Even now, lounging around her apartment at the age of 62, wearing Mephisto slippers and a far-from-revealing hoodie, Linda Ronstadt is thinking back to a summer in Guadalajara when she was 12, and a light-haired Mexican boy named Mario.

“I would flirt with him,” she recalls, her come-hither eyes and heart-shaped lips still echoing the days when she was decreed ‘Rock’s Venus’ by Rolling Stone. “One night, there was Mario with two taxis full of mariachis serenading me with firecrackers.” To Ronstadt, it was the ultimate seduction. “These are big-voiced songs, filled with the exuberance of nature and the fertility of the earth,” she says of mariachi music. “The songs are complex sexually.”

Ronstadt is the consulting artistic and educational director of the Mexican Heritage Plaza’s 17th Annual International Mariachi and Latin Music Festival in San Jose, California. The festivals have become a Latino cultural phenomenon, drawing thousands of fans annually.

Ronstadt raised the profile of Mexican music. “Canciones de Mi Padre”, released in 1987 and her first album of traditional mariachi music, became the biggest selling non-English album in US history at the time, with sales of more than 2 million copies. The music emanates a sense of place, where young couples stroll arm in arm and dance under strings of lights in village plazas. “There’s a lot of homesickness in Mexican music, a profound yearning because of the need to migrate,” Ronstadt says, “I left home when I was 17, and I was homesick my whole life.”

Through the music of her father and grandfather, Ronstadt seemed finally to inhabit herself. To hear about her girlhood memories—the smell of wool on the Navajo blanket she would lie on as she begged her parents to sing, her father on the guitar and her mother on the banjo—is almost to forget about Ronstadt’s other life. That’s the one with the platinums and Grammys, the romances with George Lucas and Jerry Brown, the photo of her flung across her bed in a harlot-red camisole that she now calls the “sprawling picture”.

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