were never jealous of each other's art.

We were our biggest fans.

I thought of her as being two sides.

Matisse and she thought I was doing Sans Picasso's it's difficult for me to talk about my wife, but if it wasn't for her half the things that I did would have disappeared.

She always managed to gather up these sayings and wrap them and label them and store them away.

We're just discovered discovering them now the entire body of work is largely intact.

It's an unprecedented situation to be able to sort of art historically, like look at the whole thing.

And start to tell some stories.

Because usually an artist will have a career and they'll sell work and their show work and their work will be distributed.

He's still making work every single day, and it's like a perfect intact trove of of an entire lifetime of art production.

We were just speechless.

Yeah, a little breathless, frankly.

And we immediately as soon as we left, we knew we were going to offer him a retrospective and hope that he said yes.

And he did.

Being rejected again and again, yeah.

I had no expectations of even exhibiting some boys the retrospective is a tiny fraction of Robert's work.

I would put it at 1% or less he's a phenomenal painter.

He was trained properly at a moment in time in art school, where you really learn sort of old master techniques and you learn how to built up the surface of a canvas.

And the abstract works back here.

These aren't single applications of a layer of paint on canvas.

There are probably 100 paintings living underneath the surface of that painting, and you take a cross-section of a painting, you realize just how complex these are, not flat surfaces.

They're really well built up unbelievable.

I had never seen my art work in an environment like that.

His art is great, but it's almost just as much about how he went about.

Like he figured out a way to make a living.

He raised a family, and that didn't stop him from this pursuit.

And it sounds like a cliche, but it was like he was doing it for the right reasons, and I think that's incredibly meaningful.

He's a living embodiment of a kind of meshing of art and life you start out to paint a masterpiece.

I don't know of anyone who wakes up in the morning and says, Oh, I guess I'll paint our home on average, a piece of art today, but of course you never attain.

The goal is set out I wish my wife was here to enjoy it with me.

I think of her every day and talk to her every day.

She would say it's about time he gets the recognition he deserves.

I think that's what she'd say No, never give it up for ever I still think about the one I'm going to do tomorrow.

Since his exhibition at MCC in Tucson, Robert has exhibited several times with Carey Schiff's gallery in New York, and he's been added to several major collections.

Last month, on July 30th, Mr. Barbour turned 100 years old and he's still painting.

We would like to wish him a very happy birthday.

He is an inspiration to artists everywhere.

School segregation is a difficult chapter in American history.

And while it left some painful wounds, many African-American children were able to persevere and thrive a tribute to their resiliency.

Barbara Lewis shares her stories about attending class at the historic Dunbar Building.

From 1942 to 1950.

This is memory lane My name is Barbara Lewis and I attended Dunbar segregated school from 1942 through 1950 I remember this room being my first grade room it's familiar and I can remember it and but it's now used for storage at the moment.

My teacher was Miss Carter.

I love that name and actually I remember she now talk about a soft and loving teacher.

She was, I never had friends until I started attending school.

We were just kind of, like, isolated.

And my folks didn't let us run around and make many friends.

So this was like my friends and my little family and I was so happy to be with them.

There was it Wigner, Me, Harriman, and Sparks Byrd.

Preston, Tina.

I could go on, but yeah, I remember all that.

We were very happy children.

I don't think we realized that we got the only books we have for shoes, books when other schools were through with them or or that we were really deprived.

I think, if that's all you know, that's all, you know, and this is the principal's office, but my goodness, it's so much smaller than I remember.

It used to look so big to me because, well, I was little.

I guess I talked all the time I talked constantly.

I think I came here talking constantly and, you know, OK, Barbara Hollins, go to the principal's office this is the electrical room now.

It used to be we didn't have a cafeteria as such.

But Miss Warrior would cook on burners.

We were especially happy on Thursdays because there was Chili being Thursday, and we loved it.

We pay a nickel for our little lunches and find a place to eat them.

This art is I'd say it's kind of like our auditorium, our our assembly hall, because we didn't have one to begin with, and we'd have all kinds of celebrities of African-American ones.

So that would come to town.

Parents that had a profession would come to talk, and we'd line up from under this arch all the way down to the end of the hallway would be kids coming out of each one of these rooms.

We would have our Christmas parties for everybody here.

It really is nostalgic when I when I stand here and look down or when I come this way and look up because this was our main space until we got an auditorium on the other side this was 1950.

That's me.

And let's see, this is my best girlfriend.

This oh, I had two boyfriends we'd ever had.

Interchange them, this is.

And they were best friends.

This is Sparks and Bird.

Preston Yeah.

I'd alternate.

You don't want to hear that story again.

This is.

Oh, this is our teacher, Mr. Todd, and he's 103 this year and he's still, as far as I know, clear headed.

He was a wonderful teacher.

Such a nice man.

And I can say that they did good because the majority of each one of those classes, the kids are professionals.

A lot of doctors, engineers are from that Dunbar School, which is amazing to me.

I don't know, he just felt I felt warm and wanted this is a school only school we could go to in those early grades.

And this is the only school that black teachers could teach was here.

We were all in this together.

The funny thing was it soon as we got our ninth grade graduated in ninth grade, we went to integrated Tucson High I had a magic wand.

I would have it completed so I'd have enough money where we could finish our library, finish our museum, shore up some of the defects that have happened over the years with the earth moving, and we'd have a lot of activities because we do have a lot of room I'd like for it to be many things, but for the legacy to remain, I do not want a legacy of separatism.

But but just let it be known what it what it was.

But we want to be better than that.

I'll always love this building, I mean, no matter what happens.

But we're going to see to it that it stands another hundred years thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see in September for an all new season of Arizona Illustrated.